The cabinet mode also has lights that tell you which direction to press located around the joystick. It’s a directional overlay that tells you the exact button press, and you simply have to be quick on the draw. This is not the same as the flashing-light indicators the games originally utilized to guide your actions. The most important addition is the “move guide” that you can optionally add to the bottom of every game. From here out, this will be the standard Definitive Review fine for bad menu design in classic game collections.

I’m fining Dragon’s Lair Trilogy $ 5 in value for this. I’ve been playing games my entire life and that’s the absolute worst menu select choice I’ve ever seen. I would have looked past it and just called this lazy, but then I keep going back to the gold/faded gold highlighting decision. Combined with the distinct lack of options for one of the extra features that I’ll get to and you can tell they just didn’t really care all much about presentation. But, if you weren’t paying that close of attention when you started the game, you wouldn’t know. For Dragon’s Lair, is purple THIS ONE, or is it red? You would know from the front menu of the game since there’s more than two options to choose from and only one is a different color. Why not have an arrow? You know, that time-honored symbol you use to point at something and say THIS ONE! The other menus aren’t that much better. By the way, in every menu option where there is only two choices, this problem is there. That they MEANT for the brightened option to be the highlighted one, but whoever designed the menu accidentally crossed their 1s with their 0s and got it backwards. This is such a obviously bad choice that I’m convinced it’s an accident.

What option do you think is highlighted here? Believe it or not, “Continue” is the highlighted option, while nothing is highlighting the bright “quit” option that stands out a lot more in this screen. Take a look at this screenshot from when you pause the game. Oh, before that, I have to mention the menus of Space Ace. But, before I figure up the value of the games, I need to look at the slate of extra features in the set.

I’ll round up the $19.99 price and say Dragon’s Lair Trilogy must get $20 in value to win my Seal of Approval. Since that’s the sold-separately price, we’ll round it up and say a quality game in this set is worth $10 in value. This is pretty much how my reviewing appears to developers.ĭragon’s Lair Trilogy retails for $19.99 on PlayStation, Nintendo Switch, and Xbox, with each individual game being sold separately on platforms like Steam for $9.99. Or, maybe not? The only way I can know for sure is to put these games through the wringer. A “you had to be there” we can’t understand. The excitement of actually playing Dragon’s Lair was lost on me and my generation. When Dragon’s Lair 3D: Return to the Lair released in 2002, to 13-year-old me, it was just another game, and not even a good one. Sadly, it’s a phenomena I’ll never be able to fully understand no matter how hard I try. No game that has aged as badly is remembered so fondly by the generation that experienced it in-person in arcades. Look away for a moment and you risk missing it completely, but if you saw it, you’ll never forget it. On the other hand, I had one reader describe Dragon’s Lair’s reign as king of arcades like a bright, beautiful shooting star. In my eleven years on social media, I have never once heard a single person trade a tale of Space Ace in arcades. They served as little more than novelties, or “attractions” for arcades. They’re famous for three things: being beautiful to look at, being difficult, and barely qualifying as video games. The look on his face was so precious, a look that continued later in the day when I threw the disc in and proceeded to get totally demolished by the games.ĭragon’s Lair, Space Ace, and Dragon’s Lair II: Time Warp are games that never stood a chance against the test of time. Fast forward to Christmas morning, 2010, and waiting for me under the Christmas tree, again from Dad, is Dragon’s Lair Trilogy for the Wii. We tried it on a game console but it kept clicking-through to the DVD control menu. Even Dad admitted that playing it with a DVD remote control was not the smartest idea. He threw it in and handed me the remote control (which was NOT a very good controller) and it was just about the worst thing I’d ever experienced in my life. “Have I got a game for you!” Dad said to teenage me.

Fast forward to the 2000s, when we ended up owning Dragon’s Lair on DVD. I was born in 1989, and while Dragon’s Lair II: Time Warp technically counts as “my lifetime” really, two-year-old me wasn’t playing anything besides peek-a-boo by that point. 2023 marks the 40th Anniversary of Dragon’s Lair, a pioneer of “more fun to watch than play” gaming.

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