Babble #9: What Dragon? What Revenge?!

  So Dragon’s Revenge for the Genesis… where to start.  What if I tell you it’s the bastard child of Devil’s Crush and Tengen?  No help? Then let’s have a history lesson first.  It all started on the Turbographic-16 when Compile and Naxat Soft made THE BEST VIDEO PINBALL GAME EVER MADE and it was called Devil’s Crush.  It was a questionably Satanic game of pinball where the entire board was based upon American demon mythos.  It was a sequel to a previously awesome pinball game called Alien Crush, based upon American alien mythos (especially the movie Aliens).  These games are the best thing on the TG-16 and are now easily accessible thanks to the Wii’s Virtual Console, so if you haven’t played them… GET THEM THIS INSTANT YOU BASTARDS!

  Anyways, Devil’s Crush being the example of bad assery it is, it could not be contained on one system alone, and got a port to the Genesis.  While the Genesis port is surprisingly not as good as the original TG-16 version, it’s still a pretty good port and worth a look at.  The port was released in America by Tengen, under the name “Dragon’s Fury” for whatever reason.  Yeah, yeah, I know they wanted to remove the “Devil” part of the name not to offend people.  But with all the demon mythology in it, calling it “Dragon’s Fury” really seems a bit silly, and while there is a dragon in the game and a woman that turns into a demon dragon sorta’ thing, I can’t think of anytime where I felt a dragon was specifically after my ball’s little silver ass.  Nonetheless a great game on the Genesis, even if it was inferior to the TG-16 one.

Well, Tengen must’ve made a decent chunk of change from Devil’s… errr.. Dragon’s Fury, because they decided to make their own sequel to the game without any authorization from Naxat or Compile (hey, ir worked for Pac-Man) and made Dragon’s Revenge.  Once again, I’m not sure what dragon wants revenge on me, but I’m guessing it’s miss shapeshifter from the first game.  I mainly came to this conclusion because the first thing you see in the game is a digitized woman turning into a dragon via some rather doofy effects.  I will call her Ms. Sinistar from this point on, because the first thing she says to you is “I LIVE!!!”  The fact that in the game her face will randomly fly off the field yelling various random phrases also adds to the Sinistar feel, but more on that later.  Let’s get to the actual game.

First of all I want to say this game is no Devil’s Crush or even Alien’s Crush by any stretch of the imaginiation.  It pales in comparison to either of the games rather badly, but does that make it bad?  Oh, hell no.  It’s actually a really fun game and a pretty good effort by Tengen.  So I applaud their attempt and say, “Good show, ol’ chap, pip pip and all that.”  It’s just not as good as the original games, and honestly, how could they?  Those games are damn near perfect.  Though despite it’s fun, Dragon’s Revenge has a lot of things that annoy me.  So let’s get to the actual review segment of this rather lengthy article.

Since the first game was about aliens and the second about demons, this game seems to take on a rather generic midevil fantasy theme.  It’s actually a rather neat idea even if it’s somewhat less inspired.  The gameplay is rather solid, even if the physics seem a little weird, the playing field is rather angular and some parts feel a bit sparse, but it’s still has an interesting design and just enough stuff to do and keep it enjoyable.

Like Devil’s Crush this game has several little bonus levels you can into to fight a boss for some hella’ bonus cred and potentially end the game.  The boss designs are decent, but don’t feel very inspired.  They’re mostly revolve around just hitting the boss character in the middle of the stage and don’t lose your ball.  They sort of try for a 3D/isometric view to make it look like your ball is going into the foreground and back, but the only thing that seems to be affect by this is the ball, as everything else seems front and in front of you, so the ball ends up looking less 3D and more like it’s just shrinking and growing for no apparent reason.

The graphics in this game is kind of a mixed bag.  The hand drawn sprites actually look pretty nice, like the skull head and the dragon and what not, but the digitized graphics look ass terrible.  Most of them look like they took a picture of something and then zoomed it up to the point of being a pixelized mess.  The women with the swords at the top is one of the best examples of this mess.  Sure, the screenshot doesn’t look bad, but that’s because the picture was shrank down for this article.  Trust me, when you see it on your TV screen it looks like a terrible blocky mess.  Also in the middle of the field is Ms. Sinistar, who will decide to chase you down if you hit the right buttons and what not.  She looks fine when she’s dormant and sleeping, but the moment she’s flying around the graphic looks so redonkulus since it’s just part of her face flying around.  It looks less like your being chased by an actual face or a head and more like a magazine cut out.  Another weird effect in the game is when you pull the plunger back to shoot the ball, the ball starts shooting random arrows and making explosions.  It’s a rather pointless effect, but still manages to look kinda’ neat.  Anothre weird effect is when you shoot the ball into this random dragon’s mouth he starts doing a weird mouth animation as the ball slowly goes through his snout and down his throat.  It maks it look less likehe’s swallowing it and more like he’s gagging on it as an invisible hand is shoving it down his throat.  It’s both humorous and unsettling to look at.  In short I think the game would’ve looked better if they ditched the digitized graphics and did it all in hand drawn sprites.

The music and sound is another problem.  The music is decent enough, but the sound effects are just plain weird, generic, and out of place.  For example when you hit the giant gem at the top of the screen several times, it will make a glass shattering sound, yet the gem itself does not shatter.  I just find this weird and off.  Also there’s a lot of digitized vocal sounds and these get really annoying real quick.  There’s this loud “UGH!” sound that gets played when the aforementioned dragon is hit in the face or when you kill a monster.  It’s annoying, but not near as annoying as Ms. Sinistar.  As mentioned her face randomly flies off and gives chase while yelling “I LIVE!” and various other phrases.  These clips aren’t too bad, but everytime you hit her (or certain items around her) she does this rather erotic sounding moan.  This may sound funny or even potentially seductive as I’m sure it was meant to be, but since it’s only one clip and it’s repeated over and over and over and over, it quickly becomes less amusing and more downright obnoxious REALLY FAST.  In fact, it hit annoying for me the third time I heard it, and trust me, that’s not very long into the game for that to happen.  I do however like the “GAME OVER, PUNY HUMANS!” line she spouts when you die.

The last thing I need to mention is the cover art on the game cartridge.  It’s quite possibly the cheapest cover art ever as the cartridge art (not the box art) is the exact same cartridge art from Dragon’s Fury, except with the girl’s eyes moved down.  I’m not kidding.  That’s some pretty cheap shit right there, Tengen.  Was getting someone else to draw the cover REALLY that expensive/hard to do?  WTFH?!

Overall Dragon’s Revenge is a fun game despite it’s flaws, and it’s definitely worth playing if you have a Genesis.  It’s not an extremely common game, but no one asks much for it either.  In fact, the Movie Trading Company by my house currently has it for $5, so it’s not like people are asking much.  So I say look into it, it’s not the greatest video pinball game ever made, but it’s definitely fun.

I leave you guys with a few vids.  One shows the intros to both the Genesis version of Devil’s Crush (Japanese version thus not being called Dragon’s Fury) and Dragon’s Revenge.  The other is a look at one of the bonus rounds in Dragon’s Revenge.  Enjoy.