From the Brow of Zeus

When I was 8 or 9, I really wanted an NES (just like everyone else), but instead of getting one, we got a Sega Master System. We grumbled a little, but it did come with three free games. The first two were combined in one cart: Hang On, a motorcycle racing game that was pretty neat, and Astro Warrior, a vertical shump with music that, to this day, brings back memories of clamping my mitts around a SMS pad and playing as best I could despite freezing mountain town temperatures.

The third game was a mail-in special, which you got as a reward for buying Sega: Double Dragon.

Double Dragon was the first arcade game I ever saw that had a line of people waiting to play it. I'll never forget the day I walked into Scandia and saw four or five people actually waiting to play an arcade game. Not just one or two guys popping quarters on the machine to hold their place--a right British queue.

"Why the heck are they waiting?" I wondered. "This arcade is huge, there's tons of games, go play them!"

Then I got a taste of Double Dragon and I knew it was worth standing in line for. Just like it was worth getting a Sega instead of a Nintendo.

See, the NES version of Double Dragon is compromised. There's no two player simultaneous mode--the fighting minigame really isn't worth mentioning--which means one of the best two-player co-op games at the time was whittled down to alternating multiplayer. This had a huge impact on the game, because not only did it mean waiting to take turns with my brother, it ruined my favorite end-game twist of all time.

Anyone remember beating Double Dragon at the arcade for the first time? Me and my brother did it. My little brother, really, because by the time the credits rolled, I was already dead. See, D.D. is your standard blue jeans 80s revenge movie boiled down into a simple quest to save the girl, but after punching your way through cities and forests and finally getting to the Shadow Warrior's lair, the game suddenly pits both players against each other in a fight to the death. This is insane, because whoever loses is basically branded the surprise twist villain, and the other guy saves the girl and gets the happy ending.

I didn't get the girl. My little brother did. I fell off a friggin' pit at the bottom of the screen and lost my last life.

Of course, the NES Double Dragon lacks all of this. There's no, "No way!" moment where you suddenly have to box your friend over a pit of death. You just fight yet more baddies until the end of the game.

The Sega Double Dragon was different. It was the first really good arcade port I ever played. (Atari 2600 Pac-Man... was not great.) I played the hell out of D.D., and sometimes my brother won, and sometimes I did, but either way, on the way to the Shadow Warrior's lair, it was fun as hell.

We eventually did get an NES, rented the hell out of Batman and Super Mario Bros. 2. We loved it, having known all along that SMS was second fiddle to NES. We even rented Double Dragon a lot, just out of morbid curiosity. But it just wasn't the same, and in the end, we always went back to Sega's Double Dragon.

The movie is pretty cool, too. But that's a story for another time.

Images from MobyGames.

Labels: videogames