The bad news for me is that I play all my PC games on my HDTV using a wireless setup and the lag is such that I was going through 10-15 lives just to get through the first few scenes – keep in mind I used to be able to play the entire game on a single life. For some inexplicable reason the game currently doesn’t support a gamepad – although developers promise this is coming in a summer update. At critical points in the action you are given a small window of opportunity to interact with the game by moving or hitting the action key. You control Dirk, the hero, through dozens of animated action scenes. The gameplay is just as simple (and boring) today as it was in 1983, but you can’t help but love the interactive cinema aspect of the experience. Then you were unstoppable…you were “Dirk the Daring”. Only after several dozen (or was it hundreds) of tokens did you finally master the timing and find your “zone”. Timing was critical, and if you got too confident and started pressing the joystick or button too soon you would also die. Even though the game prompted your next action with flashes of light overlaid on the colorful background art, these visual cues only allowed for about one second of error and you could never win by reflexes alone. With only five possible actions up, down, left, right, and swing the sword this was the genesis of the modern day QTE. While most people were playing Defender, Galaga, Q-Bert, etc, here comes this game with amazing graphics from Disney animator, Don Bluth (Land Before Time, American Tail, Titan A.E.). For younger gamers however, the gameplay in Dragon’s Lair might be laughably primitive.ĭragon’s Lair was a breath of fresh air back in 1983. After all, what could Digital Leisure possibly have done to best their 2006 effort, Dragon’s Lair HD? But since this was a Steam Greenlight pick there must be an avid fan base of 40-something gamers out there who want to relive their misspent youth, and for only $10 and a gigabyte of HDD space you can follow Dirk’s laserdisc adventures on your modestly equipped PC. ![]() I was admittedly intrigued when I heard Dragon’s Lair was coming to Steam. Dirk the Daring truly is gaming’s most immortal hero. Since then I’ve played and reviewed the game on nearly every console, not to mention Blu-ray, HD-DVD, and most recently, for the iPad. Ironically, the first time I ever played Dragon’s Lair outside the arcade was on PC when a much stripped down version of the game was shipping for PC on 5.25” floppies. This is my sixth (or maybe seventh) time reviewing Dragon’s Lair on just as many systems, which makes it surprisingly hard to keep coming up with fresh material. I’ve been playing Dragon’s Lair since 1983 and it seems that I have been reviewing it just as long.
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