"The first-ever eye candy arcade game"

This is one of those rare games that is a whole lot of fun... if you're watching someone else. The reason is because the entire game is a twitch-fest where you need to push the Sword button or move the joystick at the proper time while the video plays. That's the whole game. In fact, you could more or less recreate the entire experience of playing the game faithfully on an Atari 2600 if you left out the movie part. I'll get to that part in a minute, but for the moment, let me point out that this game would've easily gotten zero from me if it looked like the rest of the arcade games around in 1983. It does not, and it succeeded because it looked absolutely nothing like the rest of the arcade games in 1983.

Instead of a bunch of dots that sort of look like a knight running around, you have a fully-animated cartoon knight straight out of a Don Bluth film. To those of you unfamiliar with the name, he's better known for movies such as An American Tail and The Secret of NIMH. So it was a heck of a lot more eye-catching than a little yellow pie eating bunch of dots. The plot is standard fare now, but was certainly a step above ''Shoot the asteroids with your ship without getting hit.'' The game puts you in the role of an archetypical do-gooder knight named Dirk the Daring, who's out to rescue Princess Daphne from the lair of Singe, the Dragon. And to Mr. Bluth's credit, this really was a great game to watch, even if the voice actors were also the programmers and sounded like bad porn stars. This *was* an interactive movie, and watching it from start to finish was well worth it.

Unfortunately, playing the game from beginning to end is a lot less fun. The primary method of learning how to get to the end usually involved spending lots of money (and this game usually ended up costing 75 cents per credit in its prime) to learn and memorize the sequence of moves needed to successfully complete the sequence. And of course, once you've seen the ending to a game like this, there's really no point in ever playing it again. But because it looked and sounded so nice, it spawned a sequel, a few imitators, and live-action derivatives -- all invariably costing a whole bunch of money to play in their primes.

Dragon's Lair was an early attempt to take a shortcut past technological constraints in order to provide a gaming experience unlike any other on the market at the time. Unfortunately, in this case -- even with all the eye and ear candy -- there really isn't much of a game to experience.

Reviewer's Score: 2/10, Originally Posted: 09/29/02, Updated 09/29/02