Dragon's Lair (Sega CD) Playthrough - NintendoComplete

A playthrough of ReadySoft's 1994 interactive movie/FMV arcade game port for the Sega CD, Dragon's Lair.

I think that just about everybody is aware of Dragon's Lair at this point - its famous even among the famous arcade classics thanks to its Disney-quality animation in 1983 when Pac-Man and Donkey Kong were still ruling arcades. I have a sneaking suspicion that the involvement of Don Bluth (who worked on Disney films before establishing his own studio, responsible for An American Tale, The Land Before Time, etc. He also headed Anastasia at Fox) and the advent of the Laserdisc player (optical video discs the size of records) might've helped a bit too... ;) Cheeky sarcasm aside, even kids know about Dragon's Lair to some extent from Stranger Things. It was, and still is, something of a cultural phenomenon that somehow still manages to draw breath, raspy and labored these days though it might be.

The Sega CD version of the game was ported by ReadySoft, who the following year released the excellent Braindead 13, a wickedly funny and violent game that played quite Similarly to Dragon's Lair and Space Ace. Maybe a console port of DL was the toe in the water that led them to create the BD13 masterpiece. Who knows?

Bearing the limitations of the Sega CD in mind, this is quite a faithful reproduction of it. All of the rooms are present (including the mirrored ones), and the gameplay - if you'd call it that - is accurate to a fault. Until the room solutions are committed to memory, the super-narrow input times, and general lack of clear direction from cues like flashing items and doors will ensure you see the Game Over screen far more times than you want to count. There aren't any options either, nor is there any training-wheel modes. Hit start, and you're instantly watching Dirk cross the drawbridge, five lives at the ready.

The video quality here is still clearly squeezed of color and detail, but it's amazingly clear and smooth for Sega CD FMV - far better than other animated titles like Revenge of the Ninja and Cobra Command, and its light years beyond the pixel-vomit that most games using full-screen live-action video suffered from like Mad Dog McCree and Rebel Assault. Yeah, eww. The sound is a bit on the raspy side (I'm guessing 11 or 16 khz mono), but it's usually clear enough for the music and voices to come through reasonably well.

In all honesty, with the number of ports of the game that are now available, many of which can match the video quality of the original Laserdisc version, there's no reason to play this version in 2018, though I do still find it to be a neat novelty of a bygone era, if for no other reason than to remind myself of how far we've come.

It's a beautiful cartoon, and while the game might make you rage endlessly, there's no denying how satisfying it is to play perfect game, or to let someone else play so you can just watch.

Unfortunately I didn't have a perfect game this time around. I was going to record it again until there were no deaths, but I decided against it so that I could show a couple of death scenes along the way.

Hope you all enjoy it!
_
No cheats were used during the recording of this video.

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