Players can grab and hold enemies (who can also do the same to the players) allowing them to be pummeled by their partner. Not only that, but barrels and even boulders could be lofted towards foes.Ĭo-op added injected even more fun to the gameplay. Players could also now pick up dropped weapons like bats and whips and use them against enemies. Continues also placed players right back where they had died though it would also reset their score to zero.Ĭombat was now based on which direction your hero was facing - you didn’t have to use a specific attack button to actually attack to the left or right of your character - allowing players to focus more on fighting enemies than juggling buttons. There were still no health gauges to give you an idea of how well you were doing against the bad guys, but our heroes still had theirs. Areas were further broken up into four “missions” starting in a neighborhood, moving to a factory area, woods, and finally, the enemy ‘base’ in the mountains. Instead of a large area several screens in size filled with a mob of enemies as it was in Renegade, players scrolled towards the right along a path and encountered batches of enemies instead of everyone all at once. And then they created a dramatically different game from those pieces, much like what they would also do with the fantastic River City Ransom on the NES in 1989. Technos kept only the essential elements that their team broke ground with in Renegade - the use of eight way movement, the illusion of scene depth, jumps, kicks, punches, and beating down bad guys by the dozen. Two players could take on the mean streets and beat down thugs together! Let’s do this! It was nothing like my experience with Renegade which was a really good thing. I also had a great time in playing Double Dragon, especially after realizing that it had two-player co-op. The Japanese flyer also wasn’t half bad, though the two main characters didn’t tattoo their names the way their Western counterparts did.Īt the time, I had no idea Technos did both Renegade and Double Dragon - the two seemed like night and day and had the Taito name emblazoned on the cabinets. Taking the pieces that worked well from Renegade, they stuck them into a new cabinet, energized them with new graphics, overhauled the combat, and gave us Double Dragon in 1987. They would go on to redefine everything they had learned in making that game to come out with something that was so different as to wonder if they were the same studio a year earlier. The thing is, Technos seemed to realize that. In my case, I didn’t particularly like my experience with it as much as I did the individual pieces, preferring to lay a few tokens down on a good, linear game of Kung-Fu Master than go back to Renegade. Technos’ Renegade in 1986 could be a tough game to warm up to in the arcade. Unlike Renegade, Double Dragon didn’t undergo a facelift and was brought over largely intact. As with Renegade, Taito was the distributor for the game in the US. This time around, the flyer for the NA release of Double Dragon actually looks pretty great with sharp screen shots and both Spike and Hammer (Jimmy and Billy Lee in Japan) ready to serve knuckle sandwiches on the street.
0 kommentar(er)
