| smbhax [sys=GB; cat=Beat_em_up; reg=JPN] |
| | | Semi-faithful port of the arcade Double Dragon. Ye olde Game Boy can only handle two badguys onscreen at once, apparently, so it's a bit toned down in that regard, and some stages look considerably different (and maybe a bit shorter) than they used to, but your young street fighter has most of his old moves, and the music has been brought over, if in rather low-fidelity.
Jump, punch, jump kick, grab guys and throw them over your shoulder, throw elbows behind you... That good old stuff is in. The elbow is quite a bit weaker than it used to be. What really bugs me though ist he jump kick: very slow, and has a bizarre trajectory. Speaking of slow, plain old movement is pretty slow here, and takes some getting used to.
Weapons tend to disappear on their own after a few enemy waves, bummer. That's not so bad as being sent back to the beginning of the stage when you die, though; so, you have to single-life every stage, essentially. Grr. Take this together with jumping puzzles across moving platforms later on (why did the DD games always revert to this? Darn quarter-suckers...) and you may get some frustration.
Helpfully, the CPU tends to do silly things like fall down holes and off ledges. Phew.
There seems to be two-player support, but I haven't tried that yet. All in all, I think they did a pretty decent job of bringing the thing over to GB. The jump should have been better, and restarting the stage when dying shouldn't be necessary, but otherwise the thing is pretty solid. |
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| | | | You can I guess work around getting sent back to the start of the stage with each death--for the most part, maybe not if you fall to your death or something hmmmm uh oh--with cheat codes (from https://gamehacking.org/game/1370): Infinite Energy 012F98C4, Infinite Lives (in case you do fall to your death) 010499C4. |
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| | | The J version much cooler art on the sticker--it's the art from the Japanese DD arcade game flyer.
Otherwise there doesn't appear to be a difference; text is in English; TCRF doesn't have a listing for the game so presumably that means no regional differences to note, among other things. |
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In Mesen, using cheats and a custom color palette!
0:58 - MODE A
4:55 - funky building
12:17 - the ol' bridge
20:29 - lava losing
29:55 - skull suck room
35:12 - boss room
37:09 - ending & credits
I used 012F98C4 Infinite energy and 010499C4 Infinite lives cheats from gamehacking.org, because when you lose one of your four lives (no continues!) in this game, you're sent back to the start of the stage/area. 'p' And I used a few save states to inch through a couple of the platforming bits where I kept falling into Technos Japan's infamous bottomless pits. ; D
There's no jump, just AB to instantly jump-kick. ^ _^ The Punch button to elbow when an enemy is close behind you feels pretty fiddly and superfluous; maybe they felt they needed at least one distinctive "Double Dragon" move for it to feel like a real Double Dragon game.
Shinichi Saito, the game's director, appears to have been a director/background designer at Technos Japan through 1993--he next pops up as a manager at Hudson in 2003, per Mobygames. He started in 1987 as "Director and Designer" for the original arcade Double Dragon! And yet there's really no biographical information I can find for him online; the big Technos Japan / Double Dragon guy is generally Yoshihisa Kishimoto, who was "Director and Producer" on arcade Double Dragon--so I guess he and Saito co-directed arcade Double Dragon, with Kishimoto handling the business side and Saito being more on the creative side.
Anyway, Saito directing this GB version of basically the NES Double Dragon probably explains why it feels so solid and Double-Dragon-y, even stripped down as it is. It's a much more minimalist game than the actually-a-Kunio-game Double Dragon II for GB, which Saito directed a year later (well, he also directed the Kunio GB game from which it was converted, in the same year this DD1 for GB came out). Saito also directed the WWF Wrestlefest arcade game that year! (And in 2007 he directed "Double Dragon" for Xbox 360; I think in the video I confused that one for some other, 3D Double Dragon; but this 2007 one was a port of the original Double Dragon arcade game, with optional high-rezzified graphics that look kind of weird and smoothed out like such things tended to.) What I'm saying is, this guy directed really solid games. : )
Although, I don't think I would have had the patience or coordination to get through this game without cheats. I had it back around 2005 and played it on the Gamecube's Game Boy Player, but my notes from that time don't include saying I actually finished it. ; D Those two converging platforms in the cave, and those suctioning skull doors in the final base--eesh!!
With cheats though it's a delightful little masochistic beat 'em up with classic Technos Japan style. : ) |
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I put together level / mission maps for each of the 4 stages.
0:08 - Mission 1
2:55 - Mission 2
6:23 - Mission 3
14:13 - Mission 4
24:22 - wrap!
Oh the thing I was going to say but then couldn't quite remember at the end due to encroaching senility is that the version of the game I was using is the Japanese version, so I dunno there could be some difference in the US version that I didn't know about I guess (TCRF doesn't appear to cover it ; D--so maybe that means no?). |
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| | | | The maps are on GameFAQs: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/gameboy/197144-double-dragon/faqs |
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