Everything old is... still old. With the same gameplay of the original 1983 classic, the latest Dragon's Lair game fails to impress in any area.

There’s a certain advantage to being a middle-aged guy who plays video games. Our age doesn’t make us better at them (it probably makes us worse – at certain games anyway), and it doesn’t give us any real in-game benefits at all (other than being able to answer the age-verification trivia at the beginning at the original Leisure Suit Larry). It enables us to say “I was there.” I was there when my local 7-11 installed one of the first Space Invaders machines ever seen in my town. I was there when Defender and Pac-Man ruled the arcades. I was there when Pong was considered cool and I was even the proud owner of an Odyssey II game system – one that had cooler games than the Atari and was made to look like a computer rather than a gaming console.



I was also there when an arcade game that featured graphics good enough to rival those in any Disney film was released. I stood there transfixed with all the other teens as we looked at the incredible title that was Dragon’s Lair.

Featuring artwork and animation by Disney phenom Don Bluth (he would leave the mega family film giant to release a few of his own pictures including The Land Before Time and The Secret of NIMH – titles which beat the heck out of anything old Walt’s company was doing at the time), Dragon’s Lair cost a full dollar to play at most arcades (this may be common today, but was nearly unheard of back then) and we lined up at it anyway because it just looked so damn good.