A little while back GameSpy's "Top 10 Box Arts" article inspired me to look at a series of games that were altogether new to me - the Double Dragon games (the Japanese version of DD2 is one of the pics). As I regularly get my proverbial haunches handed to me by BenT on various matters, I'll forego wasting space on my criticisms of the list - which really isn't bad at all, seeing how it's so diverse and includes The NinjaWarriors (well, that's two words) box art. I highly recommend it. The article, I mean, though I would say that the NinjaWarriors actually has TWELVE of the required items of a late '80s box art - the last two being using character shadows as calligraphy, and putting it all in chrome.

Under the box, Double Dragon games on the Genesis wouldn't know shiny box art from shineola (that's being charitable on the shineola given its usual counterpart, I know. Not in favor of the shiny box art). They don't succeed in many places, either, just as this paragraph has been hastily added after I wrote the rest of the post and really doesn't succeed in much of anything.

However, back to the games. I do not think it pathetic at all that I have moved backwards from relatively modern beat-em-'ups such as Sengoku 2, Bad Dudes vs. Dragonninja, Riot City, Comix Zone, and the immortal (...) Renegade - that being one of the first games I ever emulated in MAME...amazing that I managed to soldier on after that horridly executed bastardization of the Kunio saga. I'd known that Double Dragon is

Of the games on my short list (I haven't tried out Final Fight yet, or really messed with the Bare Knuckle/Streets games, sorry to say!) I would place Double Dragon closest to Riot City...and yet (at least in the Genesis incarnation) Double Dragon does have some things going for it: high-contrast, colorful graphics, music that would be unforgettable if only we could whistle it on command (I've never quite caught it, actually...), and some River City Ransom-style characters. Yet the game has some agonizing bits - nevermind the lack of paralax scrolling, which is irrelevant for this arcade game port ('92 Accolade, 512 kb). More thoughts, written just hours after my initial playthrough on 8/30:

Quote Originally Posted by I
[I like]... I also like the baseball bat, because it was my only friend in this game. [Ed: Don't know what I meant by that, since the spear gargoyles - rather flagrant waste of graphics, those! - were also a great help at times]
I really don't like: Seeing those RCR-lookalikes repeatedly, to say nothing of seeing Karnov nine times in ten minutes. Directions stick quite easily, so you'll often be "whiffing," [Note #$2: by this I mean attacking the air while an enemy is attacking your back; thankfully most later BEUs moved to the "fixed facing" model] and very quick enemies will close ground with you too quickly, ugly dudes who use M16s along the horizontal in beat-'em-ups; and Thug #24, watching our hero bash the top of Thug #26's head into his groin, thinking "Wow that looks like fun. **SENSORY OVERLOAD** [Final Note: I was experimenting with a style of review here - I think the only senses overloaded are the reader's, as a result of my inability to correctly use a semicolon given this is essentially a run-on sentence! Be glad I haven't released my Light Crusader capsule review yet. Alright, here's your review again.]
Almost liked: The neat cutscene bit where you drop the baseball bat onto the conveyor belt into the trash compactor, because that was a cool bit of detail. The problem is that I wanted to keep that bat...*sigh*
Then there's Double Dragon II.

Well, it's damned tiny, and if you flashed a slide showing random Double Dragon II scenes in a show consisting of old NES game screens - who'd see the difference? I'll slog my way to Gehenna if a game's got respectable sprites on its system and a good framerate, but Double Dragon II not only seemed tiny, but the animation very sluggish as well. Control seemed actually rather good for that framework.

How about Double Dragon III? Ah, so far this is my favorite of the bunch, though I've discovered some reviews that mark the game for death - worst of the 16 bit'temups, in fact. I don't feel so at all. Now as a game, it fails, and quite horribly, given the fact that you often get smacked out of the air while executing a Comix Zone-style Flying Dragon kick (well, it's the other way around really, but you get the idea - it's how we all beat Golden Axe on the Genesis), and hand-to-hand combat is a similarly impossible task, comparable to fighting UFOs while trying to climb a cinder cone volcana - take one step and you fall back down two, plus a face full of heat ray. The rest of the gameplay elements are poor, as well - one can buy "tricks" out of the store which aren't explained, never really hard to obtain owing to the steady supply of "coins," and tricks apparently disappear after time regardless (Roney seems to have a special attack with Up + Kick which I eventually wore out, I guess).

The fun bits here are in the game's art. Billy's jumping animation is simply humorous, but some of the sprites look good, just not very much animation is happening between slides. Music here is either terrible or very good but repetitive, depending on your outlook (I've been playing the America theme in the game's Sound Test since before I started writing this post, guys...though it really isn't that good, and the Japan music is much more pleasant/cool). Finally, some of the backgrounds - such as the inside of a Japanese dojo/house/lord's waiting room - look very nice indeed, but once again there's no paralax scrolling, just spikes coming out from between the floorboards and more spears poking out from walls.

Double Dragon V:
This really, truly is a Double Dragon game? I had Billy pegged for Turok...quite possibly one of the most bizzare twists I've seen a series take to date though I haven't checked out the Battletoads/DD crossover games yet, which probably will cause things to make more sense as the graphics in DDV display a 'Toads look to them - which is to say there's lots of appendage deformation and general silliness going on, and Sekka from DDV is almost a dead ringer for BT's Dark Evil Queen.

The backgrounds are nice!

The rest can be thrown out of the window - clumsy six button control, your average (or even below-average) grungy throwaway Genesis soundtrack, and some art that's...well -



To, um...well, I also played a game called "Bishin Densetsu Zoku," a rather unhappy F-Zero/fighting game mesh, with some truly awful race sequences, unintentionally funny cutscenes with actually not bad looking characters, and fighting scenes where some cool/OMG HOT cutscene characters turn into walking pieces of meat plus a toupee. That game also has some neat backgrounds - but unlike DD5, they're actually rather interesting, and now that I look at Flare's (decidedly un-sexy) ingame sprite I see that she has eyes. Takara's King of the Monsters port to the Super Famicom is fun for a try; Battle Tycoon on the system is...definitely interesting, plus it's sexier than everything else I've covered in these last paragraphs. Which could possibly mean only one thing - it's time to turn off that blasted America BGM and get some sleep!