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| | | One of the earlier entries in Hamster Corporation's series of emulated arcade games, Arcade Archives Double Dragon doesn't have the time or score attack modes later Arcade Archives entries have, and unlike later games does not have the option to scale the screen up to the full screen height (rather odd really), or to turn off the subtle black/grey border background.
But man Double Dragon is still a gosh-darn fun game. Yeah the AI can't really see the elbow move coming, but if you stay away from that, I don't know if there's another beat 'em up that puts up a fight like this, where each battle really feels like a knock-down, drag-out brawl, with simultaneous hits and just a lot of pummeling going on. Good times. : )
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Forgot the direction-specific jump attack buttons in Arcade Archives Double Dragon. Jeez. (So button layout on the arcade stick ended up K J P.) DD had kept sneaking into my thoughts of late; that's one itch scratched for a while, anyway. Played on the hardest difficulty, although in testing after the playthrough I wasn't smart enough to tell much difference between that and the easiest; enemies have fewer hit points on Easy maybe. |
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Trying to play through Arcade Archives Double Dragon on PS4 and forgot I'd left it on Very Hard difficulty from last time long ago. = o Also a weird thing happened in the spear hallway before the final room where a guy just froze and I tauntingly left him there instead of trying to break him out of it and then the game got stuck and wouldn't let me move forward and I probably deserved that. : P So I had to start over and rage-play all the way through again but I did way better that time. = D?
Well... Was doing horribly anyway so maybe it's just as well that weird freeze happened (maybe because I punched him just as some dynamite was exploding? I have never had this happen in DD as far as I can recall and I've been playing it--way too sporadically, apparently ;_;--since it came out in the arcade when I was a kid!!) and forced me to play through again with a real MAD ON and I guess that's what you gotta do, gotta play with murder mind just set on stomping these ***** ****s into the MUD!
Anyway yeah I'd committed the sacrilege of staying away so long and starting to think maybe DD wasn't so good 'cause obviously it has weird stuff like the slowdown and some moves being too good or not so good later on 'cause like guys duck the kick all the time later but no it's got this strange charm where those things just kind of make it feel tough and make you want to WIN HARDER raWR!
So yeah DD's still good and I was a fool ever to doubt it.
I never noticed knives were so hard to pick up before though. : P
And actually kick is pretty good against those green Dragon punks, can knock them right out of their fancy spin kicks and stuff. Oh and kicks worked really well on the two big guys right before the end room, that really surprised me. So I was wrong about kicks, too. = o
I sure couldn't hit those lime-colored punks once the boss showed up. And I love the way he just trundles in past that window. Forgot his gun is insta-kill, ow. Ow.
Legendary Technos Japan director Yoshihisa Kishimoto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoshihisa_Kishimoto , who invented the modern beat-em-up with Renegade & Double Dragon, created the weird dodge ball game genre with Super Dodge Ball (arcade; not the NES version though which is really what made it sing), and maybe made the best arcade wrestling game ever with WWF WrestleFest--I know nothing about that scene but that's what people say on the internet--among other exploits, is credited as "Director and Producer YOSHI KISHI" in the DD credits.
Come to think of it he also directed the recent "get the band back together" Double Dragon IV which unlike DD1--but like, say, Kishimoto's arcade DDII--wasn't very good, but definitely has a crash midway through it so maybe the hang I got here brings it full circle. = o
Then again this was only the fourth entry in Hamster's Arcade Archives series and they were still working stuff out like they didn't even have a "return to title screen" option in the menu, didn't have a separate Hi-Score mode, and you couldn't zoom the game screen even close to the full screen height, so for all I know that guy freezing could be an emulation error. |
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