Double Dragon was a popular arcade beat-em-up game. The point of it was to fight through hoards of enemies to save your love interest. Like any popular arcade game of the late 80’s, it was ported to countless home consoles: Commodore 64, Ataris 2600 and 7800, the Amiga, Sega Master System and so on. As a matter of fact, there’s even a remake for the iTouch. Sadly, I don’t own any of these versions, so I’ll be talking about the one I got: here’s Double Dragon for the Nintendo Entertainment System.
I already pretty much covered the plot in the intro, so let’s get right into the game play. Then again, I almost completely covered the game play in the intro too: it’s a Beat-em-up like most other beat-em-ups. Punch and kick enemies enough that they fall and blink out of existence and hope no one does it to you. If you like these kinds of games, than you’ll like this. If you don’t, then you won’t.
However, there is some originality. As you’re punching thugs in the face, you’ll be given experience (depending on what kind of attacks you’re using). Once you reach one thousand, you’re given a heart signifying a new skill level. With each new skill level, you obtain new abilities, such as the jump kick, head butt and hair grabs. This is something that I don’t see represented much in games from 1988 (at least not to my knowledge), but I do see in later games, mostly of the Action RPG genre. Basically what I’m saying is that, in this way, Double Dragon was actually ahead of its time.
As usual with home ports of arcade games of the time, this game has a significantly downgraded visual quality. But, not even taking that into consideration, this game doesn't look at its best: Billy (the player character) looks skinny and not macho at all. He also has a minimum of shading, meaning he comes out looking flat. The worst part about this is that it was obviously a design choice by someone at either Technos or Tradewest since, in the 2 player battle mode, he looks much better. Of course, the poor graphics aren’t limited to Billy: there are enemies with faces that just look like random black pixels, others with weird proportions and some make poses that make you wonder “WTF?” Though, the backgrounds are very, very nice, but that makes me just a little more aware of the bad character sprites.
To quickly mention the music, I’m actually a minority in the sense that I don’t like the music in this game. Personally, I think it’s too busy, trying to play too many notes, while at the same time not using a wide enough range. But, I’m no musician, so what do I know? Like I said, a lot of people disagree with me.
If there is one thing this version of Double Dragon is probably most famous for, it would be its flaws: some of the glitches are so famous and well know, they are considered legitimate strategies for beating this game. Though those are quirky and can be helpful, the flaws that I feel like mentioning (which I believe are just as well known) make this game a lot harder than it should be. The first one is the jumping. You have no control while you’re in the air, meaning if you misjudge a jump, you’re gone. This isn’t helped by the ledges that are easy to fall off of and the fact that, when you land, you have a second of recovery time for your enemies to hit you. Also, jumping is essential to beating the game.
Even without that, this game is hard, but 75% of the difficulty can be attributed to one obstacle: the walls that greet you on level four. These knock you down and hurt you, and once you get back up, they can, and will, hurt you again! It has no pattern or frequency, it only takes 4 hits to kill you and has 8 chances of striking you down. A friend of mine and I have both beaten this game, and we both agree, that those walls are simply unfair.
If you think that I don’t like this game because I spent most of the review pointing out its flaws, I don’t. Honestly, these were things I felt I needed to mention. However, the graphics and music never bothered me and I did eventually figure out the jumping and how to get past the walls most of the time. The core gameplay is honestly just so good that it’s easy to overlook anything that might bug you. The controls work well, the hit detection is accurate for the NES and it’s really just a classic. Again, if you don’t like beat-em-up, then this won’t change your mind, but if you do like them, then you won’t regret getting this. I give Double Dragon for the NES 9 levels out of 10.
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