Dragon's Lair Trilogy

Okay, to start off, unlike most of the negative reviews, I actually like Dragon's Lair. If you're just curious about the games in general (not these specific versions), read this first paragraph: they're the original quick-time events. You watch a cutscenes, press a button at the right time, and your character doesn't die. Unlike most modern QTEs, the game doesn't tell you directly what button to press, instead using visual cues to show you what the proper next move is (though as the series went on (from Dragon's Lair to Space Ace to Dragon's Lair II) these clues became less and less clever and more reliant on waiting for something to flash yellow and moving towards that). It's purely a test of your reflexes, with a lot of trial-and-error involved, but the death scenes are made amusing enough to shave off some of the frustration. If you're interested in some twitch gameplay in its simplest form and/or want to see a piece of gaming history, it might be worth tracking down a copy. Not this one, though. This "Dragon's Lair Trilogy" is a low-effort compilation of their mobile ports. As such, the HUD from those ports are present at all times, no way to turn them off. There's also a "move guide" which shows you which buttons to press at what time, removing the need to watch the animation itself for clues (you can turn this off, but this choice doesn't save if you quit and come back, rendering their save feature useless). The menus don't work properly unless you use the mouse. The gameplay runs choppily, despite just being a video player that listens for keyboard input. And there may be bugs that make the game unplayable; Space Ace, in particular, has a branching path in its first scene, but I couldn't get the alternate path to trigger, even when the game told me I'd done the input correctly. I've wanted a nice collection of all three of these games for a while (still don't have Dragon's Lair II), but this isn't it. At least GOG refunded me, so good on them.

Sure, these games are pure, 100% quicktime events, but keep in mind these originally came out in the early 1980s, when laserdisc games were all the rage. Sure, there were others, like Cliff Hanger (which was basically an anime movie, Castle of Cagliostro, chopped up and turned into an LD game), but these three games were all animated by legendary ex-Disney animator Don Bluth, and the quality shows. Back in the day I did play the first Dragon's Lair, as well as Space Ace, but it was the latter that I truly got into. Dragon's Lair for some reason didn't appeal to me as much, so I poured a lot of my time (and quarters) into Space Ace, a game which I got good enough at that I could play it to the end on a single pair of quarters (the game cost 50c at my local arcade). I alway generated a crowd when I did, too, which I always enjoyed. Sure, there isn't really much "game" here, these are essentially the fathers of the QTE game, the Choose Your Own Adventure books turned into short films. But they were genre-defining, the animation and voice acting was top-shelf, there was plenty of that Disney-style humour in it, and they have well-earned their place in the gaming history books. And despite being a laserdisc game, they've been ported to dozens upon dozens of systems, even the 16-bit systems like Amiga and Atari ST (where they took up something like 8-9 disks) in the mid-90s, which was a feat unto itself at the time, frequent disk-swapping annoyances aside. Whether you enjoy QTE games or not, these are still worth having -- maybe just for nostalgia's sake, but they are legends in their own right, and kind of a must-have for anyone who loves the true arcade classics.

I'm sure most people know that Dragon's Lair was special in its day almost entirely because of the graphics. In the days of Mario Brothers, Pac-Man and Dig Dug, a game featuring interactive Don Bluth animation must have seemed like it had fallen out of a magical portal to the year 3000. There was just no comparison whatsoever, it blew everything else away by a light year. The gameplay was only passable, and rather frustrating, but nobody cared- if it cost you a dollar in quarters to see two minutes of game, it was worth it. If you were lucky there would be someone who knew the game by heart showing off and you'd get to see the whole thing for free. By today's standards, the animation is still great and unique, but the gameplay just doesn't hold up. Quick time events aren't well-regarded these days, and trying to perform them while watching what's going on in the animation is virtually impossible- you'll tune out everything but the flashing hints telling you where to go next, and when it's over you'll only have a vague impression of what happened, especially in Dragon's Lair II where the action is completely bonkers and hard to follow even if you're only watching without playing! Speaking of, this version has an option to do just that, letting you experience the excellent animations without the frustration... but that brings us to the bugs. I didn't experience any in the actual game, but the menus are a mess! Any scrolling window just plain doesn't work- when you start to scroll it blanks out, and you have to drag the bar back and forth, catching glimpses of the options and trying to click on them while the game moves them away from your mouse as though taunting you. If you hit "Play All", the game is virtually guaranteed to crash at some point before the end, forcing you to wrestle with said buggy menu to watch each segment individually. Even the button to select which game to play is unresponsive and requires a dozen clicks to register. Why didn't they test this??

Fantastic even though this has been available on so many different platforms, this should be THE DEFINITIVE high-resolution version. Where is Space Ace 2 Borf's Revenge, to complete this collection? Please bring Space Ace 2 Borf's Revenge to complete this.

To be brief, this GOG version of Dragons Lair 1 has a game breaking bug that happens every time I play this version of the game. There is one scene with a simple passage to the right. you make the correct move, and it shows you exit correctly, then the screen flashes, and then plays the cave-in death animation for that scene, and the game won't let you progress any further. Both Dragons Lair 1 and Dragons Lair 2 seem to become faster and faster the more time you spend playing the game. This only happens in the GOG version. I would honestly suggest buying the Steam version of this game instead, as this one has bugs that will likely never be patched.