Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!mailrus!ames!oliveb!pyramid!comdesign!ucsbcsl!hbo From: hbo@hub.ucsb.edu (Howard Owen) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: Dragon's Lair Summary: It's a cool game Keywords: Don Bluth's Dragon's Lair Game Review Message-ID: <1057@hub.ucsb.edu> Date: 18 Dec 88 21:46:52 GMT Reply-To: hbo@nobbs.ucsb.edu (Howard Owen) Distribution: na Organization: University of California, Santa Barbara Lines: 83 I always thought that the arcade version of Dragon's Lair was a waste of money. It had something to do with the arbitrary nature of the puzzles. Why pour quarters into a machine simply to figure out which way to pull the joystick or when to push the fire button? Besides, the real appeal of the game was the graphics, and finding out what came next, both of which you could get watching some puerile youth feed the game with his parent's hard earned copper-nickel alloy. It therefore came as quite a suprise to hear an irres- istible siren's song emanating from a copy of "Don Bluth Dragon's Lair" on the shelf of my local Software Etc. store. "I have insanely great graaaphics" sang the software. "Quiet!" I retorted, "You take over the machine and won't work with my hard disk." "I have a hi-res mode that will knock your sooocks off" sang the software. "Get thee behind me!" I commanded, "You are too expensive." I'm discounted a whole entire 5 perceeent" sang the software. "I'll take it!" I said in abject surrender. So what if I hadn't got any Christmas shopping in? Getting the game home, I proceeded to fire it up. Dragon's Lair comes on six floppy disks, accompanied by a little two page instruction sheet. Start- ing up is simple: put disk one in DF0: and boot away. The instructions state that "The game will recognize as many disks as are connected." I was a little worried that this would not extend to the external floppy on my A2000. Amiga- DOS configures this drive as DF2:. Since I don't have an internal DF1:, I thought this might give Dragon's Lair some problems. Fortunately though, the game had no problem with my configuration. Perhaps that is one slight benefit of dropping the supplied DOS in favor of a custom loader. One big drawback to this is the impossibility of loading the game on a hard disk. Readysoft says they "support" the Comspec SCSI controller and drive, but you need to give the game a dedicated partition of ten megs! This requires reformatting the disk to load the game. Not my idea of support! Speaking of the loader, though, it is quite fast, although I can't help wondering how much slower it might be than FFS on my A2090. Yes, I know most people have only floppies, but still. In any event, it wasn't long before I was watching Dirk the Daring glance suspiciously to his right and left. As he turned to stride purposfully toward the castle gate, I was feeling a trifle overwhelmed. There were too many astonishing elements in the scene that was unfolding in front of my eyes. The animation was smooth and realistic. The scene appeared crisp, with a minimum of "jaggies." The image filled the entire screen from top to bottom. This game was done in overscan! Pressing the "H" key yielded another suprise. The digital soundtrack fell silent, and the screen shrank to about a quarter of its original size. in this smaller area, an image sharper and clearer than any I had ever seen on my Amiga before appeared! A bare trace of flicker betrayed the use of interlace in the ultra high resolution display. I sat back and cheered! As a result, I was eaten by the slimy monster at the bottom of the castle's moat. A trivial price to pay for the privilege! After getting over my initial astonishment at the sheer technical artistry of Dragon's Lair, I settled in to enjoy the game. As in the original version, the controls are trivially simple. The four "cardinal" directions on the joy- stick, and the fire button are the only options for control. The key to the game is knowing WHEN to push the appropriate widget. Since I hadn't given in to the urge to fill the arcade version with quarters, I never memorized the sequences needed to get through the various screens. This left me in a neophyte adventurer's position with regard to the Amiga version. I found that at first, the wait for disk loading was tolerable. As I progressed beyond the first few screens, however, I found myself becoming more and more impatient for the next scene (which I had seen before) to load. Another feature which I sorely missed was a pause button. I KNOW it wasn't present in the arcade version, but this is HOME computer software. Come on, guys! Other than that, I found myself experi- encing a profound sense of deja vu. This IS Dragon's Lair, digitized frame-by- frame from the original. It has all the strengths, and all the weaknesses of the arcade version. If (like me) you were annoyed by the shallow and arbitrary nature of the puzzles in the original, so will you be with the Amiga version. If you were blown away by the graphics and smooth animation in the arcade, you will be when you see it on your Amiga's screen, too. In summary, I give Dragon's Lair a ten out of ten for artistry and technical excellence, and a five out of ten for game play. I won't take off technical points for taking over the machine, because I believe this is a rare instance where such measures are justified. As long as the disk loader was needed in order to support the data compression schemes, then I'm even willing to accept floppy swapping and lack of hard disk support. I do NOT consider the zany scheme with Comspec's hard disk to be "support!" Overall, I'd say this game belongs in every Amiga user's library, if only to show our less fortunate computer bretheren what they are missing! The preceding article is Copyright, 1988 by Howard Owen. -- Howard Owen, Computer Systems Manager PHYSNET/HEPNET/SPAN: SBPHY::HBO Physics Computer Services internet: hbo@nobbs.ucsb.edu University of California, Santa Barbara bitnet: HBO@SBITP.BITNET PLink: HBO "I am not a pay TV service!" BBS: "The Quirk" 805-967-9357