Double Dragon

"Hopelessly outnumbered, but strangely, no chance of winning! What's that all about?"

Let me just say that I am going to step out here and be the first person here to say that even though Double Dragon is greatly entertaining, I don't like it. You get to punch and kick and even grab people by their hair and slam their skulls against the hard bone of your knee, but that doesn't help you any, because the enemy can do it all too, and with better precision than you. Such difficult AI puts this game low on my list, even though I still return to it often to see if I've gotten any better.

In Double Dragon, you play as Billy, the beau of the lady Marion, who has been kneed in the stomach and carried away by the Black Shadow Warriors (or something like that, I don't remember their name exactly). One or two players can go on the seven-level martial arts spree, with Player One as Billy and Player Two taking the helm as his brother Jimmy. You'll fight some of the finest the villains have to offer, and unless you partner up with a friend, it's unlikely you'll take the Black Shadow Gang to town yourself.

The controls aren't responsive enough to help you save your main squeeze Marion without expert handling. Repeated tapping won't give you what you want, and it's hard to pull off the better moves with the limited control scheme of the NES controller. Therefore, when you find your butt getting kicked, the controller will rear its ugly head and abandon you like the dog that just bit the baby. It especially starts to become problematic at the times when precise jumping is required to stay in the game. You can blow several lives on one simple leap alone. The 2-player versus mode is a colossal waste of space that shouldn't have even been put in this cartridge.

Sounds for your basic kicks and punches come down to what seem to be a cat hacking up a furball. At least the music is something you can put up your dukes to. Some of this stuff is old-school NES music at its best. Muting the bad sound effects comes at the expense of that groovin' music, but it will all annoy you in the end. Techno goes good with this game - that's my personal prescription for the musical blues this game suffers from.

Fans of such series as Final Fight will like this game with its never-ending barrage of baddies that have only one instinct (i.e. to kill you with no mercy). Some people like that kind of thing. I'm all for a difficult game, but this game just packs it on and makes it no fun. There is one thing I like, though: when you do beat the game, you get to fight Jimmy to see who gets the girl. If only Mario and Luigi fought tooth-and-nail like that - the franchise could really go somewhere. I can see it now .... Mario Sports a Black Eye .... but I digress. See you later.

Score: 4

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 05/31/02, Updated 05/31/02