The Lee brothers were right inside that garage when Maria got kidnapped! What the HELL guys, you didn’t hear her getting beaten up outside?
Maybe they were getting changed or something.
OK, so here’s my Double Dragon story. I loved the arcade game. So much so that I would just watch people playing it whenever I couldn’t afford to play it myself. I had never seen anything like it before and there was no comparable game on my humble C64. So as you could imagine I was thrilled when the C64 home conversion came about – by Aussie superstars Melbourne House no less.
It was terrible. Absolutely terrible. Not even a “well what do you expect for the C64″ kind of terrible. The machine could do side-scrolling brawlers quite well thanks very much – Renegade….uh, Target Renegade…er…Renegade 3. Anyway. Having a couple of sprites on the screen moving around 2D scrolling backdrops wasn’t an impossible task.
In the C64 version of Double Dragon, the two sprites that made up each person weren’t even attached to each other. Nothing worked right. It looked ugly. The weapons were crap. The collision detection was woeful. It was a horrible excuse for a game and I was out $30 because of it.
Gutted.
Fast forward fifteen-odd years and I find myself working with a man who, among his many claims to fame, was the producer of the C64 version of Double Dragon. Small world. He said that the deadline was impossibly tight, and the coders had no real practical experience with the game or the C64 but they were cheap and available, and they had no choice but to put in the box whatever they were supplied with. They even had to issue an apology in the box to try and explain away the technical issues. It was a rush job and it showed.
You bet your ass I demanded my $30 back from him.
(There was also an Atari 2600 version, which was actually half decent for the machine! How the hell they did it I have no idea)
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Half decent? Every single encounter in the 2600 game is a boss fight, and the enemies have no shame in destroying you if they get even a single hit in. Which they will, if you’re stupid enough to ever do something so obvious as punch or kick them. They won’t even flinch. It’s like you’re hitting metal.
Broken Terminator-style enemy AI aside, it’s at least recognizable as Double Dragon, I’ll grant. I can see why you’d compare it favorably to the C64 version.
Bonus Trivia: Although designed to be the most powerful Pong system ever sold, the 2600′s two characters and a square ball system of graphics was almost instantly hacked when Atari’s programmer’s discovered they could use it to race the beam of light televisions used to project images on the screen. If you think Double Dragon is impressive, check out Halo. ( Yes, it actually exists. )
I think I’ll fire up the 2600 version later tonight to remove the rose tinted memories of that game once and for all. It doesn’t sound like I’ll have any fun at all!
And I’ll definitely have to play some Halo 2600! It could be awesome