If you are a gamer who spent too much time and money hanging out in arcades back in the early to mid 1980s then you'll no doubt remember the original Dragon's Lair.
Whilst other games were generally of the 2D, sprite-based shoot-em-up variety, Dragon's Lair was a startling vision of a possible 3D gaming future, where games were amazing interactive animated movies. In Dragon's Lair, we were promised, you could actually control a character in an amazing looking cartoon world.
There was of course one major drawback. As soon as you had parted with your fifty pence piece to have a go of the game, you very quickly realised that it was shit. The controls were virtually non-existent. Now and then you were prompted to move the joystick or press a button to make your character, Dirk the Daring, move or jump. And ninety-nine times out of a hundred, even if you thought you had moved the joystick or hit the button correctly, Dirk would fall down into a deep, black abyss, poor Princess Daphne would remain un-rescued and your mum would stop giving you 'money to burn on that daft computer machine'.
So it is with a certain air of nostalgia we bring you news on the latest Dragon's Lair update, Digital Leisure has released a high-definition version of the game. Yes, really.
"Using today's most sophisticated film transfer equipment the original Dragon's Lair film master was pulled from the vaults at Technicolor and carefully cleaned, reprinted and captured for this HD experience," their press release informs us.
The company also plan to follow-up Dragon's Lair HD with HD forthcoming releases of Space Ace HD and Dragon's Lair II: Time Warp HD in the near future.
SPOnG will bring you more news on formerly rubbish old arcade games, which actually might be quite good now that they don't cost fifty pence a go and have controls which work and don't make you so angry you almost break your wrist punching an arcade cabinet.
Nostalgia fans can check the trailers here:
MPEG4 XviD (15.1MB)
Windows Media (14.3MB)
Whilst other games were generally of the 2D, sprite-based shoot-em-up variety, Dragon's Lair was a startling vision of a possible 3D gaming future, where games were amazing interactive animated movies. In Dragon's Lair, we were promised, you could actually control a character in an amazing looking cartoon world.
There was of course one major drawback. As soon as you had parted with your fifty pence piece to have a go of the game, you very quickly realised that it was shit. The controls were virtually non-existent. Now and then you were prompted to move the joystick or press a button to make your character, Dirk the Daring, move or jump. And ninety-nine times out of a hundred, even if you thought you had moved the joystick or hit the button correctly, Dirk would fall down into a deep, black abyss, poor Princess Daphne would remain un-rescued and your mum would stop giving you 'money to burn on that daft computer machine'.
So it is with a certain air of nostalgia we bring you news on the latest Dragon's Lair update, Digital Leisure has released a high-definition version of the game. Yes, really.
"Using today's most sophisticated film transfer equipment the original Dragon's Lair film master was pulled from the vaults at Technicolor and carefully cleaned, reprinted and captured for this HD experience," their press release informs us.
The company also plan to follow-up Dragon's Lair HD with HD forthcoming releases of Space Ace HD and Dragon's Lair II: Time Warp HD in the near future.
SPOnG will bring you more news on formerly rubbish old arcade games, which actually might be quite good now that they don't cost fifty pence a go and have controls which work and don't make you so angry you almost break your wrist punching an arcade cabinet.
Nostalgia fans can check the trailers here:
MPEG4 XviD (15.1MB)
Windows Media (14.3MB)
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