Reviewed: December 18, 2004
Reviewed by: Mark Smith

Publisher
Digital Leisure

Developer
Digital Leisure

Released: November 5 , 2004
Genre: Arcade
Players: 1
ESRB: Everyone

4
8
8
4
4.7

Supported Features

For those who have never had the pleasure of playing a laserdisc arcade game or any of Digital Leisure’s DVD conversions these games are basically feature quality cartoons with branching points throughout the story. At any given time you will be prompted to input a command, either a direction or an action button. There is only one correct choice per opportunity with all of the other incorrect options resulting in an untimely, and often humorous death.

Back in 2002 Ubisoft released a spectacular new version 3D version of Dragon’s Lair abandoning the pre-rendered hand drawn animation style. They took all of the rooms and encounters from the original game and turned them into amazing 3D environments and then they added all sorts of new room, levels, puzzles, and traps. This is the version that Dragon’s Lair III is based off of.

Basically everything that is billed as a new feature for Dragon’s Lair III was already a new feature in Dragon’s Lair 3D, but now instead of a free-flowing 3D game the gameplay has been reduced to the original concept of action cues where you are prompted for a timely input of the correct course of action.

I must mention that this game, along with the rest of the titles in the rapidly growing Digital Leisure library are not designed specifically for any gaming system. They are DVD video games, and as such will play on any DVD player whether it be a PS2, Xbox, PC, or a standalone component player in your home theater rig. None of these games have been endorsed by Sony or Microsoft - they just simply happen to work on these systems because they support the DVD format.

Dragon's Lair was a breath of fresh air back in 1983. While most people were playing Defender, Galaga, Q-Bert, etc, here comes this game with amazing graphics from Disney animator, Don Bluth (Land Before Time, American Tail, Titan A.E.). The game featured a trailer with a booming narrators voice and clips from the game that always caused a crowd to gather, first at the game then the token dispenser. The nature of the game was memorization. You only had five possible actions; up, down, left, right, and swing the sword.

Even though the game prompted your next action with flashes of light overlaid on the animation, these visual cues only allowed for about one second of error and you could never win by reflexes alone. Timing was critical, and if you got too confident and started pressing the joystick or button too soon you would also die. Only after several dozen (or was it hundreds) of tokens did you finally master the timing and find your "zone". Then you were unstoppable...you were "Dirk the Daring".

Act too soon or react to late and you get to witness one of the dozens of horrible, yet humorous death scenes. A diamond will appear on the screen when you are supposed to input a command. A correct move turns the diamond yellow and the wrong move turns it blue. Some inputs are spaced out while others are rapid successions of difficult combos.

The only fault in the gameplay lies in the hardware we are forced to play it on. When Dragon's Lair debuted it was being played on a 12" laserdisc on an industrial laserdisc player with amazing seek and random access times. The way the game is laid out, based on your actions the game would skip to certain sections of the disc to play the appropriate scene. Back in 1983 this was seamless, but today, even after two decades of technological advancements, the typical home DVD player whether it be Xbox, PC, PS2 or home theater component, just doesn't have fast enough access. This results in some very annoying pauses about every 10-15 seconds during the game as your hardware scans for the next scene. While not as bad as previous DVD games, these pauses still ruin the flow of the game.

Dragon’s Lair III comes with a nice collection of DVD bonus material, actually the same stuff that was on the Dragon’s Lair 3D disc, including a great music video, a documentary, press clippings, and a fact sheet. There is also a special library of character bios, concept art, storyboards, and tons of artwork for characters and backgrounds. This will be of more interest to adults who played the original than the kids who will likely be playing this game.