Double Dragon Neon

There's a wave of this situation running through, not only video games, but the movie industry as well. This being, the almost accursed situation of the Remake. While films have been around long enough for people to see the 2nd and 3rd wave of this happening, Gaming is getting to the point that games themselves are starting to be re-made for the modern era of gaming. Granted that some games are updated for each generation of console or next iteration of PC gaming, but sometimes a game that's been left to the side for a significant period, are now being picked up and made into (almost) the same game as before with bumped up graphics and new features. Double Dragon Neon is this for the original Double Dragon, but at the same time, goes way above and beyond just a simple remake.

This game, firstly, is so heavily saturated in the 80s you'll be expecting Rick Astley to turn up and slap you repeated in the face with a Sinclair C5 while strumming a guitar made out of a Commodore 64 machine. Ok perhaps not that 80s, but certainly disco 80s with the over-the-top neon colours that now heavily populate this version of Double Dragon. Even if nothing else, the game will be heavily show itself through a rather large abundance of references to 80s paraphernalia and the original game while also introducing one of the most memorable villains to grace a video game in quite some time, not for BEING a villain but for being one of the most amusing, self-referentially humorous and over the top behaviour and lines from any villain.

The plot, for those not alive around 1987 onwards, is that someone decides that Marion (excessively busty and leggy in this iteration) will make a great girlfriend for themselves and has her abducted, not realising that her boyfriend and his brother are "Double Dragons" who will punch, kick, combo, power move and use a variety of weapons and other such items to battle their way through the game and into the inevitable final showdown with Skullmageddon, who is little more than a modernised version of Skeletor from the He-Man cartoon and more Ham than a pig abattoir. To great comedic effect.

I'm serious, I couldn't stop laughing when I realised on pausing the game while fighting this boss, advised me to "punch me in the stomach while I'm swinging my sword and I'll stop! There, I just saved you a trip to the internet!". While in other times, was moaning about how it's ok for me to pause the game in a fight but not for him to do it. Throughout almost the whole game, he'll drop in every comment and hang every lampshade on any situation while punning everything he can about bones that one could think of. "Not very HUMOROUS!" to the point you can't help but sympathise with the supposedly ineffective villain until he under goes his entirely predictable, but equally welcomed, final transformation into ... Giga Skullmageddon armed up with blades and mechanics much in the same way most final bosses would transform into beefed up versions of themselves in other games from the original times (The 80's in case we forgot).

Game play is your usual brawl-em-up, punching kicking, throwing, block-countering while the specials are made up from collecting mix-tapes (and reviving your partner is done by winding the magnetic tape back into a mix-tape while using a pencil in the hole, only 80s people will get this one). Each tape can be used to power up specific special moves which do need to be selected in another menu rather than being learned as a move/combo. Which does interrupt game play somewhat but the trade-offs is the simplicity of the combat being just one button for the move. Statuses can be attributed in the same way in that you'll pick a set that can boost power but drop defence, balance all the stats, focus on massive defence but no real attack for the tank types, draining stats and health from other enemies at reduced stats overall, allowing for a multitude of game play types and techniques that either can be selected and forgotten or changed during the game, mid-level, to fit into the requirements the player might have for that particular situation.

The bosses are ridiculous in an amusing, Over The Top way, and just as filled with references and tropes as the final boss is. Ranging from Abobo in the original game, to a mega-man clone on a space station (everything goes to space in the end), giant plant based on Audrey 2 (with a shark head flower and dinosaur head flower... yep it's there) a giant tank based on an original Double Dragon 2 boss, Skullmageddon a few times for the sake of it. A few clones named on the typo made in the 3rd original Double Dragon (Bimmy and Jimmy, as if the spell check wasn't an option back then) and several other over-the-top characters and situations. Such as fighting against an upside-down flying helicopter, or sliding down a tundra on a plant's lower jaw, or fighting in space and breaking screens only for Skullmaggeddon to take the cost out of another minion's pay packet.

It's over the top and fun. The actual combat is slightly formulaic if you watch the movement patterns of the enemies, allowing you to goad them into specific movements, or rather disastrously, recognise when someone's going to be butchering you mercilessly because you know an attack is incoming and there's nothing you can do to counter it. Almost a death by slow motion. But there's enough there to mix up the combat itself and try some more impressive moves and techniques but people usually won't do that. They'll find a combo that works well for them and stick to it. Changing only if they encounter an enemy for which that method is entirely ineffective against.

The music tracks, composed/remixed by Jake Kauffman (known for the music in Retro City Rampage, Duck Tales remastered, Contra 4 and a whole host of other games over the last decade or so), certainly show their origins, most of which are remixes or retuning of earlier games' music, particularly of the first game, and given that oh-so-generic treatment the 80s is famous for and it hits the mark nearly every time, a little miss here and there on the more out-of-place levels and you'll realise those when you encounter them. Humour and sound bytes are rife in the game, in particular when Bill and Ted sorry... Billy and Jimmy, end up sounding like some "Valley-type, cool-dude" kids and manage to sound idiotic at the same time. Case in point, grabbing a baseball bat, slamming an enemy only to hear "Touchdown!" shouted to great enthusiasm. Its little tweaks like that and the other use of very bad puns that shine through with the pseudo-campy humour.

It can get a little awkward in places however, especially when it comes to the issue of the shops and the weapon smith. Each level on the map screen, where your character is personified by the Double Dragon 2 NES sprites, has details as to whether there is access to a shop or weapon smith. Shops sell items and tapes, such as food and health regens, extra lives etc. Weapon smiths take the gems you get from killing actual boss monsters and uses them to upgrade powers, which is all well and good but the shop becomes particularly annoying for this particular gripe. The gripe being, that the shops cannot be visited straight-away but must, I repeat, MUST be found in the middle of a level in order to attain the power ups required. The shops in this method are more annoying as not every shop has every item and some of the shops are in fact, hidden within levels i.e. on secret routes and within breakable entrances that one normally wouldn't seek to find. Only THERE can you buy more of the items to max out your abilities, stats and power moves. Rather than just walking into a shop.

Like one would expect. Each time I go shopping, I go to a specific shop and BUY it, I don't have to run through a level of death and carnage, facing down adversaries and dropkicking people through walls and racing around deadly tracks of blood, guts, gore and explosions... Except when I go shopping and need to take the M25... and arrive at Lakeside... Yeah I take that whole point back; it's still fucking annoying though to have to play a level to get to a shop.

The engine for the game however is fairly solid, except in circumstances where the game somehow manages to slam you into an obstruction, which causes damage, to bounce into another one, then into a 3rd one and results in your death by this point. Namely more possible on the higher difficulties and even more awkward is this pseudo 3D movement, in where pressing up would normally move you into the background on levels, and down moves you into the foreground. Some levels will START this way, but change to being entirely 2D and having NO means of moving back and forward, which then necessitates a change in tactic and means of combat that normally wouldn't have been an issue. When the game then punishes you for NOT being able to adapt to this arbitrary change soon enough, that becomes the dick-slap to the face from the game. Hardly fair and not in the slightest part enjoyable, even if you do like dick-slaps from non-game sources.

The game does feel awkward however with the lack of online support. It's a little odd when you realise that the original arcade game was released with online-support (buggy and laggy but THERE) and to not have it included in this game makes it feel like there's been a rather missed opportunity here for greater potential. Perhaps they've not been given rights to, or there's an issue with the network coding, or the game just doesn't translate well for netplay, all could be valid reasons but there's the fact that the game is missing one of the fundamental aspects of multiplayer in this day and age that, ought to have been included and increase the potential market for the game's fan base to those wanting to play it online with friends that can't turn up to the house like the old days.

Seems not everything in Double Dragon Neon is as revamped as it purports itself to be. While it remains a good solid game that sticks almost lovingly to the original source, the game does trip itself up a few times in relying too heavily upon nostalgia factors.

Quake

If Doom is the recognised Great Granddaddy of the First Person Shooter genre, then Quake is the Grandfather of 3D First Person Shooters. Not that pseudo 3D perception we'd been given with Doom, Duke, and any BUILD game for that matter, or indeed the Marathon series of games. But a TRUE, actual 3D set of architecture, 3D models for virtually everything from weapons to pickups and so on. Quake holds the most recognised crown for it and paved the way for the games like Unreal, Half-Life and so on.

Quake still holds true to the Doom formula, as one might expect of ID software, in which players get from point a, to point b, in an as "alive" state as possible, preferably with as many guns and as much ammo as one can acquire. What functions slightly differently is that the game gives you a 3D run down of the difficulties (Easy, Normal, Hard... and nightmare if you can find it) then you may select which of the 4 episodes you wish to begin, battle your way through the levels, kill the end enemies and exit with the rune. Once you've gained all 4 runes, you'll see the end level open up and from there you combat the final boss that has caused the situation in the first place resulting in one-lone-hero syndrome.

Sort of...

Let's start with the positives. Bearing in mind I'm taking a look at the original Quake with no additions, mods, enhancements or other such little situational changes (like using OpenGL etc.).

The game is fast, even on low end machines for the time, the optimisation of the code is impressive nonetheless for the game and even while showing levels in some of the most outstanding shades of brown imaginable, (seriously... almost everything is brown, perhaps something to be not-so-proud of for the future of gaming, turning everything "realistic" brown) the character's movement in and around the game is often very fluid and rather quick, which is taken to extremes in the speed runs of the game.

Enemy AI is little more than the doom system with opponents often taking the most direct route to you and moving back and forth a little if they cannot, animations are clunky but we're talking of a game that would have hand-designed these animations and models rather than using 3D scanners or body mapping for motion. There's no ragdoll but that never came into the fore until after Quake 3, so there's no point slagging off the game on that regard. However it would be nice to have enemies that weren't outfoxed by a brick wall and a corner.

Enemy variation is the usual mixed bag we've come to expect from ID software, though less varied as in Doom 2. There's your zombie marines with shotguns, zombie doggies, zombie heavy marines with lasers (a weapon you never get by the way) for the modern levels before you hit the time portals in each episode and then the game shows its roots as having started as a Dungeons and Dragons design. You'll be warped to castles and such where knights with swords, bigger knights with fire launching swords, magical worms that spit acid (I've not a clue what it's supposed to look like), zombies that can't be killed and need to be blown up, Fiends which resemble manic dogs with scythe arms and severe blood-mouth, tar-babies that blow up, ogres with chainsaws and grenades (the fuck???) and later Vores and Shamblers that are the more monstrous creatures that fire homing explosives and lightning respectively, often taking position in levels as a sort of boss creature.

This is where the game falls a little flat. The demo/shareware version is the first episode alone, sporting a good number of levels, multiple distinct enemies including even the shamblers (giant white yeti looking things that shoot lightning) and a boss creature that is part puzzle, part battle which rises out of lava, throws lava at you, and then is destroyed in lava.

You encounter nothing like that boss ever again; even the last boss is just a large BLOB with tentacles suspended above it that does NOTHING. Seriously, I've seen dead people offer more of a threat than this creature. While yes, it does have an army of the more nasty enemies to battle while you get to it, the actual fight with it is a cut scene if you time your jump through the teleporter at the right moment. After seeing the first boss of the first episode you cannot help but wonder did ID run out of time while making this and as such had to fudge the last boss? And lose making any other bosses too? It's rather inconsistent within the games (especially as there's videos of people beating the game in 100% kills, on the hardest mode, within 20minutes) you won't get to see anything like it again and it sticks out as such a variation from the norm, you can't help but wonder why it's not repeated or other such creatures had not been implemented.

Perhaps more a case of "Our demo is excellent, the rest we threw together"

Weaponry within the game is a fairly standard set up. Axes for the melee, shotguns of both single and double barrel flavours, nail guns of the dual and quad variety take place for the machinegun class. Grenade launchers for that dynamic angle of attacking, rocket launchers for the direct method and the lightning gun that sprays bolts in a constant, high-damage, stream. (Do NOT use it underwater, unless invincible). 8 weapons all in all and fairly consistent with ID for the variety. So nothing really adventurous there and nothing that packs the "wow" factor of a BFG (later Quake games however.... mmm 10k).

Various power ups will augment damage, boost health/armour or turn one invisible or even make one anti-god like (666 health, ho ho ho such humour), though usually found in places that they HAVE to be used or hidden so well nobody will find them.

Quake also brings to the fore, underwater swimming! This really gives you freedom of movement, screws up your resolution and makes it hard to see what you’re doing and lets you sink slowly if you just “remain” there. Drowning takes place shortly after and all guns work underwater, especially the lightning gun.

That pretty much is quake. Save for one final aspect of the game, the multiplayer.

There's the co-operative model for people that like to run through the game with infinite respawns while they and their barely-recognisably-human models attack all manner of enemies and even each other if they put the wrong friendly-fire setting on, with sometimes more enemies in places and the usual situation we've come to expect in Doom. And then there's the death match option, which is one of the most engrossing and fast paced action fests I've seen in a death match game in a very long time.

Every level can be used as a death match while also there are 6 specifically designed levels just for the death match experience ranging from the claustrophobic first level with a few key weapons and really for 2-4 players to the bigger and more deadly trap filled levels, one level that is more a tower of combat with height and floors playing more of a key role. The crown goes to level 5 and to a lesser extent, level 6 as the epitome of death match experience, particularly for groups of 4-16. The shotgun fires rapidly enough to cause a threat but the bigger weapons will slaughter people left and right.

This does however lead to an imbalance of a situation where someone gets the rocket launcher and goes ape-shit mental. It's hard to take someone down with one of those unless you have one of those or gang up on them. When a player is killed, they drop a pack holding ALL their ammo and the weapon they had selected, so it's possible to get their guns off them. This does however mean that someone will be running around with full ammo most of the time as the cumulative effect of picking up ammo drops means they'll hold all the ammo for all the weapons bar the one they were using at the time.

This however, is entirely negated if their ammo pack falls into lava or into a place nobody can get to. Leaving everyone to start their ammo collection over once again. There is a high level of thrill to running a corner, ending up behind someone and giving them both barrels in the back to launch them off the edge, dead, into some lava before running off to find your next victim. Sadly, spawning in front of someone who has a rocket launcher will leave you looking like a shower of blood pissing from every fissure and crack an explosion can give you. But we're still talking in an age of teething and few games had that mercy invincibility for freshly-spawned players.

The game is certainly worth looking into for those that want to relive the older, simpler, more FUN and faster paced games, or those that want to know where the lofty heights of Battlefield 53, Crysis 12 and even Quake 12 and Doom 72: Even more demons, came from and you can't do much better than Quake in that regard.

Incidentally, the Dope Fish lives!

Double Dragon (Arcade)

While not the first beat em up with depth (moving to the background and the foreground) Double Dragon is believed firmly to be the first co-operative playing beat-em-up. This is quite the break from tradition, previous games being of the 1 vs. 1, mano e mano, method of playing where two pointless characters stop everything to kick seven shades of shit out of each other. Or the brawling games known for having one character on a lone quest to stomp out several hundred other characters in the name of stomping for the sake of stomping.

Double Dragon, the great grand daddy of the brawling games. Featuring large sprites, scrolling levels and backgrounds, huge bosses (sometimes) and even a little cut scene at the start showing the motivation anyone needs for punching, kicking, whipping, baseball-batting, knifing, massive number of colour swap dudes to death (and a few dudettes); a woman gets punched and carried off. Can't think of a better reason myself to start a huge brawl against one of the possibly the largest gangs in the world with more members than McDonalds has workers.

The game's premise isn't exactly ground breaking and not something that hadn't been done before in games or films. One (or two, for the first time ever) man, conveniently colour coded in blue and red, sets out to avenge a woman by breaking skulls, legs, and generally beating to death every single thing in his way. Your method of executing this is the now oft recognised means of walking, punching, kicking, jumping, grabbing weapons and using these skills and abilities in a myriad of ways to overcome all obstacles in the protagonist’s way.

Unlike other incarnations of the same game, on different systems, you start out with full access to all your moves and abilities. You have the 8 directional movement, you have your punch button, kick button and jump button. A simple system yet the game allows for more involvement than just this. While you're walking up to enemies and punching and kicking them, repeated hits allow for bonus moves such as roundhouses and uppercuts. Jumping while attacking can give flying kicks, or reverse jump kicks if you're not moving. Double tapping a direction gives the well-known, head butt and use of both attacks at the same time performs the elbow smash which in itself, is a huge game-breaker if used to maximum exploitative means.

Enemies usually come at you in waves of 1 to 3 opponents at a time, bosses are either some HUGE guy(s) (called Abobo... go check the flash game out based on just him) or a very tough clone of the main characters. Or it's the final boss being a cheap bastard with a machinegun that can still be butchered with the same exploit moves. Having said that though, some of the boss set ups can be rather straining on the machine, particularly on the second level where there's a significant slow down as a result of the multiple enemies on the display.

Each level starts with the characters on the far left and progression is made by walking to the right, navigating occasionally ladders and pits which rather unfairly remove a whole life if you're dumb enough to walk into them or unfortunate enough to be throw/knocked into them. Once having walked right enough to run out of the appropriate level, the boss appears and attempts to kill you rather quickly. Interestingly for the game, once a level is beaten you actually are seen to move to the next section in an almost seamless progression before starting over on the right-walking once again.

Just to avoid too much monotony, certain enemies drop weapons or some levels feature extra items that can be used such as cardboard boxes (ow?...no I don't think so), barrels (that's more like it), or gifts like dynamite (who seriously brings dynamite to fight?) knives, baseball bats, whips and such. Each level providing more and more deadly traps from pitfalls at construction yards, broken bridges, walkways and being stabbed by statues or slammed by shifting bricks... yeah that last one is rather Indiana Jones and very much a break in the style of the game, serving as nothing more than a means to drain your coins and credits with heavily punishing damage from what seems to be dodgy collision detection and arbitrary "you're fucked" moves.

The difficulty ramps up exponentially through the game by the use of more awkward locations, the previously mentioned "fuck you" damages from level 5 and that every enemy increases in health for each level you progress. The supposed difficulty however is not from the challenge the enemy provides as each enemy fights the same way no matter what level they're on, it's a grind fest of damaging a health bar you can't see. Unlike games like Final Fight or Violent storm, there's no way of knowing how much damage you've caused to an individual in seeing if you've done 1 bar or 5 bars of injury, or if they're on 50 bars before you fight. As such, you've no way of seeing which moves are the most effective in killing your opponents. But if you're winning and surviving, that can be seen as a progression of sorts.

The co-operative aspect of the game, all depends upon how well your partner can play. While it's an idea to see someone getting beaten up and wanting to jump in and save them with a flurry of wild attacks, the game will register the attacks on the other person, meaning you'll hurt them, maybe even kill them. The potential for knocking someone down and killing them in pits, or hurling huge weapons that bulldoze everyone including your partner, there's a lot of dick moves to enjoy and before long you'll be punching the person playing with you, and the fight continues outside of the game into the arcade and the friendship is over. Maybe, thankfully.

However, despite the dickary potential, it's a solidly good co-operative game that excels in the aim of being enjoyable for 2 people to play. Except at the very end, where if both players have defeated the last boss, the guy with the machinegun, then the real final boss becomes, the other player in an all-out battle on one life (or more if you REALLY want to spend coins) for the right to rescue the punched-out woman from the start of the game. It's an odd situation for a game to encourage a solid co-operative attempt throughout, only to then reward the players with turning them against each other by force and play as opponents. An original game concept in its execution and one that's rarely been repeated in games since then. (Streets of Rage perhaps depending upon choices).

Musically, I think nearly everyone that knows of this game, at the mention of Double Dragon could hum a few bars of the theme tune and likely the first level as well. It's choppy and upbeat for the most part and definitely reeks of an 80s composition vibe heard in multiple tracks released that decade, particularly the earlier years of the decade. It's not something you'd bump your head to, but you'll find yourself humming it along with the game as it worms its way into your ear.

The game though, does suffer from the repetition of repeat plays, being an arcade game you know every time which enemies will appear, holding what and so on but I'm beating at a limitation of coding rather than the game's actual faults. It still holds well on the nostalgia factor and will bring people back for the occasional play just to remember what the game was like and to remind ourselves of how far we've come from such roots. Despite the aged looks and appearance, the game is still just as playable which is more than could be said for a lot of other games and the rather unique aspect the game does have (beyond being the first co-op brawler) was that it had more moves and attacks than say games like Final Fight which relied upon attacking, jumping and special/desperation moves.

I have to say, were I to actually own an arcade, I'd have this one out on the floor. Not at the forefront perhaps, but down the back or the sides, a little darker in presenting than the others but it'd be there, for those willing to explore a little further, willing to see a little more and see the older days as a show of honour. Not without flaws but given it started something, it did it well enough that many games failed to match it. Now THAT deserves recognition in the least.