I still remember the first time I saw Dragon's Lair. It was in 1983, I was in college and I stopped by the Union to blow some of my very limited funds on video games rather than studying. When I walked in the arcade, there was a huge crowd around a game. Now sometime 4 or 5 people would be watching someone who was really on a roll and about to break a record, but I had never seen anything like this. I jockeyed for position and what I saw was astounding. Here was a video game that looked just like an animated cartoon. I was blown away.

To get the full effect of what I was seeing, you have to realize that back in '83 graphics on video games were very crude. Also released that year were the games Spy Hunter and Star Wars:

Spy Hunter (left) and Star Wars (right) were both released the same year as Dragon's Lair.

Those two were cutting edge graphics at the time. Compare that to Dragon's Lair:

It's easy to see why people were lining up to pay fifty cents a go (twice the regular rate at the time) for a chance to play it. Since that time Dragon's Lair has been released on several different formats for the home including a PC version and an interactive DVD. Now Digital Leisure has remastered the original film elements in HD and put out this arcade classic on HD DVD. (A Blu-ray version was released earlier. You can read DVDTalk's review here.)

The game revolves around Dirk the Daring who is trying to rescue the fair Princess Daphne from the evil Dragon Singe. As Dirk, your job is to navigate through the traps, monsters and pitfalls of a castle and find the hapless lass.

The gameplay is pretty simple. At various points in the game a yellow diamond will appear in the lower right-hand corner of the screen. At those times players use their remote's directional keys and the enter button to select an action: left, right, forward, back, or attack with the sword (enter.) If you've selected the right action, Dirk evades an attack or trap and gets to move on; otherwise he dies a horrible (and sometimes amusing) death. The response from the remote and my Toshiba A2 was okay. There wasn't a lag between the time I'd enter a command and it would register on screen (the diamond changes to the button you push) but sometimes the action wasn't recorded for some reason. This wasn't a large flaw and didn't really impact the feel of the game.

The problem is that this game is over 20 years old, and even when it was released the mechanics of the game were lacking. This is a case of style over substance. Sure, it looks really pretty but it just isn't that fun to play. The problem is that there is very limited interaction in this game and you have to make a choice before the correct action is apparent. Often players just have to guess which button to press, and systematically go through all five choices until the correct one is found. It's more random guessing than deduction or following a set of rules.

Be prepared to die a lot too. If you go for more than 20 seconds without being killed, you are doing really well. Each scene (there are about 40 of them all together, with some being mirror images of each other) has between 3 and 8 places to enter commands and you have to get all of them correct before the scene can be considered completed. These choices often come up in rapid succession, sometimes there were so fast that I didn't even realize I had miss a place to enter a command until I had died. If you do die, you don't go back to where you were (except when entering the castle at the beginning.) You are reincarnated at the beginning of a different scene. This can be rather disconcerting at the beginning and irritating later on. If you play long enough the game takes pity on you and will let you work on one scene until you complete it, but I wasn't able to determine if this is a function of time or number of scenes completed. With each "game" you have five lives, but there are an infinite number of times you can continue from where you left off, so completing the game is just a test of endurance.

Video:

When porting this game to HD, Digital Leisure made a big mistake. They decided to crop the image so it would fit nicely onto 16X9 monitors. In my mind this is the same releasing a pan-and-scan version of a widescreen movie. The biggest attraction to this game is the great animation and video clips, and cutting the tops and bottoms off is horrible. As people have often stated, it's not about more or less picture, it's about the right amount of picture. This HD DVD does not present the right amount.

The new HD version of Dragon's Lair (left) has cropped some of the image but looks much better than the earlier DVD release (right.)

Aside from that the image does look very good. Take a look at the scans above. The HD images were taken from Digital Leisure's web site, and though they've been shrunk a bit they still give you a good idea how sharp and clear the image is. This disc is a large improvement over the SD DVD release boasting more detail, even colors, and deeper blacks. On the digital side there was some mosquito noise if a few places, but this was minor.

Audio:

The original mono soundtrack has been upgraded to a DD 5.1 mix. While this sounds nice, it really isn't that impressive. The action only lasts for seconds, literally, so players never really get a good chance to be immersed in the sound effects. Still the audio is clean and clear and sounds very good.

Extras:

This disc comes with a lot of extras. First there is the "Watch" option that lets you view the game from start to finish. I actually found this more enjoyable than playing the game. It runs a little less than 22 minutes.

The video commentary features creators Don Bluth, Rick Dyer, and Gary Goldman talking over the whole video game. There were some interesting bits including the testing where the kids that they brought in to play the game asked if they had to continue playing. There's also an interview with the three creators who talk about the genesis of the project, development, and restoring the original footage in HD.

The HD Restoration has a split screen that shows scenes before and after the restoration. There's a Time Capsule that's pretty interesting too. It's another split screen featurette but this time it plays the ending of the game and compares various incarnations of the game on the left (Amiga, PC, Laser disc, DVD, etc.) with the restored HD version on the right.

It's too bad that they didn't port the bonus items from the earlier DVD over too. That had several interviews, box art, merchandise and an episode of Starcade that featured Dragon's Lair. None of those are included on this disc.

Final Thoughts:

While many people will have fond memories of Dragon's Lair, it isn't as impressive today as it was 20+ years ago. While the animation is still fun, the gameplay, which was never great, really suffers by today's standards. It's more of a test to see how long you can go entering semi-random cursor controls than a real game. The newly restored image does look great however and fans of the game should check it out for that reason alone. Make it a rental though, since it doesn't have a lot of replay value.

Note: The images in this review are not from the HD DVD and do not necessarily represent the image quality on the disc.