Double Dragon Trilogy

🛢️ The release has already been criticized enough; it's truly flawed, full of bugs, and has incredibly slow menus. Let's talk about the games themselves, because these are literally some of the worst games you can find among cult classics, technically. Each game doesn't improve festures of the previous one, but rather breaks them, adding even more flaws. They're short, clunky, and designed to squeeze out coins. Bad hitboxes, no balance, and can only be completed with abuses. Calling the third one a "game" is an absolute insult, as its final is torture even with cheats. Old arcade games are re-released with optional infinite continues for a reason, and while there are difficulty modes, level selection, and overall an attempt to make these creations playable, «DD» still has many bad games in its long-running series, and these are three of them. Don't bother buying it; instead, play their more acceptable ports on specific older systems.

Um dos ports mais mal feitos que vi na vida. Mal adaptado para controle e teclado. Bugs e bugs nos cenários. Apanhamos mais que Maduro na venezuela. Essa trilogia é uma falta de respeito a Doube dragon.

THIS IS TRASH, save your money go download an emulator.

No local player is poop. Stop being poop.

Terrible, terrible, terrible ports. Runs like ♥♥♥♥. Buggy. The games just don't feel right. I bought this to support the franchise I love, but this is bad and I'll just keep playing the ROMs I've had for years, which run so much better than this. Was it even play-tested before release?

Double Dragon Trilogy to niestety masakra i to nie w pozytywnym znaczeniu. Rozumiem nostalgię i wiek oryginalnych gier, ale to wydanie kompletnie mnie nie przekonało. Sterowanie jest toporne, rozgrywka szybko zaczyna męczyć, a całość zwyczajnie nie daje mi żadnej frajdy. Można docenić znaczenie Double Dragon dla historii beat ’em upów, ale dzisiaj zdecydowanie wolę wspominać te gry, niż faktycznie w nie grać. Próbowałem, ale nie dałem rady. Nie polecam.

The original arcade trilogy of this two-fisted, beat' em up bonanza -- which, in time, made its way to the consoles & ruined friendships when players realized they could kick their buddy in the face!!

Really bad port its speed up and enemies have ♥♥♥♥ hit boxes

A poor port of a trilogy that is famous for popularizing the beat-em-up genre. I played the Double Dragon trilogy on the NES, which were awesome games (though III is insanely difficult, and playing it as an adult, I couldn’t believe that I was able to make it to the final boss of that game as a kid without cheating). I always wanted to try the arcade versions because I never really ran into them and wondered what they were actually like. When I saw this, I got really excited because I love when classics are modernized with a button to pop in more quarters and even rewind features and other enhancements. I saw the poor reviews of this game, and I wasn’t sure what to do. I figured I’d give it a try. Everyone’s complaints are valid; while it’s not the worst gaming experience, it is not a good job of preserving gaming history while enabling modern conveniences. The Positives: -It’s the three Double Dragon games in one package. If you like the beat-em-up genre, then you’ll want to see the series that popularized it. -I had fun playing each game, and everything but the final bosses of 2 and 3 was generally an enjoyable experience. -It was interesting to see the same levels as the NES games but with enhanced graphics. The Negatives: -The negative of the original games is that they're meant to pop quarters into, and the way they did it was to get you to pop a few quarters into the game across the game for ~20 minutes or so, and then they take a ton of money by making the final boss take an eternity and have cheap attacks like the “I’m going to randomly appear and take 1/3 of your life” attack in 2 and the “I’m going to (literally) bounce from one side of the screen to the other and then sweep you into the air from there over and over and over again while my character sprites flash between two outfits” attack in 3. -Setting aside things like janky gameplay from the classics that are often a limitation of the hardware available at the time, I can’t believe 3 shipped in that state—it literally plays like you’re in a room with a strobe light. I looked up the original on YouTube to make sure that it was the game and not just the version I was playing, and it really is like that. What is it with the 3s of beat-em-up games completely ruining the gameplay that made them great? Both Double Dragon 3 and Streets of Rage 3 change their gameplay (this flickers; Streets of Rage is unrealistically fast and feels weird)? -Usually, the NES games were a step down from their arcade counterparts, yet we accepted them to play at home (example: TMNT 2: The Arcade Game). However, the NES versions of Double Dragon are arguably better than their arcade versions. It might be nostalgia, but I really liked everything in the NES that was missing from the arcade, from the special moves in DD1 to the fun levels in DD2 to the additional characters in DD3. It was still fun, but I felt like the arcade games were just me standing far away, coming up from above or below, and spamming kick. In the NES game, I could do more than that, and my hurricane kick hit more often. -Now, to the port. The criticisms are legitimate: the menus are slow, which isn’t a big deal at first, but if you go back to the menu after a death, it’s brutal. Yes, they got rid of the classic information parts of the screen like lives, health, and time, replacing them with an overlay that doesn’t match the graphics style (and, as I was playing in full-screen mode on a 4K display, way too small and poorly placed/formatted). The health doesn’t even make much sense, as I’d get hit a few times and not lose any, then I’d get hit once and lose two bars. No, you can’t add lives or continues with any form of emulated coin inserts, and you can only really get the POWER UP item in 3 in the store (because you can’t insert more quarters). There are no real new features other than the difficulty modes and the story vs. arcade mode, the story mode just saving your progress at the cost of no continues. I will say that the controller settings worked well (I’ve played retro game modernizations where the controls ruined the game, so that’s a win), and the music options were cool (I did the “8-bit” setting). But, looking back at videos of the original arcade game, it feels like it was a little faster with a little better visuals than this port had. Overall, I just don’t know what to say when I get classic games with bad ports. I’m going to not recommend, but what I’d really do is buy this license, which gives you the right to play this trilogy, and then play it in any way that you can to get the best experience with the three arcade games. I think that Sega and Capcom are the gold standard for offering their classics on modern platforms where people can legitimately buy and play the game, but I still like to pay for any version made for sale to incentivize other companies to make their classics purchasable. I just wish companies like this, Square-Enix, and others that modernize their classics with changes that no one asked for would learn that I want the game I played back then with just a few features added like rewind, virtual coin additions, bug fixes, and other convenience or bonus features and not changed graphics and a version of the game that doesn’t have the look and feel of what I remember. That’s all anyone wants, and then you can make all the remakes and reboots and whatever else you want to make for kids today who don’t like the old stuff. See Final Fantasy Renaissance vs. Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster and Star Wars: Despecialized Edition vs. Star Wars: Special Edition for examples. A slow version of this game with a crappy overlay and a slow menu with options they added (e.g., difficulty and story vs. arcade modes) when they could’ve just had virtual insert-coin functionality and saved themselves hours and hours of development time just doesn’t make much sense. I appreciate the control and music options, but literally everything else could just be reproducing the original arcade game without changes and would’ve been better than the changes they probably spent a lot of time on.