New 'Double Dragon' game.

[andycadley]

I probably did read the manual once, as I'm pretty sure I had a copy of the Speccy budget release and I was the kind of kid who read the manual on the bus trip home when I bought a new game. I clearly didn't remember that being there though.

And yes, there were goofy enemies, like the green skinned Abobo in the first DD, but your player character didn't have "magic" attacks and I think that's what I find jarring in this version.

I don't really count anything in the NES versions as being related at all, like a lot of NES arcade "conversions" they were really just entirely different games borrowing some well known branding. And I don't think I'll ever make sense of the weird censorship in them either.

[Carnivius]

Generally many NES versions of arcade games were redesigned to offer more gameplay and depth for a home game than the 'shallow' money-grabby arcade originals and/or to make up for the NES not being able to replicate the sprite size or colours. Not just with DD games but Rygar, Strider, Ninja Gaiden, Bionic Commando and some others, the arcade games often being the more impressive version on first plays with flashier graphics but the home version on the NES usually offering far less repetitiveness and more exploration and story.

Even a more seemingly straight forward arcade port to NES like Contra, actually vastly improves on the arcade game overall too. The japanese Famicom released even included an extra chip in the cartridge that allowed for some things the standard NES version didn't have like cutscenes, weather effects and background animations.

Come to think of it this new Double Dragon kinda reminds me of Mighty Final Fight on NES which also used a cuter character style to focus on well animated smaller sprites than try attempt the large sprites of Final Fight in the arcade and it worked really well.  A superb ZX Spectrum port was made for a contest a few years ago and is well worth playing too.   Surprisingly there is a bootleg NES port of the SNES' Final Fight 3 and it went with the traditional more realistic sprite style and it despite heavy sprite flicker (a common issue with the NES as only eight 8x8 sprites could occupy the same horizontal lines at one time so any more would often be switched about to try get them all to appear, creating the flicker) it's an impressive bootleg.


Think I just being my boring, autistic self now... Sorry.  I'll leave.

[Anthony Flack]

'Any idiot'

I know a couple of the people who worked on the superb Double Dragon Neon.  They're not idiots.

Nevertheless, they did let any idiot work on the Double Dragon series, as evident by the lack of quality control. Double Dragon III exists. 

And god knows who wrote the CPC manual but I doubt anybody gave it a second thought when it was written; certainly not now. 

And those first two games were very colourful.  More like a comic book than the black outfit of Cobra...

I think we've reached the point where it's just arguing for the sake of arguing now.