Double Dragon (Game Gear) - Playthrough
145A playthrough of Virgin Interactive's 1993 beat 'em up for the Sega Game Gear, Double Dragon.
Double Dragon for the Game Gear (known as Double Dragon: The Revenge of Billy Lee in Europe) is something of a departure from the series it claims to be part of, being much darker and more violent than most of the mainline games. It's also notable for being a Game Gear exclusive - unlike most Sega 8-bit titles, the portable version is entirely different from the Master System game of the same name.
This Double Dragon has you, as Billy, off trying to save his (already dead?) brother Jimmy. The general format is the same as the classic games: you move from left-to-right, punching, kicking, and weaponing anything to death in your eyeline that dares to move.
And you get guns, which feels extremely weird on a Double Dragon game, but whatever. I enjoyed gunning down most of the first stage, even if it goes completely against the grain of the other games.
The moveset has been changed a bit and gives you a fair bit of versatility in your moves, though the controls do get a bit awkward at times south so many things mapped to combinations of the D-pad and the 1 and 2 buttons. The controls don't often get in the way, but you'll definitely notice when they do, because this game is tough. It feels much fairer than Double Dragon III, but it is much longer and requires a lot of thumb dexterity to get to the end.
The graphics and sound are excellent for the Game Gear. The backgrounds are among the best on the system with tons of detail and color. If I remember correctly, the game included save RAM to bump up the quality of the visuals - the game has no save feature, but the memory is instead repurposed as working memory for background tiles. The sprites look great, too, even if their animation tends to be a bit choppy at times, and the music is also pretty good, providing some peppy tunes to back the action.
Double Dragon on the Game Gear is certainly the odd-duck of the series, but if you can bear the heavy difficulty level, there's a lot of fun to be had.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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