Search This Blog

Sunday, June 16, 2019

Double Dragon - Arcade [003] PlayThru



The arcade original Double Dragon from Technos is the seed to many sequels, some good, and some bad.  A title that has seen ports created for numerous computer and console systems from the 1980s, and even to the latest generation systems.  This is the birth of a fighting franchise that was able to entrench itself with gamers for just over 30 years, and still lives on today.  



NOTE: A trainer was used for making this capture.

The Double Dragon life itself has seen many ups, and also many downs.  The franchise transitioned between being a side scrolling beat 'em up to a versus fighting series and back again.  Also both a movie and a cartoon series were spawned.  While it has been many years since I saw the film, I do remember it being nothing of value, and pretty much a let down.  I never did see the cartoon series, but that was probably due to the time it was released rather than any particular avoidance.

Enough with the background, lets talk about the game itself.  Double Dragon was released in 1987. I definitely believe that Technos delivered on a decent gaming experience.  While I have not done much research into the competing titles at the time, as a kid, I think this was the first solid 2 player side scrolling fighter on the arcade scene. 

The controls are decent, granted this playthru is on an emulator, rather an the original arcade PCB.  The graphics and art are good, especially for the time.  The music and sound are solidly produced, but definitely have that chip sound effect in part coming from Yamaha's YM2151, a common chip in numerous machines in the late 80s.

Overall, if you are a fan of the genre, and have never tried Double Dragon, I would definitely say give it a spin.  Potentially, this game is the seed to the entire genre, and Technos deserves the respect for planting the seeds, in my opinion, for a genre that flourished!

Capture info -

This gameplay was captured on February 17, 2019.

Game was played in MAME with the output provided by NVidia's ShadowPlay.

Video was edited with Shotcut.



No comments:

Post a Comment