[LGR Theme plays]
[fizz, sip]
Aahhh...
[typing]
Dragon's Lair.
It's one of those games that is so legendary,
there should be monuments made in its honor.
When it was released in 1983,
there was absolutely nothing like it.
Until that point, arcade games were made up of sprites and bitmaps
to simulate action and objects.
But then came Dragon's Lair with its fancy new LaserDisc technology,
It was a digital video format which allowed random loading of real video,
which ended up being perfect for Dragon's Lair.
The entire game plays like a short interactive movie
where you are presented with a scene,
and you find the correct way to interact with it and then move on.
And to top it off, the entire thing was animated by Don Bluth,
a world-class animation veteran of Disney and his own studios.
He really brought the thing to life
with classic characters like Dirk the Daring,
Singe the Dragon,
and Princess Daphne.
[sexy music plays]
Princess Daphne...
Yeah, with this monster of a game,
there was no shortage of demand to play it,
so it's natural it would be ported to about every home system imaginable.
But wait, how could they port a freaking high-tech LaserDisc game
to 8-bit or even 16-bit systems with any kind of success?
Well, the short answer is they couldn't.
But, oh, they tried,
so you got all sorts of awkwardly-made knockoffs
for the arcade game on all types of systems.
For this video, I'm going to be focusing on the MS-DOS version from 1989
for EGA graphics cards.
It's worth noting that this is quite different than the later DOS game,
Escape from Singe's Castle.
This one's the original by Merit Software and Polarware,
and judging from the ALWAYS accurate screenshots,
it looks pretty impressive.
It's got some rather high system requirements
for the time as well with 640K RAM,
EGA graphics and at least a 286 processor and a few megs of hard drive space.
Well, actually, the 286 and hard drive are only recommended, but that's just stupid.
This thing uses high-quality EGA graphics
and comes on 13 floppy disks.
Holy crap, I can't even imagine
the pain it would be to run this from floppies.
Unless you have 13 floppy drives, I guess.
Might have to try that.
Once you get the game installed to the hard drive,
just run the executable and, uh...
Well, I suppose there's some copy protection here.
And all I see in the box is this single sheet of paper,
which has installation instructions and...
oh, here we go.
Game Entry Codes.
Uh, let's see... we got the codes here...
Wait, what?!
It seems this paper only tells you how to decode the codes.
I missed the actual code sheet,
and that's because it's straight up camouflaged to the box.
Seriously, could they have made this text any fainter?
Not only can you not use a copy machine to copy it,
but this has to be the most confusing copy protection scheme I have seen in a while.
It tells you a line to check, then a color and a number.
That color and number corresponds to an area on the code sheet on that line.
Then decode the color, in this case, blue,
and then choose the number of spaces over
that corresponds to that line, in this case, code 1.
Then you type that code in, minus the last two characters,
and you're ready to play.
I know there were plenty of annoying copy protection schemes, but come on!
Who's really going to copy 13 floppies to play this?
Dragon's Lair PC starts off with a demo screen,
which has to be one of the worst I've ever seen.
It's just the first scene over
and over.
The only keys to the game to press are the arrow keys and Enter,
so you press Enter to start.
If you don't know what you're doing, then you die.
And die.
And that's it, back to the menu. Game over.
Now I've played Dragon's Lair in countless variations,
but for those of you that haven't, it's really simple.
All you need to do is find your way out of the scene
and to do this, you must press a certain combination of keys
at the right time to continue.
Do it enough without dying and you win.
In this case, at the very beginning,
it's pressing Enter when the tentacle appears,
wait a half second, then press the up arrow.
And that's it. Congratulations, you know how to play Dragon's Lair.
From here, it just goes on and on until you reach the end of the game,
which I'm rather sure is impossible
and it's filled with utterly unforgettable pain.
Ha! And it seems the developers knew this.
Look at the instructions sheet.
"Many rooms will seem impossible to get past at first."
"Never fear though,"
"once you've mastered a room, you'll soon forget the pain it took to get through it."
Yeah, until you freaking die at the very next room
and then have to start all over because of some of the lame control response issues.
Half the time the controls won't work
when it seems that you KNOW that you've pressed it properly.
I know this is true of all Dragon's Lair games,
but this is just a little worse than some I've played.
Eventually you'll get the hang of it,
but then you notice a larger problem.
It's freaking boring.
I mean, just look at this exciting scene.
There's a total of six times that this exact same scene
plays out until you can go to the next room.
It just mirrors the scene.
Over...
and over.
Nothing changes in between mirroring,
it's just pressing the opposite direction that you pressed last time.
And get this: almost every scene is done the exact same way.
One scene mirrored a couple of times until you get to the next one,
and then it keeps mirroring itself.
And there are only ten scenes overall.
To top it off, each time you play it is exactly the same,
so you know precisely what to expect and when,
unlike the arcade and other versions
where it shuffles the order of rooms.
Which would keep things interesting.
And it only gets lamer.
There's no sound at all.
Just obnoxious PC speaker noise
which I think is just there to cover up your constant swearing
at stupid areas that should be easy but for whatever reason
hate your guts.
I guess there is a plus side.
The graphics themselves are quite nice for EGA,
especially the animation.
But you know what, that actually kind of sucks,
because then you can't do anything fun at all with those graphics
because the game itself is annoying, unforgiving and bland.
Not to mention buggy. I don't even know what the balls is happening here.
Geez, Dirk, I know this sucks, but drugs aren't the answer.
To sum things up, Dragon's Lair EGA is pretty much crap.
The arcade game is great,
many of the later CD-ROM ports are also good,
and it's quite easy to play that original version
on all sorts of other systems nowadays.
I suppose for what they had to work with,
EGA Dragon's Lair is still somewhat fun
if you're really, really desperate for some Dirk-on-dragon action.
But to me, it's just not worth it.
So unless you're just a die-hard Dragon's Lair fan,
or have an interest in sideshow attraction DOS titles,
save your sanity and avoid this awkward nutsack of a game.