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Dragon's Lair (DS) Status: Finished playing I started playing this game on Sunday 7 December, 2014 // I stopped playing this game on: Friday 12 December, 2014
Current opinion of this game
A classic worth playing, and the animation is quite enjoyable. I wouldn't pay much at this point though.
December 12, 2014 02:08:00 PM
I've done some more digging around (as well as asking) and the game can be described as "multicursal" - there are a few branches and the locations are shuffled in there. So there. Learned something new, I did.
December 7, 2014 06:40:54 PM
I had played Dragon's Lair in a few broken(?) implementations that ran too slow and crashed (iOS) or didn't have all the content. I've also read about it, it's quite the famous game after all. I must admit that, until now, I didn't really understand how the game worked. Or at least, how I think it works. It was pretty confusing for a while. I guess the general idea is that it's a series of quicktime events with neat (80s) animation. I played on "easy" because I wanted to see how long the game is. It's not that long. I imagine there are videos on Youtube with a full playthrough but going from memory I'm guessing it's less than a few minutes. Which is REALLY short if you think about it. I'm guessing you can beat the game in 100 button presses or less. I'm not noting this as a bad thing, more of a surprising "fact" I hand't realized. Playing on easy meant I got more explicit cues for what the next action was and infinite lives. This is what threw me off, because I was really confused as to the order of the different scenes in the game. It seemed to be that every time I died I started up in some other random location, played a few and then died again - starting up somewhere else. I'll need to go back to it just to make sure because I know that some locations are repeated (e.g. the elevator) but I'm not sure about the others. Maybe most of the order is randomized? It took me a while to get the hang of it, notably the fact that I couldn't really play it by looking at the animation - rather the cues on the lower screen saved the day. Once I beat the game - I was able to watch all the scenes in order as part of the extras. I guess I'll have to play it again on "normal" (there's also a "home" mode instead of "arcade" - no idea what the difference is there either) just to see what it's like. Either way, I'm glad I played it.

Dragon's Lair (DS)