One of the most ambitious adventure games of its time. Released as early as 1990, Rise of the Dragon offered a somewhat primitive yet immersing cinematic gaming experience. For me.
The plot is not really that complicated (Legacy of Kain came much later) - the setting is the futuristic Los Angeles, looking awfully similar to the futuristic Los Angeles in Blade Runner. Here, however, the year is 2053 instead of 2019 - apparently the game's creators came to conclusion that 2019 was much too early for hover cars, video-telephones, etc... Anyway, the city is on the verge of being torn apart by a malevolent underground Chinese mafia planning on taking over the world by selling a powerful, mutagenic drug. You know, a typical Elexis Sinclair syndrome. Or should I say, SINdrome. After the mayor's daughter falls victim to the organization, a veteran cop-turned-private-eye, Blade Hunter (the name sounds familiar) is called to investigate.
Most of the time, you'll watch the ROTD's rotten environments through Blade's own eyes, or so it seems. You get the general overview of the area and the opportunity to click around an interact with objects and characters. The latter are usually very talkative and once a conversation starts, you'll see close-ups of their faces (their expressions change, depending on what mood they are in), along with available dialog options. Needless to say, your performance as a conversationalist will directly affect the relationship between Blade and a given character, so if you piss somebody off, he or she won't be willing to help you later on, and you'll get stuck. The objects are much easier to handle - through the simple inventory.
Rise of the Dragon also features a time limit. You have precisely three days to solve the case and bring the bad guys down, or you'll loose. The game is especially unforgiving with transportation. Traveling from one location to another obviously takes much time, so you cannot just move around freely, like in, let's say - Broken Sword. You have to plan ahead.
There are also some arcade sequences, where Blade finally uses his gun. Two of them are simple side-scrolling shoot'em-ups, with the opportunity to dodge enemies' bullets by ducking or jumping on platforms; and one is an even simpler mouse-aiming shoot'em-up. Fortunately, if you happened to suck at these, the game offered to skip them - very thoughtful of the developers.
A word about conversions. In 1991 the game made its way into Amiga (10 floppy diskettes) and in 1993 into SegaCD, in a very deformed shape. For once, it featured voice acting with Cam "I'm you! I'm your shadow!" Clarke himself voicing Blade Hunter and all of the subtitles got removed. Yet, the consoles of that time were less capable than home computers, so the color palette got narrowed down to 64. Apart from that, Rise of the Dragon was one of countless victims of early nineties video-game-brutality paranoia. Many things, from lap dancers in night clubs to ammo clip innocently lying on Blade's desk, were removed. Strangely enough, you couldn't skip the arcade sequences this time.
If you already know Rise of the Dragon, you might know Heart of China - a very similar adventure game, this time borrowing heavily from Indiana Jones series, released one year later. Both games are very important classic titles, offering a much more sophisticated approach to adventure genre than their predecessors and being an inspiration for many great later titles. For all of you vintage-fans out there - simply must-plays.
 |  |  |  |  |
No comments:
Post a Comment