However, like many technological wonders, the bubble burst and Lair et al were relegated to the flash-in-the-pan wing of video-game museums under the banner "games that made you pay money to memorize the answers to a multiple-choice exam." Until, that is, PC DVD-ROM and home DVD players became mainstream and Ontario-based Digital Leisure refurbished, remastered, retooled and re-released Dragon's Lair on DVD as a game that required only a keyboard or generic DVD remote for a controller, the latter's menu navigation and "enter" button in lieu of a joystick and action button.
Last year, Digital Leisure remastered the game again in high-definition and 5.1 surround sound, but released it only on standard PC DVD-ROM — a teaser of what was to come, which is this: Dragon's Lair on Blu-ray, the re-remastered, high-definition, surround sound version of the game playable on Blu-ray movie players and, naturally, the PlayStation 3 (which uses Blu-ray technology), and also containing a wealth of historical content and bonus material.
As such, on top of playing the game on your HDTV with just a movie-player remote or SixAxis controller in hand and a nice, optional "easy" setting that allows you to make a wrong decision without starting over, you can now just passively watch Dragon's Lair like a high-def cartoon, albeit one with really choppy editing — each scene jumps seamlessly but abruptly to the next as if a correct decision was made, followed by the "outtakes" that would have been the result of a wrong decision. It's pretty disjointed to watch. Sit-back-with-popcorn movie viewing this is not, but it is timeless in its artistry and humor.
You also can watch it with a picture-in-picture commentary from Lair creators Don Bluth, Gary Goldman and Rick Dyer (each spending an embarrassing amount of time scratching their heads trying to remember what they were doing 25 years ago). There's also behind-the-scenes footage, interviews, documentaries and the like; a solid compendium of the history of Dragon's Lair and the technology and the various iconoclasts involved (fictional and otherwise).
As a game, Dragon's Lair these days falls neatly under the category of "brain games," a simple but ornery affair involving a string of quick, animated clips, rapid-fire prompts and split-second decision-making (a load-up-on-the-caffeine sort of deal).
Ultimately, if that's not your thing, it's a frustrating game and not really novel anymore, but at least you don't have to fish through your pockets for another quarter every 50 seconds.
More important, however, Dragon's Lair on Blu-ray has tremendous value if you're a fan of retro gaming, a weekend video-game historian, an animation buff, a masochistic brain gamer or all of the above. Quick, pick one.
* Score: 4 out of 5
RSS