There are bad games, and then there's the arcade version of Double Dragon.
A few weeks back I had to re-license all my 360 content after it unceremoniously red ringed on me, and I came across an old remake of Double Dragon I had downloaded and had completely forgotten about. For a good reason. This version is something of a digital rarity because it was de-listed from Live thanks to it's publisher, Empire Interactive, going under. Or so Wikipedia says.
It's for the best, though. Unlike great games that were de-listed (Lost Cities, I wish you had found an audience), I don't think anyone should have to suffer through this under any circumstances. No, not even for historical study. I don' t think Double Dragon was the first side-scrolling beat 'em up, but it definitely popularized the genre. And that, kids, is all you really need to know.
Unfortunately, the reason it fails is because of it's lineage as a quarter munching arcade game. You never get to see the glaring flaws because twenty-five cents just didn't get you far enough in to experience them. Replaying it with my brother and an infinite well of coinage; we found ourselves on a thirty minute adventure of how games were made back in the day, and how not to make them today.
The word cheap comes to mind when I think of Double Dragon. I know the term was thrown around a lot in the eighties -- whether it was falling into a pit that you swear up and down the game wantonly tossed you into or you found yourself trapped against an impenetrable wall of flying bullets in a shmup -- but in this case it's true. But that's the nature of the beast when something is made for stealing money from unsuspecting kids and not for genuine enjoyment. The hit detection would be best described as loose, there's an excruciating part where you have to get the Lee brothers across a seemingly impossible one foot gap and the last boss brings a gun to a fist fight.
In the end, my brother and I invented our own fun; either from trashing it's shortcomings or role-playing that we were traveling in the steamy underbelly of Hollywood. Don't ask me why; there was a baddie who looked a bit like Steve Guttenberg and it felt cathartic to thump him, and it just steamrolled from there. Sometimes you just have to make your own fun; in this case it's the only way to have any. After the laughing subsided and one of us beat the other up after defeating the last boss for the chance at a one night stand with Marion, Double Dragon was summarily put to bed and forgotten about.
Normally I have issues about writing musings that put down anything (I'm obnoxiously nice like that, sometimes), but damn it -- Double Dragon deserves it. It's not as good as you remember it being kids. Or, if you're like me, you're actually thinking of the NES version that, for all it's technical shortcomings, was vastly superior to it's arcade progenitor. Not even Scott Wolf* could save this.
*Scott Wolf starred as Billy Lee in the unabashedly terrible film adaptation. I'm sure he'd rather be known for being in Party of Five.
Posts
4 comments:
Yeah, it's true. It was definitely engineered with quarter grabbing as the first priority and "fun" the second. Still worth my 400 points though for nostalgia purposes. And kneeing dudes in the gut and throwing them by their hair never gets old.
That's one game I'll never miss... And I could have had TMNT Arcade instead. Dammit. I got it later, but not before playing this abomination.
@Jeremy: I never had any nostalgia for the arcade version; I grew up in the sticks, so my exposure was on the NES version. I used to think my distaste for the XBLA edition was due to that, but even taking that out of the equation; the NES one is better.
But you're right: kneeing thugs is eternal.
@Ed: Did you get tricked by the demo like I did? That's the only part that was similar to the NES game. I too have TMNT to wash away the tears.
Post a Comment