Redness

So very scary.

If You Stab a Piece of Wood, It Turns Into This....

Quite a while ago I got a whittling tool, just a handle with a couple replaceable blades on it, and a bunch of small blocks of basswood. I carved up a few of them, one wound up looking like a piece of wood that had some corners hacked off (not shown), one became the little black and red twisted tower thing, and the other became a noble beaver.

Why do bad video games happen to good people?

A conversation about old NES games got me nostalgic enough to fire up my trusty emulator, NESticle. Unfortunately, instead of enjoying old classics like Kirby's Adventure or Double Dragon II, I thought "now that I'm older and wiser, I wonder if Dragon's Lair is any easier?"

It's still impossible. I tried downloading windows media encoder so I could capture video of me playing the ROM, I thought it would be funny to show how many things can kill you on the very first screen, but my review would be pretty damn short since I can only make it about 4 SCREEN LENGTHS into this platform game...plus I couldn't get it to work.

The main problem was that Dragon's Lair in the arcade was popular because it had amazing animation by guru Don Bluth (Secret of NIMH, American Tail, Land Before Time). That fails miserably on an 8-bit system. On games like Mario, you can make him duck in one frame, almost as soon as you hit the button. In Dragon's Lair, the hero Dirk takes 5 or 6 frames to slowly get on his knees once you hit down. The same problem occurs for attacking, jumping, and even turning around, meaning that even though the enemies are slow as shit, you just CANNOT respond in time to do anything unless you memorize it.

Luckily for me, there is already a pretty funny youtube video of some guy bitching about this game.