The KO #37 - Double Dragon (PS1) has the greatest intro ever I bet
1This is Double Dragon for the PS1 (played on a PS2)! It only came out in Japan, which is too bad because it's a darn crazy fighting game. Here I am flailing around for one credit with all the characters (including the two secret characters!); I started this off feeling like oh man this is cool because it's so crazy, but by the end of it I was actually feeling like...this is just a dang fun fighting game, you know? The four attack buttons, which are basically just four power levels of attack, seem a little interchangeable a lot of the time (and will also switch between punch and kick on the same button for standing or crouching, sometimes! : o), but in a way, especially in my don't-actually-want-to-study-how-stuff-works-properly style, that just sort of adds to the madness; there's a lot of weirdness and imbalance, and some clunkiness and ugliness, but the game overall just has a really fun feel to it. Like, there's hardly a character I don't enjoy playing in this game, which is...more or less unheard of for me with a fighting game!
Would love to get like a PS4 port of the NeoGeo original, guess I won't hold my breath on that but hey, you never know! And until that we have this, which isn't half bad and in some ways is quite amazing. : o
Time stamps:
0:00 - Specifically amazing, the game intro, a sort of music-video style compilation of clips from the live action Double Dragon movie that came out in the States, is so great! That music just gets me pumped every time. I haven't seen the movie...and now I kind of do, but I also more kind of don't, because how could it be as good as this intro???
2:04 - Title screen
2:08 - Over Drive Mode - As far as I can tell, just has extra flashy effects when you do a super move
2:14 - "Player Select" character select screen
2:22 - Play with Marian - she's a charge character who doesn't really feel to me like she should be a charge character; then again, I'm just particularly bad with charge characters anyway : P
7:00 - Okay here's one of the weirder things in a game full of weird things: when you pause the game, you can then scale your character's sprite independently on the X and Y axes by moving the joystick; unpause, and you're now fighting with the character in whatever size and aspect you scaled them to! : o You can only scale down from their regular size, not up, and their actual hit and hurt boxes don't change size at all, so it gets a little weird to play, but, um--well, it's in there! : o
10:44 - Dulton. What a name, man.
19:48 - Eddie. Eddie seems cool as heck, I want to get better with him.
28:04 - Rebecca. Seems like one of the strongest members of the regular cast; I did pretty well with her, relatively speaking of course, and I came to dread facing the CPU Rebecca!
40:23 - Billy. As one of the two titular Double Dragons, I suspect Billy--as well as Jimmy--is really good. I didn't know what I was doing and got overconfident. : o Their transformation super move (hit all four buttons at once) makes them super tough!
46:51 - Jimmy. "Jim-mehh!" as the announcer would say. : D The other "Dragon," and pretty tough.
58:15 - Burnov is a bad, bad man. That crouching strong punch of his is amazing.
1:09:18 - I hate, hate, hate Amon's "fighting on an airplane" stage. I thought picking Amon would save me from having to see it--so of course the first match I'm given is an Amon mirror. ; P Amon is a ninja but I don't dislike him as much as most fighting game ninjas; he isn't as teleporty (I don't think?), and plenty of his moves are just plain bad-ass.
1:18:32 - Abobo! The iconic hulking strong guy of the Double Dragon franchise. His head-flexing in this is so gross! 8p His super--when it hits(?:?)--is so devastating. Stay huge and weird!
1:30:44 - Cheng-Fu, the Jackie Chan "Drunken Master" rip-off. Fun times, some great flowing combos.
1:39:10 - Unlocking the secret characters. Spoilers? Spoilers! I learned this from GameFAQs: you highlight Billy for 3 seconds, then Marian for 3 seconds, then Cheng-Fu for 3 seconds, then Jimmy for 3 seconds, and voila, the two secret characters appear! They're the boss characters, I guess.
1:39:26 - In my hands Duke kind of seemed balanced, but he's got a teleport move that, to judge from what CPU Duke would do to me in the next play attempt, is really devastating.
1:53:30 - Shuko. Really overpowered. : P
2:19:53 - Normal Mode (as Marian) - for comparison
2:28:13 - Tiny 3D Mode - Oh no. Oh no.
2:30:40 - Options. Some of the usual, not sure quite what all of them do though.
2:31:00 - Memory Card. I hear there's a sprite edit mode in there. It was late and I didn't care to burn a mem card slot or something to find out. : P
Hardware: PS2 to Framemeister to Elgato HD60