There’s a reason Dragon’s Lair has been rereleased ad nauseum despite its massive lack of player content. There’s also a reason its sequel, arguably a much better game just rereleased in highly playable form for the iPhone, barely registers in the collective memory of gaming history.
Dragon’s Lair, of course, was a fascinating novelty in 1983 for its first-rate animation as much as its quirky linear gameplay Take away Dirk the Daring’s side-splitting death scenes and Playboy-inspired Princess Daphne, put the technology in less-capable hands than Disney turncoat Don Bluth’s, and it’s questionable whether laserdisc games would have become an arcade sensation.
Unfortunately, the success of Dragon’s Lair did ensure the technology made it into less capable hands with disastrous results. By the time Dirk resumed adventuring almost a decade later in Dragon’s Lair II: Time Warp, more than Singe’s Castle had been laid to ruins. Home versions of DLII have been released during the 20 years since and, while the iPhone version is better than most, all have differing flaws that revive memories of the pitfalls that sent laserdiscs to a quick death.
Older gamers may remember machines like Mad Dog McCree and M.A.C.H. 3. were common sights in arcades for a short time. A fair number of people (including me) tried them, but good luck finding gamers these days who don’t want to throw a brick through their screens. The always useful (if not 100 percent reliable) Wikipedia notes “to cut costs, several companies simply hacked together scenes from obscure Japanese anime, creating games like Cliff Hanger (from Lupin III: Castle of Cagliostro and Lupin III: Mystery of Mamo) and Bega’s Battle (from Harmagedon).”
Even in capable hands, the limits of laserdisc technology almost certainly doomed such machines to quick-fad status. Bluth’s Space Ace did OK as a followup to Dragon’s Lair, but was far less of an arcade success. Both titles have seen many home releases dating back to machines of the early 1980s like the Colecovision and ZX Spectrum which, as expected, were incredibly awful. Either 90-plus percent of the animation content was stripped out, leaving a few brief and non-sensical screens (and usually a stack of floppy discs to switch between), or it was clumsily translated to another genre entirely (the platform rendering of Space Ace for the Super Nintendo is a solid contender for the worst video game ever).
Given laserdisc’s quickly fledgling status, it’s not surprising Bluth’s sequel to Dragon’s Lair ended up pressing the “abort” button like so many projects did at a time when computers were a new and often-experimental industry full of spectacular innovations and colossal failures. Initiated in 1983 when it became clear Dragon’s Lair was a huge success, development came to a halt a year later as part of the great video game crash. Apparently most of the animation was already complete and it finally made it to arcades in 1991. But Bluth obviously had been contemplating something of a “direct to video” approach during those intervening years, since home versions for a number of computers were released a year earlier.
The storyline and animation are the best of Bluth’s trio, even if the narrative is incomprehensible at first. Dirk and Daphne are now living in a cottage with about a dozen kids who are apparently the result of fertility drugs since all of the boys have the same appearance and age, as do the slightly older girls. Living in the attic is Daphne’s mother-in-law, who weighs roughly the same as the rest of household put together, has Ann Coulter’s attitude and makes Rosie O’Donnell look like a centerfold model in comparison. (Why, oh why, would Dirk tolerate a constant reminder of what his blushing bride might be like in 30 years?)
Daphne, who doesn’t seem to have aged a day or lost any of her Playboy figure despite all that childbirth, gets kidnapped again and the first part of the game mostly involves surviving She-Devil’s raging tirade of “YOU’D BETTER FIND HER!” Question for the dear old MIL: How do you expect the man who defrocked your daughter to rescue her if your insane range of attempts to kill him succeed?
Dirk, fleeing out of the house and down the road, finds himself again in Singe’s Castle, now in decay after his triumph over its namesake dragon. Plenty of familiar and deadly foes remain, along with crumbing floors from last time, with the additional peril of Evil Mom in pursuit (apparently the castle’s creatures find her too fearsome to get in the way). The valiant knight eventually finds himself back in Singe’s lair, where the dragon is now just a skeleton, but this is where the real game begins rather than ends.
A previously unseen contraption is now in the lair: A time machine that likes to carry on folksy conversations, apparently oblivious to the fact you’re still fighting for your life against an onslaught of giant snakes and other predators. It tells you the Evil Wizard Mordroc has kidnapped Daphne and gotten lost in the wrinkles of time. Dirk’s task is to save her before Casket of Doom opens, Mordroc places the Death Ring on Daphne’s finger in marriage and she is lost forever in the Time Warp.
Dirk ends up pursuing Mordroc through the age of dinosaurs, Garden of Eden, Alice in Wonderland, Beethoven’s study and ancient Egypt before reaching the Evil One’s castle. The animations for each of these worlds is clever, frequently hilarious and sometimes LSD-worthy trippy (the AIW segment is an obvious candidate given the rumors of Louis Carroll’s drug use, but check out Bluth’s perception of Eve and the power of music when Ludwig really gets going). I can see this game causing a volcanic debate among the Religious Right: It takes the Biblical view of the Creation, for instance, but why are the guardian angels speaking with lisps and generally acting like stereotypical homosexuals? And if Mordroc can marry Daphne, does that mean she and Dirk are living in sin – and does that make their otherwise seemingly perfect family values household an abomination? (Trust me, I could go on.)
The full game animation is about 10 minutes, but it’ll take a long, long time before you memorize the moves and timing well enough for a perfect quest. One spoiler tip: the game doesn’t end at a point (or two) you might expect it to, so don’t lower your guard until you see the final victory screen.
My first encounter with DLII was one of those content-stripped ports on a black-and-white Macintosh, which is every bit as laughable as the description suggests except for the $50 price tag. I saw the arcade version a couple of years later and the attract mode at least gave me an idea what the game was about (the Mac port being utterly incomprehensible), but watching a hapless player try to get past the first couple of scenes made it clear DLII started off in the very deep end of the pool with no thought of making things easy enough to hook newcomers.
Full versions of Bluth’s games eventually saw increasingly accurate home releases on CD-ROM, DVD-ROMS and digital downloads. Apparently I was the kind of sucker developer Digital Leisure has in mind with all those releases since I bought the original Dl and Space Ace in many of the available forms. DLII got a pass for a while, largely from those very bitter first impressions, but I eventually caved and snagged used versions for a few platforms.
I bypassed the iPhone version of DLII when I saw it in the App Store the day of its release, a rarity for someone who obsessively collects and writes about video games from long ago (even those I ignored or didn’t particularly like). A few days later with a “what the hell, it’s only $3” shrug, I snagged it for no reason beyond seeing if it might be of enough general interest to be worth reviewing.
Surprisingly, it’s probably the best version of DLII I’ve played to date, a word I emphasize because extras contained in other releases are missing here that would really complete the package. You can’t, for instance, watch the animation play through. Purists may not want the ending revealed (as if successfully rescuing Daphne is somehow in doubt), but I found it highly useful for understanding the storyline and certain aspects of gameplay that aren’t immediately obvious. When Dirk activates the time machine, to cite another example, the brief cut-scene is the familiar “parade of skeletons” snippet during his resurrection after he dies. This confused the hell out of me the first few times I made it that far with a DVD version.
Some of the newer releases also contain commentary tracks by the developers while the animation is playing, interviews and other material. Still, the iPhone version costs of fraction of its console/DVD/Blu-Ray brethren and you can always use YouTube watch a full play-through of the game.
The high playability of the iPhone DLII port comes from settings allowing laser-precise and bumbling beginners alike to guide Dirk through his quest without resorting the endless “try to advance one step at a time by making random moves” approach necessary on many earlier releases. At the extreme ends of the settings, players can start with a spartan three Dirks and no game continuations, or an infinite number of Dirks with text prompts guiding your every move. The iPhone version is also notably free of other unreasonable frustrations such as moves whose timing doesn’t match the the animation, poor control response, missing scenes, and unpredictable lags due to loading of scenes. Furthermore, you can save your progress at any time (but only one game at a time), an always vital feature for any mobile title.
Unlike the original Dragon’s Lair, where the early scenes weren’t too difficult for even the clueless to figure out, you need to make a lot of moves very fast in DLII, with very few intervals to come up for air. On the other hand, those yellow “flashes” telling you where to move (or lighting up your sword) exist for every move, even without the text “help” turned on, also a departure from the original. Opinions seem divided as to whether that’s a necessary aid or excessive distraction that dilutes the challenge. Since I played this through the first time using the text prompts as well, obviously my rating reflects the view of someone not minding a little help. (Few will care, but this is possibly the hardest game I’ve ever tried to take screenshots of, so a couple of the “in-game” images here are from the DVD release.)
A new feature included in this and other recent versions that has many DLII fan forum chatters salivating is an optional “director’s cut” alternate ending. It’s shorter and less exciting, but truer to the purported storyline (the original’s finale contains a huge flaw roughly equal to discovering that, no, Spock didn’t die after all). It also adds a bit of replay value, which is basically non-existent for laserdisc games once you complete them unless you’re trying to impress an observer.
Laserdisc games aren’t something I generally recommend to those unfamiliar with the limited-play format, to say nothing of buying them over and over in various forms if you are a fan. But the iPhone port of DLII – along with the earlier releases of the original DL and SA – are cheap enough for the merely curious and worthwhile for veterans who haven’t seen the alternate ending (or completed the game at all, which isn’t out of the question even after many, many attempts).
Mark Sabbatini
Dragon’s Lair II: Time Warp by Electronic Arts
$2.99
Category: Arcade
Requires: iOS 3.0 or later
Languages: English, French, German, Italian, Spanish
Rated: 9+ (Infrequent/Mild Cartoon or Fantasy Violence)
Size: 346 MB
