Double Dragon

"The one game the 7800 desperately needed falls flat on it's face."

INTRO - Looking back on the Atari 7800, the entire system seems like one big missed opportunity. Here's a system that was not only designed to play arcade perfect (circa 1984) ports, but had complete (theoretically) backwards-compatibility with the Atari 2600, and yet thanks to the ineptness of Jack Tramiel, nobody wanted it. Looking back at the library, it's just not very eye opening. Oh sure, there's some great arcade ports, and purists will swear Food Fight is worth the price of the system alone, but when all is said and done, it's hard to get excited for a library that's only 60+ games big, filled mostly with rehashes of games found on Atari's previous two systems as well as many other early-80's consoles. Compared to the Nintendo Entertainment System and even the Sega Master System, the poor 7800 just doesn't have much of a leg to stand on when it comes to newer titles, be they originals or modern arcade ports. And out of the ones it does have, only a handful are worth anything, gameplay-wise.

Which brings us to Activision's 1989 port of the 1987 classic beat-'em-up, Double Dragon, the grandaddy of all street brawlers as we know and love them. While two years had passed since the game's arcade inception, Double Dragon was still very much a hot property. Both the NES and SMS received their own ports of the first game in 1988, which is the year the sequel hit arcades. Come 1989, the NES alone received a massively awesome port of the sequel, and the 7800 played catch-up with...this. If there's one game the 7800 could have used more than any other, Double Dragon is it. The game's popularity cannot be underestimated, this was one of the biggies of the late-80's. A 7800 port should have been a dream come tue, but in typical Atari fashion, things didn't turn out quite right.

STORY (7/10) - Okay, okay, that's a very generous score, but I'm comfortable with it. The story is pretty simple: The Black Warriors led by Big Boss Willy have captured Marian, the girlfriend of one Billy Lee, who just happens to be a martial arts master. Naturally, Billy Lee and his twin brother Jimmy Lee (also quite adept at martial arts) take the law into their own hands, and hit the streets, taking on any goon The Black Warriors throw at them. The story isn't anything especially new or innovative, but for such a simple concept, nothing gets you pumped quite like a captured girlfriend.

GRAPHICS (4/10) - For a 1989 game, these graphics are extremely underwhelming, if not terrible. The sprites are just awful. Small, chunky, with almost no detail whatsoever. Granted, this is only an 8-bit system we're talking about here, but even the NES and SMS versions were pretty respectable looking for their time. 7800 fans will always point out that the system could stand-up graphically to those two systems, but was never pushed to it's fullest extent. There's no better evidence of that than this game's sprites. The backgrounds fare a little better. The first two stages are pretty drab, with a color scheme that attempts to mimic the arcade, but ends up alternately washed out or gaudy. On the plus side, the stages themselves are arcade perfect as far as the layout goes (the only one of the three 8-bit consoles to boast this), they just don't look all that good. Stages three and four mark a noticeable improvement however, stage three in particular, which features a nicely detailed forest. Still, in the end, the Atari 7800 Double Dragon is a very weak game graphically.

SOUND (2/10) - Just awful. The 7800 had sound identical to the 2600, and was actually a step-back from the 5200. Naturally, this Double Dragon's music is identical to the 2600 port. It was passable on that system, but not here. The music is shrill and annoying, a far cry from the arcade original. Any gamer around in the late-80's will tell you Double Dragon featured one of the best, most memorable, heart-pumping soundtracks of all-time, and that hasn't changed with time. For many of us, these tunes are embedded in our minds. So, to hear them here in such a butchered, almost unlistenable form is unacceptable. Not even every tune from the arcade is here, rather the same two repeat off-and-on throughout the game (the music for stages one and three), with the title tune thrown in for good measure. Needless to say, the sound effects are worthless. I can't give a 1 here, since there is some kind of soundtrack, and it can be recognizable as Double Dragon, but this is one game where the Pokey sound chip should have been used. If the less-popular Commando had a kicking soundtrack via Pokey, there's no reason Double Dragon shouldn't.

GAMEPLAY (3/10) - The graphics and sound could easily be given a pass if the gameplay was even remotely close to arcade original. It is not. Most computer ports of the time also had mediocre to bad gameplay, but the NES and SMS had reasonable facsimiles. The 7800 version's gameplay is a mess, however. Playing with the 7800 Pro-Line joysticks is pure torture, but the controls are unresponsive no matter what you use. Any kind of special moves from the arcade are nearly impossible to pull off, and even if you do, the difficulty is so off-the-charts that none of it matters. Right from the beginning, this is a tough game. I don't mean challenging, I mean downright HARD. It's not impossible to make it through to the end, I'm proof of that, but you have got to be good and a little lucky. You only get three lives, and no continues, which is just ridiculous. The gameplay's saving grace is two-player simultaneous action, but that serves more to confuse things, since Billy and Jimmy are nearly identical. Even with two people, the gameplay is so poorly programmed you're in for a struggle. Activision really missed the mark this time around.

REPLAYABILITY (2/10) - Not much. The drive to conquer the game can be a factor, and you'd better believe that the poor kids blessed with a 7800 instead of a NES or SMS in 1989 played the heck out of this, but any kind of replayability is not due to fun.

CONCLUSION - Like so much else having to do with the 7800, the system's Double Dragon is a huge missed opportunity. The fact that it's a stand-out title in the system's library has nothing to do with how good it is (it's not), but rather that it's one of the few genuinely popular, modern for the time games to appear on the system. I've always held the view that a bad port of Double Dragon is better than no port at all, and I still hold that view, even if the 7800 version is weak in every aspect. It had to be a small miracle for kids who hung onto the 7800 in the late-80's, and in that regard at least it's something (especially since the only other beat-'em-ups on the console are Kung-Fu Master, which was wildly outdated by 1989, and Ninja Golf, which is good, but doesn't really count as anything more than a quirky original that came too late. Ditto for Basketbrawl).

This cart is fairly rare, and for Dragon fans it's worth picking up, but paying through the nose for it and expecting some kind of decent arcade experience is NOT going to happen. More of a collector's piece than anything.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 03/30/09

Game Release: Double Dragon (US, 1989)