My younger brother got grounded too. He of course was guilty by knowing me because i needed an accomplice.
source
The day sticks out in my head: It probably wasn't even that late.... there is a good chance you are reading this at a later time than i fired up my NES to play this game with y brother. It was likely 10 or 11 PM, I have no idea. Perhaps this is something that you can only relate to if you were a child of the times when these games were released. Even though the game, the levels, the enemies, and ultimately the ending were completely stupid...it was something that needed to be conquered......
source
Double Dragon seems exceptionally dumb by today's standards, but back in 1988 it was the best thing ever and the sales of this game and the fame that it was able to accomplish are a testament to exactly that. We loved it , and so did literally everyone else.
I loved it to the point of defying my bedtime and then quietly firing the NES back up under what I thought was a quiet environment..... but i had to get my brother involved because 2 players were necessary to beat this game. As quiet as we tried to be, my mother had "eagle ears" and busted us.
the game of course, was completely full of S**t....unless you finally won it, which you would eventually thanks to the unlimited continues
It was a long time ago and yes, i know, these graphics seem completely terrible by today's standards.
However, you need to understand at the time Double Dragon was just incredible and it inspired a cartoon and even and awful movie.
All in all, i am really happy that the night my mom busted me and my brother playing Double Dragon happened because it is still in my mind today many years later. The game looks dumb today, but man oh man was it epic in the last 80's. We LOVED it and i have extremely fond memories of playing it.
I strongly encourage you to watch the film because that is an epic journey into awful that really can't be replicated.....or ...doubled. (see what i did there?)
I recall watching the cartoon when I was a child... I never actually played the games, but I did know of them!
I suppose with emulation, I really have no excuse, but equally, there are a lot of other games that I'm more into that you could say the exact same thing for!
Oh well, I'll tackle it at some point I'm sure... I have enough time to do so!
i think you had to be alive when they were released to appreciate them. If someone were to play them now OMG they are terrible. I suppose it is really difficult for anyone today to really realize what sort of extremely limited technology we were dealing with at the time.
It was just so incredible to 12-year old me but honestly , if i were to emulate the game tonight i am absolutely certain i would switch it off in 2 minutes.
I was actually alive back then... I did see pictures of the game on C64, but I don't think that I was very interested in the game back then; I have learnt about a lot of console games over the years, especially as I was pretty much exclusively C64 and PC (excepting the odd bit of Game Boy) until about 1997, when I got into emulation (I was 14 then), because I wanted to learn about the history of the older Final Fantasy games before VII (which was coming out on the PC), although ironically, at the time I saw TV ads for it when it was coming to PS1, I scoffed dismissively at them!
In any case, I'm for most intents and purposes a gaming historian and an amateur ludologist, so I try to learn as much about games as I can, as well as the tech surrounding them, because that helps contextualise the decisions made with a particular game at the time!
It was between this and contra that consumed our 8 bit sidescrolling smash-em-up two player days. I don't even recall the ending, your right though, it was something like.. great job, now play again.. and credits roll.. totally anticlimatic..
...but the point was just to conquer it like you said..
it had to be done in one sitting though, if I recall, because this was the era before save points, am I right?
yeah man, there was no saving of games at this time. If i am not mistaken Zelda was the first game that had a saving mechanism. It might have had some ridiculous 36 digit code that you could write down to "save".... jeez... remember those?
ah yeah, that was a pain.. i used to keep them on scrap pieces of paper under my bed.. it would suck to lose one, or forget it in your pants pocket that your mom put in the laundry.. lol.. still.. NES was arguably still a golden era for video games.. so much versatility and challenge.
With regards to the ending, I think this is the game where you had to fight against each other one on one at the end... if it isn't, then I'm not sure.
You're right you fight together to save the girl. Then you fight each other for the girl
Posted using Partiko Android
Have you tried playing the game recently? I’m often surprised by how nostalgia and good design can hold up a game
Posted using Partiko iOS
i would imagine that it would just make me mad to play this game now. I think i will just leave it in my memories :)
This was before you could save a game wasn’t it?
Posted using Partiko iOS
It was quality. I played it but it wasn't my favourite.
pd: I think you're younger than me haha!
While I enjoyed the NES game, I was always disappointed that we never got anything approaching a true arcade port of the original.
Double Dragon II on the other hand got one of the best home ports of 8-bit history. Even calling it a 'port' seems wrong, because it's so expansive and different over the original in the best ways possible that it's pretty much an entirely new game. :)
It was a pretty awesome game. I think there was a clone of it too called River City Ransom that was pretty fun to play as well. Then they came out with Double Dragon II and it brought back all the great times. I never got grounded because of this game, but I do remember playing it.