40. Double Dragon
If you're of a certain generation, and you've played a 2D side-scrolling beat 'em up at least once, there's a strong chance you might be familiar with Double Dragon, and you might also know that the series as a whole isn't exactly a model of consistency. Technos Japan's iconic 1987 coin-op has left a lasting impact on the gaming world, spawning a series of sequels and spin-offs, not to mention a Saturday morning cartoon, a flop of a feature-length movie, and (most importantly for our purposes) a gaggle of ports and conversions of vastly variable quality (Cheat sheet: Nintendo = good, Sega = bad).
Say, how do you think the C64 version will stack up?
Yeah, I figured as much.
With the game being an arcade conversion of the mid-to-late 80s, we already knew we were gonna lose a bit of technical luster along the way, but developer Binary Design really put the boots to us Commodore owners with this one. The arcade original uses multiple Hitachi CPUs and can display 384 colors on-screen at once, utterly dwarfing the C64's graphics capabilities. We also lost two of the three attack buttons (jump/kick/punch) from the control scheme.
Even with these limitations in mind, the bad news is that this version of Double Dragon under-delivers on even the most modest of expectations. In fact, it threatens to be one of the worst C64 games I've reviewed, if we're judging it on sheer strength of gameplay and fun factor, neither of which require sophisticated hardware to achieve.
Despite this, the nightmare doesn't start off all that bad. The title screen shows the familiar Double Dragon logo and plays the well-known Level 1 theme. Though the musical arrangement *sounds* great and makes good use of the SID chip's facilities, it's actually melodically inaccurate vs other versions - there are some liberties taken with both the solo and main theme, and this should be viewed as a bellwether of what we're about to experience.
The game admirably supports two-player mode, but once you press "1" or "2" to begin, we're flung into a dire, miserable experience in every respect. Your player sprite looks ugly, your enemies look ugly, you both look nearly the same, actually. With the exception of bosses, nearly every sprite is bland and indistinct, complete with a faint line through their torso (due to "sprite stacking" to get around memory limitations, as helpfully explained by the developer in the instruction booklet while they literally apologize for foisting this game upon you). You rarely fight more than one enemy at a time, and you never fight more than two at a time. Animations are strange and unfaithful to the original, and characters seem to crumple downward instead of getting knocked onto their backs. There's also no death animation: defeated enemy characters just disappear, or you just lose a life without even noticing unless you're keeping a keen eye on the score bar at the bottom of the screen. There's no music playing during actual gameplay, save a brief jingle at the end of each level, and the sound effects are weak and infrequent.
Much worse, these flaws all pale in comparison to actual gameplay. Each encounter is an interminably long kick and punch battle, just like the one before, and the many to come. Theoretically, moves can be modified by holding various directions on the joystick while pressing the Fire button, but the results mostly felt random nonetheless. Enemy AI is nearly non-existent. You just kind of circle your opponent back and forth while tapping buttons frantically and hope that you're the one making contact at any given time.
The level backgrounds are passable, and the scrolling looks fine, but the rest of this game feels both frustrating and prefunctory, a pitched battle between slogging to the end or turning off your computer and walking away to find something more fun to do. I felt like any motivation I had to progress was immediately sucked away after about a minute of fumbling my way through the first stage. After a bit of tussling, I got the feeling that I could probably "cheese" enemy encounters and progress through the game, but I had already stopped caring by that point. If you do stick it out, you'll eventually be treated to a few niceties like picking up a weapon and fighting the world's crappiest sprite drawing of Abobo, who has apparently shed a few pounds and looks vaguely like Zangief from Street Fighter II. However, these are both elements that were immediately presented to you in vastly superior ports like the NES version, and I have absolutely no clue why you'd choose C64 version if you knew any better.
Fact is, the NES version is also *better* than the arcade version, broadening the gulf between home console and home computer gaming in the second half of the 80s, and also highlighting a big problem faced by gamers of more recent times trying to appreciate what the C64 had to offer. Both machines are 8-bit 6502 at their core, but in no way are they equal otherwise. They were built for different purposes, years apart, and multi-platform games were usually distributed across a variety of development teams of varying skill and experience. More often than not, Commodore owners simply got the short end of the stick. This isn't just a product of inferior hardware: speaking to this game in particular, retrospective opinion is that the developers did a poor job technically despite their testimony to the C64's relative weakness and outright regret for their results in the game's manual.
In far fewer words, this game stinks and anyone who paid actual money for it got ripped off (though it apparently sold like hotcakes - go figure). This was far from the only bad port of this game, and isn't even the only bad port of this game for the Commodore 64. There's actually a more recent port of the same game by Ocean from 1991 which was released on a cartridge to coincide with the re-imaged "Commodore 64 GS". Though it performs mildly better in terms of gameplay, it but still doesn't cross the threshold of being good, and looks even worse.
Of everything I've played thus far, I think this one wins the "ponderous bullshit" award for completely wasting such a great license and game design on a port that's about as fun as absorbing a skillful roundhouse kick to the crotch. Zero redeeming value, avoid at all costs.
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