Surprisingly, even though this game has HD in its title, it is not meant to come anywhere near any sort of device that involves your television set. Dragon’s Lair HD is strictly a PC DVD game which, for starters, is very different from any other DVD game I’ve ever played. The game itself, however, does play like most DVD games.
In these kinds of games, you never really have a feel of control over your actions or what is happening—you, more or less, just interact with what is going on. Does this sound odd? Of course it does. These games take a lot more luck than skill and can get very very frustrating, and Dragon’s Lair is no exception, as sometimes your choice on what to do…er…which button to push is rather easy. Other times, it might not make the least sense at all to you, and, unfortunately, most of the time you either think you are supposed to be making a choice when you’re not, or you don’t notice that you were supposed to make a mistake and just die.
Death is a funny thing in this game. Thankfully, you DO have more than one life, and many continues as well, because you will probably need them. Dragon’s Lair really is just a cartoon you watch that you occasionally need to push the correct button to continue watching. OK, well, that is not entirely true, because another jarring effect of death in this game is that you just get thrust into a whole new little segment of the cartoon. It seems to lack cohesion as you go to seemingly randomly different rooms until you get to the big end battle, where you slay a dragon and save your excessively slutty girlfriend Daphne.
The game is very dated, but there is good reason for that, as it is a “remastered” edition of a 1984 arcade game. So it is hard to call this a truly horrible game, because this edition really is geared toward people who played and loved this game in their youth and want to experience those fun times again…or whatnot; I don’t really see this bringing many people enjoyment at all.
The music in the game is pretty decent, but the other sounds and the voices are really dreadful, like nail-being-hammered-through-you-temples dreadful. The story is pretty generic but also pretty amusing, as the main character Dirk is unlike mostly every other hero, and isn’t afraid to show his weak cowardly side…OK, well, he almost ONLY shows his weak cowardly side! The game would have been a lot better if it included some voice acting or even just some sort of dialoguem because that could really have added to the zany feel of the game and might have kept your mind off the sheer awkwardness of everything the game is throwing at you.
Another thing with DVD games or other similar games like these is that, even though they are single player games, they are a lot more fun to be playing when you have some friends and spectators around to share the experience with. Since the game is basically watching a cartoon, once you finally mercifully get through the ending and the story is complete, there really is much sense in replaying it, other than SHOWCASING its pure genius to all of your friends.
Even though Dragon’s Lair is a old game that hasn’t aged well with time, you can at least squeeze some kind of fun out of it—the true value of this fun however is another question that, really, no one cares to answer.
