Two might forces combine : Arcade nostalgia and stick figure animation :
Prepare to become nerve twitchingly addicted to Dungeon Escape, a game best described as “Stick Figure Dragon’s Lair“, or, “what if Dragon’s Lair had been drawn and animated not by Don Bluth but by the guy who does xkcd”.
It’s not identical to Dragon’s Lair, so don’t go thinking your well-preserved memories of all the patterns for all the scenes from Dragon’s Lair are going to let you breeze through this one too.
It is, however, a very close homage to Dragon’s Lair, complete with a passable attempt to give this game a stirring introductory voiceover like the one from the original Dragon’s Lair .
As someone who was a hardcore arcade brat when this game came out, let me tell you, when I first heard that awesome voiceover guy say “Lead on, adventurer! Your quest… awaits!”, it sent chills up and down my spine. Hell, it still does! Dragon’s Lair was so huge back In The Day that they could charge $1 or even $2 per play, and people didn’t even bat an eye. And that’s $2 in 1983 money! Even charging that much, the games often wore out from overuse (with possible help from very frustrated people who had just gotten clocked on the head by the Lizard King AGAIN and needed to vent their rage against the evil tormenting box).
What a time to own an arcade, huh? Because the thing is, this was the ultimate quarter sucking monster. It blew away the previous champion, Gauntlet, whose main quarter sucking innovation was the ability to buy more health for a quarter. letting you save your character’s life at any time, OR, and this is the brilliant part, put a whole whack of quarters in at the beginning and play till all that health wore out.
In other words, you could put all the money you showed up with in it at once! Ingenious. And it took care of a sticky problem of arcade etiquette, which was how one reserves a place in line on a hot machine. If a machine was really popular, there would be five or six of us arcade brats hanging around wanting to play, and nobody there to decide whose turn it was. People adopted the habit of putting their quarters near the “one up” button on a machine to declare their intention to play next, but that only worked if there was only one person waiting. If there was more than one, things could get very tense as people argued over who was next after the guy who’d put his quarters. And if you were playing a game and decided you wanted to play again instead of ceding the machine to the person who is next, you would have to endure the vocal grumbling of all the people waiting for the machine. Even if the game had continues.
Gauntlet helped. Better to put your quarters in all at once, then leave the machine when you’re done.
Being the edge-of-the-herd contrarian, usually, if the game was hot and I wanted to play, I would just wait until the crowd thinned out. One of the many advantages of having a curfew that is an hour later than your average kid my age.
So before Dragon’s Lair, Gauntlet was the champion of quarter sucking. But Dragon’s Lair blew that away. The combination of amazingly awesome full motion animation (as compared to the 8 bit arcade games of the era) and stereo sound making it an intense experience for the senses and the rapid action and fast reflexes needed to play the game made playing Dragon’s Lair a highly concentrated, highly exciting experience. You got more excitement and stimulation out of playing Dragon’s Lair for thirty pulse pounding seconds than you got out of playing a traditional video game for an hour.
So of course people were willing to pay $2 for thirty seconds of play. It was totally worth it. It even made economic sense. Get an hour’s worth of gaming in thirty seconds and pay $2 instead of $10.
And talk about the ultimate spectator game. I spent way more time watching other people play than I did playing myself. Other, RICHER people. I found the game too hard and too expensive for my allowance. But the game was actually just as fun to watch as it was to play, and a lot cheaper.
In fact, it was so fun to watch that kids would actually donate quarters to a good player so they could see someone get further into the game than they had seen before.
Imagine that. Having that machine in your arcade must have been like having a license to print money.
And now we have Dungeon Escape, which lacks the visual oomph of the original, but makes up for that by being free and having much simpler controls. Just click where it flashes. Couldn’t be simpler… in theory.
In practice, of course, you’re going to need fast reflexes and a very good memory to get anywhere.
But it’s till amazingly exciting to play. It’s still full of pulse pouncing danger and a mad dash through incredible hazards while a cartoonishly horrible death awaits your slightest mistake.
Normally, a game this unforgiving and harsh would not appeal to me. But succeed or fail, everything happens so fast that there’s not a lot of time to get bummed out, and you don’t have to wait very long before trying again either. So the action just keeps rolling, with no slowing down or boring parts.
It’s raw intensity, uncut, and thus, to me, very very addictive.
And I’m getting pretty good at it. I can do that entire long fight with the monster from the wand without fail (hallelujah), defeat both the blue and the red ninja, roll through the minecart and the shield surfing sequences, and so forth and so on. I imagine I will eventually beat the thing.
As is, in order to write this blog entry, I practically had to physically force myself to stop playing the damn thing. It’s just that addictive!
So enjoy being addicted to the game like I am. The only way out is over the yellow ninja’s corpse!
LEAD ON, adventurer! Your quest… awaits!