Dragon’s Lair = Piles of tasty death on your iPhone (a review)

I have been on SUCH a retro gaming kick on my iPhone for the last few months. Between Karate Champ, Phoenix Wright, and Final Fantasy I’ve been able to reclaim most of my childhood (if not the legions of quarters I wasted during those years). However, I’m always up and ready for yet another vacation to Olde Towne Nostalgia™, and I recently discovered the bus that takes me right down Main Street.

It’s possible that some of you reading this weren’t alive during the early 1980s. Others of you may have known the touch of a woman during those years. For the rest of us, Dragon’s Lair hitting the arcades in 1983 heralded a heretofore unknown level of hype, as it was the first arcade game with graphic quality that looked just like it had popped right off of your TV screen during Saturday morning cartoons. The secret: LaserDisc. Essentially, the cabinet was a giant laserdisc player, and the controllers were a remote control. Pressing a direction on the joystick or hitting the Sword button would skip the laserdisc to a corresponding “chapter,” and the result of your action would be shown on-screen. (Dragon’s Lair also made its way into your living room a few years later. Any one of the roughly 13 people who owned home LaserDisc players were able to purchase the home version.)

Essentially, the game was a matter of pattern recognition. Move the joystick or hit Sword at the right time, and your hero Dirk the Daring (on his noble quest to free his girlfriend Generic Blonde Princess #982641 from the clutches of the evil – wait for it – Dragon from its Lair) would act correspondingly to survive and move on. Move the joystick or hit Sword a fraction of a second too soon or too late and you would watch Dirk the Daring die in any number of hilarious ways. Do this three times and prepare to feed the beast another quarter.

Suffice it to say, this game looked absolutely gorgeous, and was ridiculously, stupidly difficult. If a video game has ever been produced before or since that is any less forgiving, I’d hate to be made to try it.

So, this begs the question: why in the name of all of Christendom would anyone pay for the privilege of submitting themselves to this monstrosity nearly 30 years after it’s initial release? Well, there are a few very compelling reasons to answer that:

• It’s friggin’ cheap. At 99 cents, you can’t do much better than that.
• You don’t often find such a macabre sense of humour anymore. The vast myriad of ways that Dirk can meet his doom is alone worth the price of admission.
• The developers wisely added the one feature that the original arcade game makers never could have: infinite lives.

So, with that nasty three-strikes-and-you’re-out issue safely out of the way, Dragon’s Lair actually becomes hella awesome, if not still a bit infuriatingly maddening in some sections. The game pretty much plays out as a series of short episodes. Each “room” in the Lair presents Dirk with another encounter to maneuver and sword his way out of. Survive a room and move on to the next. Die, and repeat the room again until you succeed. Each room only takes a half-dozen moves or so to pass, so they’re quick.

However, the developers, in an attempt to destroy the mind of everyone who plays this game, added two extra dollops of pure evil challenges:

• The rooms in the Lair can appear in random order, sometimes even twice or more in the same game, and
• Each room could appear normally or, maddeningly, as an exact left/right mirror of itself.

A skilled Pac-Man player could just memorize the patterns the Ghosts took in each stage and win the game. In Dragon’s Lair, memorizing a series of moves became several orders of magnitude more difficult because you don’t know which stage is coming next, and you don’t know if the move order was going to be Right Up Right Up Left Down Sword Up Right or Left Up Left Up Right Down Sword Up Left until after each stage had started.

All that being said, the gameplay translates extremely well to the iPhone’s touch screen. Instead of a joystick and button control board, you have arrows and a Sword button on-screen to tap on at the right time. Helpfully, the controls light up (and a tone is played) when they need to be pressed.

Up for an extra dose of sado-masochism? Both of the helper options (tone and lighted controls) can be disabled. Even crazier than that? You can disable infinite lives. Beyond this place, the angels themselves fear to tread.

In the end, I’ve spent a good few hours playing this game, and I have yet to rescue Generic Blonde Princess #982641, though she makes a few cameo appearances in select rooms (always screaming “SAVE ME!” as a green, scaly claw hauls her off-screen). Was it worth my 99 cents? Absolutely. Has it nearly caused me to smash my iPhone off the floor in frustration? Not yet. Yet.

Should you buy it? Yes.