Read this article to not turn into a pile of bones!
In 1983 arcade goers went gaga for Dragon’s Lair, an Laserdisc fueled action game featuring graphics far beyond anything players had seen at the time. Legendary animator Don Bluth provided the game’s visuals, which were astonishing enough to overshadow the otherwise dull gameplay (which was essentially a glorified series of what we now call quick-time events). Nevertheless, it was a huge hit, and it spawned a number of console ports and spin-offs. Even fictional characters ate it up.
An unheralded sequel, subtitled The Adventure Continues, was announced in 1994. The release year of 1994 is a bit of a misnomer here, as this game wasn’t ever released, in any year. It was announced and supposedly impending in ’94, though, so that’s what we’re gonna go with.
Thankfully, The Adventure Continues abandoned the original’s painfully simplistic gameplay in favor of a 2D platformer. It also does a solid job of re-creating the Bluth-esque vibe in its graphics – the protagonist Dirk the Daring looks just how you’d expect, and the game’s numerous environments and enemies are colorful and interesting. There are some great throwbacks to specific things in the original Dragon’s Lair as well, such as Dirk crumbling into a pile of bones when he dies:
Unfortunately, the aforementioned “bad old gameplay” has been replaced with, well, a different flavor of bad old gameplay. Needlessly difficult jumps, enemies that are nigh impossible to avoid, and really crappy swordplay all hamper The Adventure Continues as we know it. The latter of those is especially frustrating – Dirk’s sword always has a specific angular trajectory, which makes it possible to be standing more or less next to an enemy and not hit them. From some angles it appears to be making contact but just…doesn’t. It’s rough. While it does a lot of the technical things pretty darn well, this isn’t a very fun game.
So why didn’t this game, an intriguing sequel to one of the biggest games of the 80s, ever see the light of day? As of the time I’m writing this, we don’t actually know – it’s not very good, which maybe didn’t help, but the game appears to have been relatively complete. It just…never came out, and no one knows why. Weird.
To that end, you’re probably wondering – how exactly did it end up on the internet? That’s a bit easier to answer. In 2011, a SegaAge forums user stumbled upon a prototype of the game and promptly put in on the internet for everyone to enjoy. I for one thank them for their service…I guess. While I’m all for preservation, I won’t get my time back from playing this one. I suppose you win some and you lose some.
If you enjoyed the original Dragon’s Lair, it might be worth seeking this out to see what else was attempted with the series, but it’s otherwise pretty hard to recommend this game. Even in an ostensibly mostly completed state, it just isn’t especially enjoyable. I do recommend checking out the original if you haven’t, though, if for no other reason than to see what passed for “cutting edge” 37 years ago.
We’re going back to the late 70’s for next week’s game, which is an especially shameless ripoff of an arcade classic. See you then!