XBLA is the millionth platform for Dragon's Lair

It's Dragon's Lair. You probably know what to expect.

Well said.

Oh hey, did anyone else play the godawful NES version?

I did, zipp. My cousin showed it to me one time, and that was enough.

I never made it past the dragon.

The first one I played was on a CD back in the day. It was one of the first cd games I had for the PC, and it was all cartoonish. You basically had to press the right button and the cartoon would go on, or miss and die a terrible death.

The NES version was like that, only without that whole "succeeding" option.

A crash course on Dragon's Lair for the kids: The point of Dragon's Lair, in its original incarnation, is that you perform actions now and then (tap left, hit action, tap right) but what you see onscreen in response would be spectacular, since it was all animation that had been completely drawn and was free to do anything. This was originally run off a laserdisc. In today's parlance, the entire game is a series of quicktime events, with the added (great) difficulty that the game doesn't actually tell you which buttons to press, nor is it precise about when to press them.

Home computers of the day had no way to recreate or store the animations, but the game was so popular that there was a market for anything you could play at home that was Dragon's Lair -- so there are a bunch of 8-bit ports which just take the character, themes and artwork style and turn it into a regular platform game. (EG The NES one)

About 7 years after Dragon's Lair had appeared in arcades, CD-roms had come onto the scene and home computers were a lot more powerful. It was now possible to store the animations and reproduce them, but it took a lot of storage media and often a lot of loading time. The Mac and PC got pretty faithful versions of the game which actually ran off CDs (ala DarkEternal). Some 16-bit computers also, with great struggle, managed to pull it off. The Amiga and Apple IIGS got versions of laserdisc games which ran off between 9 and I think even 14 floppy discs (seriously. You'd buy it and get 9 x 3.5 inch discs.)

For people interested in emulating laserdisc games, there's an emulator called Daphne. I find it to be about the hardest emulator to configure in the world, but don't say that to the people who develop it as they will tear your face off. They did a pile of work to make it easier to configure, which made it half as hard to use, but to me that still placed it beyond the next hardest emulator in the world to configure. And they did tear my face off on their web forum. Mind you that was a few years ago. Maybe it's easier again now...

And anyone interested in understanding the pain of the NES game might want to check out The Angry Video Game Nerd

Actually, some versions are very neat...hope it's ok to bump an old thread, but I always liked Dragon's Lair and its possibilities. I mean, obviously they're restricted, but I always wondered what rooms other people would put in Dirk's castle, etc.

You can also buy a Dragon's Lair CD for like $10 or less used. Dragon's Lair II and Space Ace come in a pack with some games. DL2 was fun with unlimited lives but Space Ace still sucked because you had to anticipate moves & it took a long time. But you could just watch the whole thing through. DL wasn't impossible that way & I remembered more than I thought I did, so it wasn't too bad to get through playing on my TV.

I had someone ask me about it all the other day...I have to admit I didn't mind paying because I remember the machines costing thousands of dollars & it was just cool to play a game that cost not one but TWO quarters on my TV at 2 AM just because I could.

The Commodore 64 version's rather creative, and the GameCube version was interesting if hardly perfect.

Oh, spoilers...dragons-lair-project.com has all the moves.