The first thing you’ll notice missing is the arcade’s opening cinematic. The best way to describe the Amiga port of Double Dragon is that it’s identical to the arcade version “except” for some things, and unfortunately those exceptions add up quickly. While I have no doubt with a bit of time Double Dragon’s opening music could have been easily reproduced by the Amiga’s sound system, time is money, and few developers were willing to spend any unnecessary time or money on a game’s title music. The Amiga version of Double Dragon is practically identical to the Atari ST version in every way, including the poorly sampled opening music. The end result were games for the Amiga that did not fully utilize the system’s superior sound or graphic capabilities. Throughout the 80s and 90s, many developers took shortcuts by coding games for the Atari ST, and then porting those versions to the Commodore’s Amiga. Understanding why this happened requires a brief Amiga history lesson.Ĭomputer and console games are frequently developed for one system and then converted to others, recycling as much code as possible in an attempt to save costs and speed up production. Moments later, the illusion is shattered with a low quality sampling of the arcade’s attract-mode music. Save for the name of the game being swapped from silver to gold, it would be difficult to tell the difference between the two. The Amiga version of Double Dragon opens with a title screen that looks almost identical to the arcade. Double Dragon also spawned a movie, a cartoon series, and dozens of home ports, including one for the Commodore Amiga. The game was popular enough to warrant multiple arcade sequels including Double Dragon 2: The Revenge, Double Dragon 3: The Rosetta Stone, and a one on one fighter (confusingly also named Double Dragon) for the Neo Geo. Although it wasn’t the first side scrolling beat-em-up game, Double Dragon defined the genre and influenced hundreds of punchy games that followed. The arcade version of Double Dragon was developed by Technos and distributed across America and Europe by Taito in 1987. It was a move that more than leveled the playing field it gave the advantage to me, a questionably-skilled teenager hoping to get the most out of each quarter I spent at the bowling alley’s arcade Finally, I loved the elbow an overpowered attack that, when performed properly, made players nearly undefeatable. Now, in Double Dragon, Billy and Jimmy Lee were free to pick up whips, baseball bats, knives and sticks of dynamite that had been used against them and turn the tables on their attackers. For years I had lamented the fact that players couldn’t pry the weapons from the cold, digital hands of our fallen video game combatants. I also liked that players could pick up weapons discarded by defeated enemies and actually use them for a change. I remember reading a lot of weird facts about twins as a kid, like twins who developed their own secret language, and some who claimed to have ESP, so the concept of butt-kicking karate twins seemed pretty awesome to me. For starters, the protagonists of the game, Billy and Jimmy Lee (originally known as Hammer and Spike), were twins. A lot of things about Double Dragon appealed to me as a teenager.
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