Blazing Dragons

"A tale of love, ambition, conflict and forgetting to brush one's teeth"

Blazing Dragons boasts impressive voice talent, with the likes of Terry Jones, Harry Shearer, and Cheech Marin, whom one should closely suspect of attempting to bring humor into the mix. The concept is also promising: Camel-Hot, where dragons fight for justice as Knights of the Square Table against the tyranny of fat, greedy Sir George and his cohort, the wizard Mervin. You point and click around the screen to control Flicker, a young inventor dragon who for some unexplained reason lives in the castle, in his quest to win the love of the princess Flame. Fortunately, despite what other characters say, there's no in-game time limit and no way to lose, which poses the question of who really has fate against him. Not that a game like this addresses philosophy on anything above a flippant level. It doesn't need to. It follows through on what it intends to be, perhaps reversing a popular theme too many for perfection, but it's a good short game with many jokes and few fundamental flaws.

As the game starts, King Allfire announces that in one day, there will be a tournament among the knights for Flame's hand(claw?) in marriage. Flicker asks for a quest but is merely sent to the kitchen to do the dishes. Flicker's major problem is that he isn't even a squire, much less a knight. He'll need to become both in the game, but fortunately the four dragon knights aren't terribly competent. Each one runs into difficulties, and surely one must repay Flicker by making him a squire. To become a knight he'll require a bit of warped English mythology. Kicking mythology or conventional wisdom while it's down is a theme of Blazing Dragons, which eradicated one of my worries, that with Cheech in on the project you'd have rubbish such as dragons lighting joints with their breath or leaving apple juice out in the sun and returning to the screen to find applejack.

As Sir George Cheech is limited to general buffoonery, where he works commendably, tying his evil plan to destroy Camel-Hot in with the troubled romance. Furious with finding a dragon-sized bite in the latest valuable gem he stole, he's been trying to build a black machine dragon that will invade Camel-Hot or, better yet, win the tournament, princess Flame's hand eventually the kingdom. He even has a traitor friend inside the castle. Flicker must destroy several incarnations of the machine before he will be accepted as one of the knights.

As for them, they may have been able to melt that ice cream that I took out of the freezer during a quick break and forgot to put back in as I got engrossed in that game, but they can't do much else. But the ice cream test is a good way to determine if I find any game engrossing; here, I even took two of the same flavor yogurt out of the fridge during another, much later break(I ordinarily have a compulsion against doing so.) Not bad for a relatively short game.

Burnevere winds up at the home for the Grimmly insane along with a frog and a compulsive piper. Blaze is obsessed with his reflection, Gasflame's vision is terrible, and Loungealot is foolhardy enough to meet the first dragon in combat. They all need help, and your reward will either be the sort of item generally worthless outside comedic point-and-click games or a squireship. With this batch and their king bent sending people to their rooms, it's no surprise that the chancellor seedy enough to likely violate more than the obscurely documented snout-picking laws gets to push people around.

Given all this you'd hope that controls wouldn't overshadow the game, and the closest they come is to inject whimsical detail. The L1 and R1 buttons scroll through talking(wonderful animated yacking picture here,) walking and using, picking up or looking at an item. An item you're holding has a neon border when you can try to use it, the eyeball for looking at an item opens and closes as does the hand for taking one, and the foot starts moving around when you can move to a different position or location. It's never stiff or overdone, and inventory just requires one key. One item you'll use repeatedly is a magic map, which allows you to jump between locations and reveals new ones as you progress. Although you aren't allowed to save the game to memory, you do get a password and a percent of the game completed(each thing done right gets at least a point,) which gives you some bearing and hope that you're not just running around picking up weird items.

And with such humorous details it's no surprise that the graphics generally work out well. Flicker and Flame are established as different from the start, with everyone else having yellow teeth. From his messy bedroom with the weird alarm clock to the odd bulging contraption he makes in the kitchen to the posters and other anachronisms in royal living quarters, there's enough added to the standard spiral stairs, candelabra, courtyards and gothic gates that you know it's home to eccentric folks. And with their stiff necks and swaying walks, the dragons look like mutant hunchback kangaroos and certainly put themselves well at odds with Sir George's puppetlike appearance.

The dialog offered(scroll through several choices) is also quite good; Flicker leaves off a conversation with many self-depreciating variants of 'never mind' perfectly fitting the mood of a teenage dragon in love, and the halting conversation between Flame and Flicker seems right, with even offsetting silliness: 'Great news.' 'You'll help me with the dishes?' Many early games with extensive talk had pauses that were awkward, but here these pauses reveal characters to be awkward and worried about a love that's in trouble. Sir George, the chancellor and Mervin also do their best to push people around and try to act evil, but they're established as too incompetent for their plans to succeed. The bit characters, such as monks hooked on prune juice, the man trying to create a new sport and be sure it will include professional player strikes, or the clever random phrase person requisite to a humorous point-and-click, provide enough diversion and intonations you think you've heard in other comedies but can't pin down. There's even a hint of tension between the English and French, which along with a hilarious abuse of history near the end will further muddle anyone silly enough to believe this occurred in a specific year A.D.--which they would deserve.

In fact, with all these positives, only one thing fails to work.

The mini-games advertised so prominently on the case turn out badly. This is too bad; given the drastic change in activity, there's a chance here to pile on several jokes that might not have quite fit into the plot, but sadly the most noticeable difference here is the awkwardness forced in to create challenge. The cat-a-pult where you fire a projectile at pop-up human knights succeeds, but later on you have a desultory Bemani session before the four tests of knighthood(one features Flicker's eyes watering and is the most real part of the whole game) and finally the featured mini-game: dragon thumb wrestling. It's at the end of a tournament where you're informed you won the first two rounds, which would have been nice to play to get experience, and once you find the right buttons to bash, Loungealot will lose. The only other real problem with the game is how, after the opening puzzle of creating an automatic dishwasher, Flicker's credentials as an inventor, beyond wrapping an unorthodox present, vanish.

Quibblers like me who analyze humor before they sit back and enjoy it will suspect most of the jokes have been done before, and done better no less. But despite a brief yet pronounced excursion into toilet humor, they are good enough(after three times through, I'm sure of this,) the sort you imagine you could think up without being ashamed of that, and certainly the sort you can use on unsuspecting folk to seem witty and original or, better yet, 'In with the right sort of shows that make you a funny person.' Coughing during maniacal laughter, 'Begone! Weirdo!' or 'if I couldn't live with myself, I'd have to find a roommate' aren't terribly deep but should always get laughs. References to how far along the game is or a joke about I.Q.(a phrase I believe has no place in any joke) are examples of humor that stops short of The Life of Brian but still manages to please, and one can't expect a fully exact computer game. The best stuff should be reserved for media without loading time such as books or movies or low-resolution freeware games, which can move quickly enough to dispense all the comedy packed in and keep the observer laughing. In fact the authors seemed to have a feel for this, as they put in some impressive speeches in the closing credits which are the closest thing I've seen to effective postmodernism in a computer game.

I've seen many worse spoofs of mythology and medieval times. A horrendous 'PC Fairy tales' book with the stated intention of showing just how much sillier fairy tales would become if they fell in with the PC fad worked all to well, but you wind up liking all the characters in this game, forgiving the odd uses for items and even Sir George's villainy.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 09/25/02, Updated 09/25/02