Don’t worry Kimmy! I’ll save you, or should I save Daphne?
it only took 15 years to get through this wonderful game and the end result was pleasing. Do not let me confuse you with that statement, the ending of Space Ace is not remarkable at all, neither is the ending to Dragon’s Lair. In fact, in some respects the endings are very disappointing. The adventure is where one takes the game to heart. Released in the early 80’s (if my memory recalls, 1983 to be exact), if you had the fortune experience to see these for the first time, you would be amazed with the results. Working together, animation and programming produced the first optical-disc based games for arcades. On a very large Laser Disc and playing in an even larger LD player, gamers were treated to an animated adventure that simply asked them to choose the fate of the main character, Dexter (Space Ace) or the our dashing knight Dirk (Dragon’s Lair). Simple controls dictated a character’s movement, which went up, down, left, right or pulled out his gun/sword and fired/swung (and also energized Dexter to become Ace instantly). When Space Ace and Dragon’s Lair first hit the arcades they were absolutely revolutionary. At the time of Mappy, Galaga and other classic titles, you would always find a group of people standing around an individual with a line of quarters lying in the bottom left of the screen, indicating to others that the adventure would continue until those quarters were used up. Regretfully, those days in the arcades, the Goldmines of the world (arcade generally located in malls), are all but gone.
Move forward around 10 years and you’ve got yourself Digital Leisure bringing back these classics onto many different platforms (Sega CD, PC, etc.). None truly captured the first experience of the arcade classic, mostly due to the fact that the speed of accessing the random scenes (and the randomness itself) couldn’t be fully recognized by the time it was released. The technology basically wasn’t as efficient.
Again, move forward about 15 or so years and you finally arrive at a version of Space Ace and Dragon’s Lair that are completely, without a doubt, the best versions out on the market. The lightening quick speed on the disc access, the ability to randomly have levels appear and the ability to deliver the goods in high-def make this far more capable then previous attempts. Space Ace and Dragon’s Lair on Blu-ray actually work better, in most respects, then the original games in the arcades. They are very frightening to see in action, but nonetheless a joy. They finally got these games perfect.
What else is new with these old titles? Why not add some previously planned levels that never actually made it to the finished version of the arcade classic. You’ll get a couple of add-ons and some extended editions. For instance in Space Ace, there is a scene where Kimmy and Ace roller-skate towards Borf’s tower. There is an extended scene where they have to quickly skate on a rolling hill that was never previously in the original.
So what is the downside to Space Ace and Dragon’s Lair? The biggest downfall comes in two parts. The first, is that the game is now 25 years old. Most people won’t notice the age of the game, because it is on Blu-ray, but because you do not have full control over the characters, people may not get it fully. It is a shame really. Which leads us into the second potential problem, the short gameplay. If you sat down and played these two titles, hardcore, you could finish the games in 1-2 hours. That may detour people from really enjoying it. I fully blame this on the forgotten arcades of the past. People who never got to experience a coin-op machine on a week-to-week basis, will not fully understand the entertainment behind sitting down to play the game for a short amount of time. That may be the one thing that these two titles simply cannot replicate, the arcade feeling. If these came with coin slots you could attach to the front of the Blu-ray player, or via USB on a Playstation 3, then it would probably be close. Because of unlimited lives, because most players will not challenge themselves, they simply will not get the feel of what it was like to experience such a masterpiece in an arcade setting.
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