The only really enjoyable thing about Dragon’s Lair is the graphics, done by Don Bluth, master animator. Ever seen The Secret of NIMH? Yeah, him. As such, the cartoony drawings in the game all look quite nice, even if the dungeons are a little repetitive. There are only so many ways to draw creepy catacombs, though, so I can understand that.

All of the graphical brilliance comes tumbling down, however, when the game pauses for three-quarters of a second every time it parses your game decision. The entire flow of the story goes from smooth animation to jumpy graphics, and it’s damn near unbearable. I tried the game both on my PS2 and on my main DVD player, and it did the same thing on both. The instruction book espouses that it’s a failing of the DVD players, and there is one model that doesn’t skip, but I doubt most people have it. And for something with a big ‘PlayStation 2 compatible!’ sticker on the front...

I understand it’s because of a shortcoming in the hardware, and not the game. But there’s a simple solution to that: wait until the hardware catches up. Or do it differently. As such, the narrative flow really gets hurt.

There’s sound in the game, although I had to turn it up to really hear it. The music is your typical fare, with jaunty tones often turning into fast ‘survival’ tones as Dirk gets into ever more trouble. There are quite a few sound effects as well, although they’re often repeated. The ‘danger’ sound effects started to grate on my nerves after a bit, but the game’s over quick enough so that it’s not really that bothersome.

There are only two real instances of voice-acting in the game. The first is the announcer at the beginning, describing the game. Dirk really only grunts and screams. And Daphne, the princess in peril, talks a few times, mostly near the end of the game. Her voice is highly annoying, and since the last sequence is one of the most difficult, it’s one you’ll hear over, and over, and over, and over.

Unfortunately, Dragon’s Lair never really had solid gameplay, and it’s no better in the DVD version. The entire game consists of pressing one of the four directions or Enter (on the PS2, it’s the X button) for your sword. You have to do it at specific times, and although sometimes there are ‘clues’ as to what you should do -- flashing doorways, etc. – oftentimes, you just have to guess until you get it right.

One of the ‘strengths’ of the arcade game was that the rooms came in random order, so that you couldn’t just memorize the pattern to beat the game. Not so with the DVD version -- the levels come in the same order every time. The instructions say that this is because of a limitation of the DVD specifications, but their other (and much, much worse) title Hologram Time Traveler has semi-random encounters, so I don’t understand why they couldn’t do it here. Instead, you simply have to memorize the order of buttons to press.

And as if the game weren’t ‘easy’ enough, you get an infinite number of continues. There’s at least one room (the tilting checkered floor room) where I died a large number of times, and never lost a man from my ‘Lives’ count. Perhaps they didn’t manage to transfer the ‘Dirk grumbling at the player’ scene for that one, so they cut it out. No matter.

The original laserdisc version had a few of the rooms ‘reversed,’ which made it more difficult to beat because the left and right commands were switched for them. They’re in the DVD version, which is doubly pointless. You always go through the rooms in the same order, so why should you go through the same rooms again, only pressing a different direction this time? Argh.

Although a few of the rooms are irritating in that there’s a long sequence of directions and attacks that you must get right to complete, none of them are really hard. And since you have an infinite number of continues, even the challenging lair of the Dragon at the end is trivial to beat. The only difficulty is playing Dragon’s Lair DVD to the end -- you’ll probably get so frustrated that you’ll stop halfway through it.

Up, down, left, right, attack. There are the buttons, and they are the only ones used in the game. This doesn’t make for a whole lot of interactivity -- press the right button, and you continue. Press the wrong one, and you die. For what it’s worth, the game is plenty responsive enough, getting the button presses usually way before you really need to hit them.

An added ‘bonus’ is footage from all sorts of news shows of the early 80s where people talk about how Dragon’s Lair is going to revolutionize the gaming industry. Yeah, whatever. They’re fun to watch for the pure 80s goofiness of it, but they’re a little too close to propaganda to really be interesting.

Although Dragon’s Lair is certainly an important piece of video game history, with the cartoon graphics and voice acting way, way before any other game did it, that doesn’t mean it’s a particularly good game. A single hour and a half sitting had me beating the game, and chances are I’ll never play it again. With the annoying pauses and non-random encounters, Dragon’s Lair DVD isn’t worth your money. Go drop a few quarters into a vintage version of it somewhere instead of trying to get your fix wasting it on this title.