Golden Age (1990's)
Double Dragon
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1987 Taito, Technos Japan
NES
For those who were not alive in the 80s this was THE game everyone talked about. The arcade version of Double Dragon sucked down quarters like a cheap Thai prostitute and we gave them gladly for the chance to take command of two mullet-wearing guys and beat some side-scrolling bootay.
The NES version of this game leaves a hell of a lot to be desired however. More than one person was a wee bit disappointed to open this game Christmas morning 1987 and see that the two player simultaneous play option was taken out. That was the whole idea of the stupid game in the first place.
That in itself wouldn't have been so bad if there was a decent translation of the arcade game going on, which there isn't. Instead what we get is a game based on the Arcade which tries to emulate the same feel but is ultimately sub-par.
You play as Billy lee, one half of the Double Dragon karate duo. You still sport the mullet-pompador from the arcade. The story is presented in a short little cut scene before the game proper; a bunch of dickheads show up and kidnap your girlfriend. Today this would be realized by a half hour long cinema scene with CGI rendered motion captured models with the actor's digitized likeness mapped onto their faces in front of a million dollar orchestra and Academy award winning dialog. None of that shit here. Back in 1987 we didn't need no talking in our video games, just BAM! Punch the bitch in the stomach and drag her ass off over the shoulder caveman style. You then come out of a parking garage and the game starts. No questions, just asskicking.
To make the game into an interesting experience for one player they decided to go the learn-new-stuff-as-you-go-along route, which kind of blows as the appeal of the arcade game was the wide amount of moves you could bust out at any given time. Here when you start your pathetic little karate dude can punch and kick, that's it. Later you learn the usual jump kicks, elbow smashes, judo flips, etc, plus one move where you grab some's hair and knee them in the face repeatedly (which even twenty years later is pretty satisfying.) Problem is there is no save feature, so start the game over and you have to do this crap all over again. You also get weapons (knives, whips, baseball bats, etc) and can pick up the occasional large rock or oil drum to clobber people with.
Graphics, meh. They look like Nintendo graphics, i.e. squished little munchkin versions of their arcade counterparts. Not to say they're bad or anything, just somewhat deformed. Sound is decent, although there is a "sproing" noise when you jump which makes it feel kind of stupid.
There was an attempt to keep the enemy types recognizable from the arcade. Part of the appeal of the arcade game was that the bad guys had somewhat of a personality of their own. This was before these enemy types became generic; No one had ever seen this kind of game before. You still have the Lindas with the whips, the huge bald-headed Abbobos who break through the walls at you, the cheap bastard with the machine gun at the end. For the most part they look alright. They do the usual surround you thing and aren't too hard to take out with the ol'-walk-up-and-down-through-the-foreground-technique.
The level design has been significantly changed to make the game more platform-like in the later levels. The usual ghetto, forest, and mountain levels are there. At the end you have to jump on these disappearing platforms, dodge spikes, and other random baloney that was never in the arcade game. Whether this adds to or takes away from the beat'em up formula is a matter of preference (i.e. it blows.)
To compensate for the lack of a two player simultaneous mode there is an added arena-type mode, where you can choose any character from the game and duke it out one-on-one. This is significant because this was three or four years before fighting games emerged on the scene. Granted the fighting system is rather primitive by today's standards (no blocking, no specials, same backgrounds, etc) but the characters do look a lot better here than in the regular game and control rather well. They also have the ability to do running attacks. This mode is limited by the fact that both players can only choose the same character. This was 1987 after all. While me and my friends played this mode and had fun back in the day it still would have been much better to have two player co-op in the regular game.
All in all an average port of an above average arcade game which was severely hurt by the lack of two player simultaneous play. By today's standards the one player game holds up fairly decently and can be appreciated for decent controls and challenge. Double Dragon sequels on the NES fair a lot better than this half-hearted effort in all departments.