Courtesy of GameRoom Magazine and just in-time for your Christmas wish-list, here is the Dragon's Lair HD-DVD review from the current (December) issue of GameRoom...

"Dragon's Lair: the fantasy adventure where you become a valiant knight on a quest to rescue the fair princess from the clutches of an evil dragon."  

That might sound like the intro to a lame Saturday morning cartoon, but for many arcade kids out there the arrival of Dragon's Lair (and its lame intro voice-over) is a landmark memory. Seemingly out of nowhere, a game of a completely higher caliber landed at their local gaming haven and despite costing 50c per game players unloaded their pocket-money. Dragon's Lair took arcades by storm; it was so successful that I've heard tales of arcade operators installing additional monitors above the cabinet, so the crowds waiting for their chance to play could watch in awe. Looking back and comparing Dragon's Lair to its contemporaries, it is still hard to believe that this game was in arcades back in 1983. 

Dragon's Lair was the first laserdisc videogame. Created by classical feature film animator Don Bluth and programmer Rick Dyer, to many it's seen as an interactive movie rather than a videogame because, well, just look at it! For those unfamiliar with how Dragon's Lair plays (hang your heads in shame), here's a quick rundown... As the game starts the player is treated to an atmospheric scene showing Dirk (our hero) approaching a menacing looking castle. Almost immediately the player is presented with a threat - dirk falls through the broken drawbridge and is about to be eaten by an unseen tentacled monster. At points such as this the player must push the joystick in an appropriate direction or push the action button in order to resolve each situation. The first two scenes (the drawbridge and the inner corridor) always play in sequence, however, once you get past the corridor things get a little hectic; the game chooses which scenes to play at random so you're never sure what's coming up next. This random element means the player must be ready for any sequence at any time. To help determine what to do in some circumstances, the player is given a visual hint, such as a brief flash of an object or door. Other sequences, however, offer no hints and the player must figure out what to do either by trial and error and a lot of quarters.  

Since it's arcade release various companies have brought Dragon's lair to the home gaming market as the systems developed throughout the years. Coleco snapped up the home rights to it and it has appeared in one form or another on Coleco Adam, Commodore 64, NES, Amiga, Sega CD and even the GameBoy has seen a little Princess Daphne action. None of these versions could have hoped to hold a candle to the original and only with the more recent PC and DVD versions (the remastered 20th Anniversary DVD in particular) we've started to see the game devolve back to it's original quality. According to the interview segments included on the disc, only now has a format emerged that truly does Dragon's Lair justice in Don Bluth's eyes. This is Dragon's Lair High Definition.

I remember playing the game's Amiga home computer conversion and thinking how incredible it looked. For its era, the Amiga offered some really lush graphics and sound capabilities that made Dragon's Lair much more faithful to the arcade laserdisc version than any previous console or computer. Instead of attempting to recreate the interactive movie, most 8-bit conversions decided to switch the gameplay to a platformer. With the Amiga version players were given a teemingly arcade-perfect conversion of the laserdisc - all on nine 720kb floppy discs. Thanks to a split-screen Time Capsule segment on the HD-DVD, my memories of the "dazzling" Amiga version of the game are now shattered! The Time Capsule uses the game's final scene to illustrate how the game's visual quality has progressed during it's many format conversions. So contrary to my rose-tinted memories, the Amiga version now reminds me of an animated mosaic rather than a crisp and fluid classical animation masterpiece.  

Digital Leisure has gone one step beyond for this HD-DVD (and Blu-Ray) release. Each frame has been restored meticulously. Instantly you can tell that dust and scratches that made it into the original film and its consequent re-masters have been wiped out. Initially I didn't think that the high definition version was all that superior to the 20th Anniversary DVD version. However, looking at both versions playing side by side in the Time Capsule segment, it's clear that Digital Leisure has really taken full advantage of the immense picture quality that the high definition formats offer. Background layouts that once looked a little blurry are remarkably sharper, blocks of color are more vivid, gradients blend more smoothly, lines are "highly" defined and give the whole picture a more solid feel. The original mono soundtrack has also been given a new lease on life; the sound engineers have done an excellent job at developing it into Dolby Digital 5.1 sound, which sounds great coming out of a surround sound system but hasn't distorted the original sound in any way. These video and audio enhancements add great atmosphere to the game.

The HD-DVD gamplay is identical to that of the original laserdisc version; albeit without the "flicker" that the original experienced as the game jumped between video sequences in the arcade. As with the DVD version, controls translate from the arcade's 4-way joystick and button to a DVD remote control's directional buttons as if it were always meant to be.  

One area that I feel the HD-DVD is lacking in is it's special features. There is a lot extra footage, TV spots, documentaries and other fanboy material that has been featured in past DVD releases but has been dropped for this release. Perhaps the degraded TV archive footage didn't meet quality standards when seen alongside the high definition content, but it would have been nice to see. The Interview with Don Bluth, Rick Dyer and producer Gary Goldman does reveal several interesting tidbits (most interesting are the conflicts between programing animation teams and mention of Playboy's influence over Princess Daphne's curves). The Video Commentary runs through every scene in the game with a picture-in-picture frame of the creators discussing the game. For the most part, this Video Commentary seems to be a continuation of the aforementioned Interview; they don't go into any great detail about most individual scenes and it might have been nice to see some animatics here instead of showing Don, Rick and Gary sitting there watching a monitor.  

Another noteworthy alteration is that the original frames have been cropped from their 4:3 aspect. The very top and bottom areas of the original frames are not seen as a result, however this was a necessary evil to fit the game into the now standard HDTV 16:9 screen aspect. I don't feel that this detracts from the game in any way, but it might disappoint some of the die-hard Dragon's Lair fans out there.  

The outstanding quality of the game itself eclipses all these minor gripes. If you're a Dragon's Lair fan and need an excuse to add an HD-DVD or Blu-Ray player to your game-room's Christmas list - this is what you've been waiting for!

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