Double Dragon retrospective: A singular creation | NES Works
Vložit
- čas přidán 27. 07. 2024
- Technos (by way of freshman NES publisher Tradewest) follows up on Renegade with a home conversion of a massive arcade hit that plays extremely fast and loose with the meaning of the phrase "home conversion." Double Dragon on NES may as well be a completely different game than the coin-op smash, as it adds several new mechanics, expands the game environments, introduces platforming sequences, helps invent the one-on-one fighting genre, and-whoops-loses the cooperative gameplay feature that gave the game its name in the first place. The end result is a game that doesn't sit well with those who demand absolute fidelity in their arcade ports, but that nevertheless stands out as one of the most ambitious, polished, and attractive games yet seen on the platform.
From this point on, arcade-to-NES adaptations will lean heavily on the "adaptations" angle, and (along with Rygar and Punch-Out!!), Double Dragon is one of the first works to truly define what NES coin-on conversion would look like in the coming years.
Video Works is funded via Patreon ( / gamespite ) - support the show and get access to every episode up to two weeks in advance of its CZcams debut! Plus, exclusive podcasts, eBooks, and more! - Hry
Quite simply the best gaming retrospectives on all of CZcams
Me: "Double Dragon. That was a fun rental."
Mr. Parish: "I'm going to teach y'all how history was irrevocably changed by this one title"
One thing I always found interesting was getting a Double Dragon home port in 1988 it being fun, but there was the let down of it being 1 player. Then a couple years later you have the brawler that basically ate Double Dragon's lunch, Final Fight, get a home console port on Nintendo's new, awesome 16 bit system....and it's ALSO only one player.
I get the reason for DD1 on NES being 1 player but what was Final Fight on SNES's excuse!?
@@AlexRN They were more interested in making it look like the arcade version rather than making it play like it. The cartridge sizes at the time held it back.
@@alexojideagu I mean, by 1988 standards with memory limitations isn't passable. I certainly didn't care when I was 8 lol
Meanwhile SMS Double Dragon and Genidrive Streets of Rage were two-player from the start.
@@221b at least Capcom ported some really amazing brawlers later on that had 2 players. King of Dragons had very minimal changes in quality.
One of my favourite NES games. The lack of 2-Player mode was sad, but understandable seeing as it was Technos first NES game and they were avoiding any sprite flicker. The combat was very similar to the arcade, and the extra levels really gave value for money.
Just to say, Renegade did get two official sequels, but they were for the 8-Bit Microcomputers only. Target Renegade was even better than the first game, but Renegade 3 was lacking.
I still remember going to Walmart and getting my grandmother to buy Double Dragon NES for me. My best friend and I played the hell out of it.
I was super into Double Dragon as a kid. I first played the arcade game, and it blew me away at the time. And then when the NES version released, it was my choice for a birthday present. I even dressed as Billy Lee for Halloween with an outfit that my mom made me based on the artwork in the first issue of Nintendo Power. Good times.
Before I watch this video, I want to thank you, Jeremy Parish for the excellent quality of the videos you make. I am always entertained when I select one of your videos.
One of my favorite childhood gaming memories was accidentally discovering that you can you bypass the second level boss by climbing down the ladders after he appears. It was simply me running away because I was scared to fight him, but my 6 year old mind was blown when I heard the victory jingle.
I always felt that the image art of Billy holding the whip, as seen on the video thumbnail looked like he was holding a pair of electric barber clippers in a threatening manner.
He is. This is why Abobo is bald.
A friend and I started all our attempts at the summit of this game with grinding. Then we realized enemies would duck the spin kick finisher in the late chapters of the game. Our winning attempts managed the exp gain to balance getting the good combat tech when needed and pushing that wretched kick as far back as possible.
This was one of those elite group of games that I rented as a child (er, begged my grandmother to rent, rather) so many times that it would have been cheaper in the long run to buy. What a great game.
@@unitedfools3493 Right? I was too young to go to the arcades in the 80s and by the time I could, they were in short supply where I lived. Missed a lot of great stuff, but at least held on to a lot of great quarters!
Haha, oh yeah, I know what that's about. There were several games like Super Mario Bros. 3 that we rented so many times that looking back it would have made far more sense to just buy a cart, lol. Prime example of lots of "microtransactions" adding up over time.
the editing and aesthetics of your videos are amazing
Great background mentioning The Warriors as well as Streets of Fire!
A classic! Although as you mentioned those platforming segments are abysmal. But every thing else, *chef's kiss*. Honestly didn't know growing up that the trilogy was originally arcade games...never saw them in the wild, nor was I familiar with the arcade ports to other systems at the time.
I don't even mind the platforming, it's the goddamn death bricks that really ruin this game. I didn't miss a single jump while recording this video, but I had such crappy luck with the bricks that I eventually gave up on fair play and started using cheat codes for infinite lives, starting at mission four, etc.
@@JeremyParish lol I feel ya. My fave in game cheat/glitch is to get all 7 hearts in mission 2
True. Those brick are made of nightmares
@@JeremyParish Oh god yes, at least with the platforming and the falling stalactites there's a pattern/timing.
The one big frustration with the stalactites is that it's really easy to perform a headbutt while trying to dodge (double-tap in one direction) and take a dumb hit.
16:50 About the experience grind, Nintendo Power revealed a bug in Stage 1 that allows you to grab a bat and swing at an invisible "enemy" for infinite experience. It negates the need for dawdling that you mentioned, but it's more of an exploit than a strategy.
That, and the game's brutal instakill parade in the back half sort of negates the combat skills you're earning, as you state in the video.
ALSO: +1 like for this great retrospective. Genuinely curious how many copies of this NES game were sold. The arcade game was apparently a smash hit in the U.S., for several years.
That was Stage 2.
Hope the crunch to get this game out quickly wasn’t INXS
Someone bring this man a beverage 👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽
Sadly it was, which is why the game ends on Level 42
Definitely a banger of an episode, and New Sensation as well as that Double Dragon opening music really hit the spot. Double Dragon also shows the wisdom in knowing a console's limitations when doing an arcade port, something that some developers were much better at that others. Looking forward to when Double Dragon shows up in Segaiden in the Master System version for contrast.
Relatively faithful arcade ports were a selling point for the Sega Master System, given Sega's multitude of arcade games and the Master System's superior graphical capabilities compared to the NES. However, there's not much reason to play many of the arcade ports for the Master System nowadays. The availability of better versions has made them redundant. The arcade conversions for the NES that aged well tended to work within the console's limitations and offered content not found in the arcade originals.
9:01 Credit due - it feels like the first 'fighting game' which really does give room to SF and the rest in the next 10 -15 years.
Loving the level of deep detail provided as always. For anyone who wasn't there, it's impossible to understand just how inaccessible everyday foreign cultures - especially those like Japan which were entirely without lexical cognates - were at the time. We got a warped orientalist fantasy interpretation of samurai culture, degrading salaryman stereotypes, visual art, a bowdlerized version of Zen, sushi and some giant robots. But the visual semiotics of every day life - caricature style, religious & folk myth iconography, 99% of food culture etc. may as well have come from an alien planet, their embedded cultural genealogies being so removed from Euro-American culture streams as they were.
People living in Vancouver, Hawaii or San Fransisco may have had access to Japanese diaspora-owned shops with video rentals & out of date magazines. But for everyone else, it required a lot of digging through libraries, if the information was there at all. Seeing all this stuff in video games growing up and wondering what on Earth it all was definitely had an impact on my going into academia.
The 2 player fight mode was supposed to be how the main game was supposed to look like, but they couldn't figure out how to do the entire game in that style so it was scaled down
Double Dragon in the arcade was one of my friend Jon and my favorite games, and we got to the point we could play through the full game with 2 credits each. When the NES version was released we were a little disappointed by the liberties taken with the game's arcade format, but caught up in the artificial game shortage made us determined to get our hands on a copy.
I probably said this a bazillion times on other videos already, but if you haven't gotten hold of Double Dragon & Kunio-kun: Retro Brawler Bundle, you're seriously missing out.
Yeah, it's a genuinely good compilation. I especially appreciated that they went in and fixed bugs in the original ROMs (like the infamous Double Dragon levitation glitch at the end of level 1) while also reducing slowdown. It really is the best way to play Technos' old NES games.
What does it add that you can't get from the original Famicom/NES games?
@@juststatedtheobvious9633 Aside from bugfixes, it includes every Kunioverse NES game Technos put out, including those that were never released outside Japan at the time. Every game has received a totally new and more accurate translation - plus the original western ROMs are also available. And there's online multiplayer.
Probably the highlight for western players is that it includes Kunio-Kun's Historical Period Drama, which is a pseduo-sequel to River City Ransom with the same gameplay, but done as an Edo-period Samurai story.
@@jasonblalock4429
Double Dragon's bugs improved the NES port, though. Whacking the invisible and invincible enemy sprite in the second stage meant you could ignore the level up system nobody liked the in the first place.
With that said, official and updated translations for the Kunio games sound appealing.
Thank you.
@@juststatedtheobvious9633 Oh, I should have specified: if you want to play the *original* roms, bugs and all, that's also an option. Although then you lose the speedups and de-flickering too.
MMC1 could only switch graphics in 4KB size chunks. This meant that if the set of enemies changed, then the player's graphics had to be duplicated into that graphics bank, and this was a wasteful use of space. A few MMC1 games did things slightly differently, and put the enemy graphics inside of the background tileset, such as Clash at Demonhead. So when the environment type changes, the enemies change along with it. Then finally, MMC3 threw all those problems out the window, and let the player and enemy graphics be switched independently of each other.
One! Singular creation, every Technos move we make.
One! Thrilling combination, punching mooks in the face
This is the first time I'm learning of Kunio - Double Dragon connection (and that both were developed by Technos)
As someone who (tries to) follow important retro gaming knowledge, I'm little embarrassed I didn't know about this.
Man oh man the weapons in this game felt so satisfying at the time.
I am glad to be back in nes works
Ahhh Yes Double Dragon the arcade game...It's one of the few games that totally blew my mind and left
the strongest impression at the time in my gaming life. There was Defender on the atari 2600(basically the first home console game
I ever played besides Game and Watch handheld stuff), then Super Mario Bros, then DD in arcades, then SF2 (arcade) , then Halo (XBox)
,and then GTA San Andreas...then perhaps Sleeping Dogs and GTA 5. Sadly maybe cause of age and lack of innovation in newer games..
I haven't gotten that feeling from any other games since.
Best channel on CZcams! Thanks for all your hard work! You KNOW what you are talking about and actually take time with the game and it shows!
Great rundown. Can't wait to see what you have to say about the SMS version over in that timeline!
Especially the bad collision detection, messy texture work, and the way you can spam continues until the last stage - easier than balancing the difficulty, I suppose.
2-player co-op and more enemies on screen gave the SMS one its advantages too though.
My best memories of this game are from the IBM days, where my brother and I enjoyed it in its CGA glory.
I never played Double Dragon as a kid. I rented TMNT 2 once or twice but that was it. I didn't really become a fan of side scrolling beat em ups until I was in college, had my own computer for the first time and discovered MAME. There were so many examples that never left the arcades, including some truly great ones that probably should have, and that could be a fascinating subject for a video if anyone wanted to do it.
One of the best intro soundtracks .
In retrospect, it's wild just how brutal Double Dragon is. As iconic as the hair pull is, it's a super messed up thing to do to a person. I never really thought it about it until Double Dragon Neon came out and omitted it.
Really good analysis,background and narrative. Great job! Good job at mentioning how unintuitive the origional control scheme was.
I'm a huge fan of your videos and your didactic style. Completely hooked! 😊
I can't wait for River City Ransom's video, as that's the beat 'em up that I remember most fondly. That being said, a new Jeremy Parish video is always a nugget of greatness.
That's probably at least 3 years away as that was January 1990 on the NES and 1988 won't be finished until next year since there is a lot of Segaiden to get through to catch up with the NES. 1989 would include NES, Master System and Atari 7800. (We'll see if that also includes Genesis and TurboGrafx-16)
From how you've dissected the beat-em up genre, I now wonder if MMO raids count as an extreme case of beat-em up co-ops.
I always thought that game was pretty tough. I could never get that far in it
I think they drew inspiration from Diane Lane’s character in Streets of Fire
You got 50,000 on Double Dragon?!
Yes....on the vs cabinet!
Brilliant as always
Mega Ran's classic line in his Double Dragons song from Forever Famicom always summed up how stupid I thought the RPG system was:
"I'm well versed in the martial arts but for some reason, I only know two moves to start."
Double Dragon 2 was so good
I want an NES Works T-shirt.
That’s not a terrible idea!
Mr. Parish, you make great content, thank you
love this series
I played this so much on the Atari 7800!
I think these and the Castlvanias have the best music in all of nes, possibly all 8 bit...
That music is 🥇
Ah...the first game I ever received (apart from the packed-in Super Mario Bros. / Duck Hunt cart). It was hard as balls for an 8 year old, but I plugged away at it until I beat it. Great memories!
A genre soon followed. Games like Final Fight improved on Double Dragon with better graphics. More refined gameplay and additional characters to choose from. Streets of Rage brought the format home into a console friendly format. Konami applied popular media licenses like X-Men, The Simpsons, Bucky O'Hare, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, while adding additional power to support 4 or even 6 players. For several years, co-op brawlers in the vein of Double Dragon dominated arcades. Ultimately fading only when they were supplanted by one-on-one fighting games or not. All of this is to say that when Double Dragon hit the NES, the audience was primed for it.
Very informative and well put together as always, Mr. Parish. Nice work.
Thank you!
I'd never known about the links between Kunio-Kun and Double Dragon! This really contextualizes why Double Dragon's Marian appears in River City Girls.
44k views and only 1.8k likes?! Hit that like button people! ITS THE LEAST WE CAN DO! He clearly puts a lot of effort into these videos.
It was cool hearing the history of Double Dragon. Great game and the opening theme is so memorable!
Beat-em-ups are interesting to me for tending to be about managing who is on your same horizontal level. They handle vertical attacks, for the most part, by just not allowing them, which feels like a novel concept. The physics of the game universe just don't allow you to attack vertically.
Great video :)
But how is Mr. K related to Alex? This is something that River City Ransom: Underground could have addressed. They did a LOT of lore consolidation in that, carving out a sort-of Western continuity for Kunio-Kun.
Well, ish. But it was a damn good game.
And now River City Girls is tying things together even better now.
You ain't tuff enuff for me🤗
@@crithitjace Kind of like the Blaster Master Zero trilogy.
@@crithitjace That wasn't as good in my opinion, but then I haven't played it for very long. It seems a shame, I've always wanted to play a game as the female characters, and the art is lovely. Can I ask, are the voice actors from random CZcams channels jarring? I've heard mixed results from people.
I love the NES Double Dragon. I even made my one and only CZcams video about it.
There was a point in the second level courtesy of a glitch that allowed you to max your level.
To your point about Double Dragon being the first to include a versus fighter as its alternate game mode -- didn't Trojan for NES have a 2P mode where two trojans could spar against each other?
I said the same thing😀
Gotta love that beat em up style and RPG level ups go so well together that Capcom decided it would be the best format to adapt Dungeons & Dragons into video games twice.
Very fun to play at the arcade too. Many quarters went into that in the mid-1990s from me.
I never noticed till now how much Abobo looks like Animal from the Road Warriors.
The third tine of this fork are the microcomputer original sequels to Renegade made in the West.
Yeah, I included a bit of Target Renegade specifically as a sop to those games, since the NES version is a port of a Spectrum title.
The indie brawler Eight Dragons began its development as a fan remake of the ZX Spectrum version of Target: Renegade. If you play story mode as Randt, the game is Target: Renegade in all but name.
OMG, the brick wall of “rage-quit”
I loved Double Dragon as a kid but MAN was it frustrating. The worst part was that, if I recall correctly, the manual didn't actually tell you how to do any of the special moves. At the best of times I could MAYBE get a random special attack to come out at an opportune moment, and at worst... well, I'm pretty sure I've never seen at least a third of the abilities in the game. lol there's an elbow smash??
In other news, I see you changed the filter on the monologue bookends. I feel like it's easier on the eyes and I can see you MUCH better, but it still has that old "RF in" aesthetic. I like it!
There is not and never was a filter on the bookends.
@@JeremyParish Are you saying you got the effects through actual hardware? That's absolutely crazy and I don't know why I'm surprised lol
@@ValkyrieTiara He talked about it in previous videos' comments. It's lit or exposed or transferred better than before (hard to tell).
The last thing you want to do in this game is grind! The spinning kick misses 65% of the time so you don’t want it. Work for the jump kick, try to get the knee smash by mid level 2, and work your way to the elbow. That’s it.
The art style and music is best on the 3rd nes game but the 2nd game is the best overall
I wouldn't kill for it, but I'd definitely reverse elbow smash for a new "Double Dragon Neon."
The only glaring omission was the hair grab attacks/throws. I can't believe they left out the most satisfying part of the game's combat.
Quick thing: Super Mario Bros. 2 uses the MMC3 chip, not MMC1. There was a prototype SMB2 cartridge that used the MMC1, but this was never sold or released.
Yeah, I just realized this a couple of days ago, too late for this video (though I'll correct it in the book). I actually looked up a list of mappers in NES games while putting together this video to confirm, so clearly I used a faulty source.
Don’t forget renegade also got two sequels from European developers.
This is a wild retrospective because as a kid I was adamant this version sucked and the Sega Master System version ruled because it was an actual arcade port, while the NES one was a poor imitation. Most importantly - single player... I had SO MUCH FUN playing Double Dragon with friends on the SMS.
Like they say, the grass is always greenest on the hill you choose to die on
@@alexojideagu You are just copying and pasting the same thing on multiple posts. Don't you have other original ideas?
Yeah, he's been scoured. What a pest.
Damn I didn't realize these games came so late in the 80s.
I remember when Banjo-Kazooie was 40 dollars near the Christmas of 1998 and I was just a 5 year old kid. It would be really cool if AAA games were still 40 dollars.
instead of $70
@@masonasaro2118 Actually, Ocarina of Time was 70
i mean, $60-70 is almost exactly what $40 in 1998 is today adjusted for inflation (and that $70 ocarina of time would be $120 today). game prices really have barely gone up since the 80s; it just doesn't feel that way because reaganomics has kept incomes stagnant since right around the same time that home video games started being a thing.
curious to note that more powerful than the entire Black Warriors gang is a random gray wall 😆
The programmers took seriously the philosophy of making games more difficult for North America.
Wait wait... If the fancier chips didn't happen until later 1988... How did Contra work?
I loved Double Dragon on the NES, even if as a kid I never owned it. I always ended up playing it at a friends house or renting it. I did love how fluid the game was. I also absolutely hated that brick wall section! It was a real run killer if you had bad RNG. I had played the arcade DD and liked it but disliked how slow and jerky it played.
I also had that one friend who owned a Master System and tried to convince everyone that DD on the SMS was better because it was a 2 player game and more of a faithful arcade conversion even right down to how janky the game played. Even though in order to have a chance of finishing the game that friend always had to do the infinite continues cheat at the start of round 4.
When you mentioned a "split timeline," I thought you were going to address the Evil Jimmy angle that was retconned in the sequels. ;)
I didn't know any of this stuff. Now I can kinda see why DD was a big deal.
I think of Karate Champ as the first fighting game, though maybe that doesn't count as "non-sports"?
I remember back as kids in the late '80s being disappointed that the NES game was only single player during the main adventure and being jealous upon hearing that the Sega Master system version was in fact two players simultaneous but it was years later when we actually got a chance to play the SMS version that we discovered it was just absolutely sluggish compared to the NES version, it just wasn't as fun and made us appreciate the NES version all that much more.
Fantastic episode yet again! ❤️
My first exposure to Double Dragon was on the Game Boy and I loved it enough to feel compelled to play it on NES. At the time I thought it was going to be the exact game as it was on Game Boy, but in color, so it blew my mind when it was a completely different game. I really liked the NES version until I got to that brick wall in Mission 4, which I was never able to get past and turned me off the game.
I watched a playthrough of the 4th mission on the legitimately awful Secret Video Game Tricks - Codes and Strategies VHS, and even the pros were not able to beat that level without video editing tricks.
My biggest personal biggest disappointment, however, is that the Game Boy version has the complete track of the mission intro theme in 4-1, whereas the NES version only has like 5 seconds of it.
As far as I have been able to determine, there is no sure strategy to get past those damned bricks. Sometimes you skip past, no problem. Sometimes they juggle you to death as you flip helplessly through the air.
Do you know about the glitch where you can just keep kicking the background in level 2 to farm all of the EXP?
7:16 I was beside myself with grief when GRIGR went out of business back in the early 2000's.
Oh neat I actually picked this up at the local store like today, now I can play and have knowledge about it
There's always the level 2 exp glitch that kind of eases the grind.
7:16 Can you clear up a long mystery for me? What does it say on the building? It looks like GRIGR, but what does that mean? My favorite experience farming was in Mission 2 with glitching an enemy and then using the bat on the spot where he was standing in rapid fire.
I have always figured that it was someone's or some company's initials, such as how "TJC" is an initialism for Technos of Japan Co., and the tile was repeated but cut off at the edge of the screen, like it should be "GRIGRIGRIGRI".
@@batmandalorian5504 I like that theory (and the TJC certainly checks out). If that is the case, I wish we knew who it is.
12:31 What is that sound? It sounds like someone whispering something. Its shortly after the timecode I posted.
i never gopt past the part where you have to jump kick over pits
More fun than the arcade version. Gameboy port also good fun.
The nes version of double dragon kick ass. 😀👍🎮
ABOBO!!
Did you know Double Dragon is actually the sequel to a canceled game called Single Serpent?
Jimmy and... Bimmy!?
I played NES Double Dragon until my thumbs fell off.
I could have sworn Mario 2 and MegaMan 2 used the MMC3.
Currently River City Girls merged the two putting them in the same universe
Urban Champions is the first one on one fighting game for NES, wasn't it?
14:48 - 50,000 in Double Dragon!
(I'm sorry.)