Page 52 - OSG Presents Classic Gamer Magazine #5

by Earl Green
by Earl Green
As pretty as the laserdisc games were to look at - admittedly,
ow that you've pulled your DVD player out of the box and the Disney-style animation was a revelation in a day and age
N N N N watched The Matrix sixteen bajillion times - both with and when Zaxxon, Pole Position, and Buck Rogers: Planet Of Zoom
without the commentary - what next? Well, believe it or not, were considered games with groundbreaking graphics capabili-
your DVD player may be a real live classic gaming machine. ties - the games were also nothing more than electronic choose-
First, step into your Wayback Machine, time-hopping your-path books (Remember those from your childhood? "If
DeLorean, or TARDIS, and revisit the year 1983, when the coin- you're going to fight the wizard, go to page 29. If you decide to
op video game industry was sure - I mean, they were absolutely escape down the other corridor, turn to page 35 instead.")
positive - that the Next Big Thing was here, and the future be- Dragon's Lair, Space Ace, and other games of their ilk had pre-
longed to laserdisc games. programmed structures. If you didn't move your joystick or hit
In laserdisc games, a simple processor awaited user input your button at the right time in accordance with those structures,
and would then decide whether or not the correct pre- you'd lose a life.
programmed action had been performed at the right time. De- Now, I know you've missed these games. You long for the
pending upon the outcome, that processor would then seek out, days when scantily-clad Princess Daphne cavorted about and
as fast as the machine's built-in industrial grade laserdisc player squealed advice to Dirk in a high-pitched voice that could cause
would allow, an appropriate digitally-recorded video clip - either harm to small pets. You miss the fun of geeky Dexter transform-
the next few moments of your adventure, or your character's ing into Space Ace almost at random - and then changing back at
hideous and painful death. the most inopportune moments. Fear not, true laser believers -
The first of these games received a lot of attention. Don the experience can be yours again!
Bluth, the animator behind The Secret of NIMH and approxi- Digital Leisure has re-mastered the original animation ele-
mately two animated minutes of the movie Xanadu, created ments and turned out multi-path DVDs of the Don Bluth trilogy of
Dirk the Daring and Princess Daphne, and banished them to games that can actually be played once more, using your DVD
Starcom's Dragon's Lair. The publicity generated by this new remote control's direction buttons as a joystick and the "select"
method of creating a game was considerable, and everyone button as an action button.
from Atari to Stern scrambled to create their own laserdisc- But is this necessarily a good thing?
driven games. But Bluth, with Starcom chief Rick Dyer, already Setting aside the rat-in-a-maze style of game play that these
had a follow-up planned in Space Ace, and eventually they also games relied upon, the DVD versions aren't without problems.
released Dragon's Lair II: Timewarp. Much relies upon the infrared signal strength and response time

Classic Gamer Magazine December 2000 52