Double Dragon Impressions: Unnecessary Roughness

Apr. 28 6:11 PM by Sardius

"Double Dragon is not a game you ever need to play again," say the guys behind N+, one of the few competent games available on the Xbox 360's Xbox Live Arcade service.

I can understand their frustration. Xbox Live Arcade's remade version of Double Dragon manages to both completely miss and utterly destroy the appeal of retro gaming in one soulless swoop. More than that, though, Double Dragon exemplified the kind of carelessness that resulted in a promising service fading into irrelevance thanks to consistently mediocre releases, with each week bringing new levels of disappointment to its dwindling userbase.

So hey, guess what got added to the Virtual Console this week!

Yep, Double Dragon. And only Double Dragon. The NES version of Double Dragon, to be specific. You know, the one without cooperative multiplayer? The one with the one-on-one versus mode that nobody liked? The one with all the end-game platforming and falling stalactites and instant death pits that I never finished without cheating because it's stupid and I hate it?

Well okay, I don't hate Double Dragon. Despite its inferiority to the original arcade version (or even the more faithful Sega Master System and Sega Genesis versions, both of which included two-player co-op), the NES version of Double Dragon was fun enough, and was pretty much an unavoidable part of anyone's childhood in the late '80s.

(My personal experience: I rented it, was disappointed in its lack of co-op but got some mild enjoyment out of it anyway, then returned it to the store for something else. Years later I played through it again when I was given free reign over a Nintendo PlayChoice-10 arcade machine for an entire night. Good times. Good, unsupervised times.)

Don't mistake my inability to muster up proper hate for the thing as a recommendation, though. Double Dragon became obsolete the instant Final Fight came out, and the genre never looked back. If you want to beat up punks this week, play River City Ransom some more. Double Dragon just can't keep up.

Try these instead: River City Ransom (NES), Double Dragon II (NES)
Don't bother with: Renegade (NES), Dragon Blade (Wii)

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Comments

You did insult Dragon Blade! It may have been a goofy game but the dialog did become hilarious. I did enjoy it to some degree and it did only cost $20 now.

As for Double Dragon, I don't remember enough about the first one except that it isn't nearly as bad as the third one.

 

yay emo Billy!

I don't remember the last time I actually played NES Double Dragon, but I DO remember that when I did I ended up getting lost in those caves and seemed to be going in circles. Ugh, it's like they were required by law to put floating platforms into every NES game back then.

 

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