I could have written this myself, because that's exactly how I feel (and same age, LOL). I still remember the first time I finished the game; I felt like I was walking on air as I headed home :). Like you, I wanted but never could get an actual arcade cabinet -- they cost way too much money on Ebay now. So I sprung for one of these replicas when they released a second set. It now sits on a shelf above my computer desk, so I can look at it as I work, and set it for a game or two once in a while.

Right there with you brotha, I have the iircade version, but this "pocket" version is a big hit, love it!

I seem to remember it was a 2 coin game. After spending a couple bucks and barely swinging across the bridge. I realized I might enjoy watching others play the game and live vicariously through their quarters 🙂

It cannot be real. First of all, it would have be MP4 or something, not NTSC, second, you can't just pick up and turn a spinning disk. If you do this, you risk destroying the disk because it is basically a gyroscope.

As a kid, I looked at MiniDiscs and fully expected us to use 1-inch 500GB discs in the future.

A little sad that the LD labels are on the wrong sides unless the original was that way: the label is opposite the recorded material since the first players read only from the back side. That is, "Side 1" data is opposite the "Side 1" label and vice versa.

It is

@@JasonOlshefsky It's meant to look like that, the player is one of the few that read from the top rather than the bottom.

Same here, except I didn't know anyone who was good at it. I just remember it looking lonely next to Mortal Kombat.

When it first came out there was a long wait to get to play it. It was a couple of weeks later and I could walk up and play it because it was a disappointment. I think that I spent maybe five dollars on it before I went back to Asteroids. 🚀

I couldn't play Dragon's Lair worth a lick, but I could win Space Ace. And yes, there would literally be a crowd of people around by the end of the game, which really stoked my 10-year-old ego. One time my mom finished getting groceries and was waiting on me, so as soon as I finished the final winning move I worked my way out of the crowd and let them finish watching the end scene.

@@daneast that used to be a big thing back in the days. Our village never had arcade machines but the market area did which was where our school used to be and happened to be everyone's go to area during 30 minute break for which everyone waited. One time there was a guy who wanted to finish Midnight resistance one way or the other and kept dropping game coins but couldn't get it done... All the onlookers were so dissapointed because otherwise he was a pretty decent player overall but the difficulty level in the arcade cabinet was that you cannot kill the last boss with your default gun... Another one was the Altered Beast but over the time everyone playing the game could finish it some people requiring only one coin

Yeah, I couldn't play it worth a crap back in the day either, but fifteen or so years ago I got the Game Boy Color version, and between a lot of practice and remembering the moves from an old "how to beat Dragon's Lair" pamphlet/book I had, I eventually got pretty good at the GBC version (which does not have as many moves to make per screen/room as the full arcade version. Seeing this was pretty dang cool, especially with all the included detail!

Doin't forget the pool table :)

Oldschool

In my day , you put the quarter on the top marque and held your thumb on it.

TRUTHS

Bigfriendly15 yeah I remember that shyte here in middle Tennessee

The elevator shaft was the absolute worst for me.

"Our princess is in another cabinet"

I know. 😂

haha

🤣👍

Most of the out of order signs were because it was full of quarters and hadn't been emptied yet...lol

It really does not share anything in common with a real laser disk?

The "laserdisc" in this toy cannot be real. Laserdisc is optical so if this was a laserdisc not only would the disc have to get smaller, but so would the wavelength of the laser. It's either got to be just for show, or it's an entirely different format, like MP4. The game was just a series of animated scenes, and this was a "chose your own adventure" game. When you hit the appropriate button or joystick position at the appropriate point, you would chose what the next scene was. Years back, I had this game running on my computer in a simulator. It was a series of video files that I could just pull up in a player, and go through them all. In fact, I think I did that.

@@fuzzywzhe Yeah there's no laser unit to be seen in the case. It's not real. For a moment I thought it may be an 8 cm CD-ROM, but it's smaller. And then I noticed that there is nothing inside to read it.

It's just a fake laserdisc, but the buttons, lazer, cabinet, aesthetics of the lazer disk player is dead on balls accurate

i remember i saw this chinese guy playing through the whole thing at the local arcade hall...think he was working in that game company :)

@@bobfrode I never got past the start of the game i still don't how to advents past it

I remember the only time I tried it as a tween (a cabinet at a tourist site in the early nineties, in great condition!) I dumped 2 dollars in for one play, died in less than 5 seconds, and ended up staring at the thing in shock. I have no idea how anyone, anywhere, learned to play the game unless they were an independently wealthy masochist. For perspective, that money was all the money I'd been given to grab a souvenir for the day and would have bought an Archie digest comic or 3 packs of trading cards

@@melskunk I was dumb i sunk 8 dollars same but in a move theater

@@melskunk ...back in the day, I'd play the game in tandem with a friend. If I played, he'd learn where I'd fuck up and take note of that area. Then he would play and I would be the one taking notes. Until this day, I still haven't beaten Singe. Maybe deep inside, I don't want to advance. It still is my favorite game. It probably took a big chunk of my youths money.

Exactly man,it looked fantastic-but more display demo and little game.

..at least Dragon's Lair was more appealing than Firefox, which was usually placed beside it.

_and_ it took 2 tokens! i remember getting very frustrated by the gameplay & decided it was just to expensive to play more of... quarter thief! 😂

It was definitely a lot more fun to watch someone else playing than wasting your own quarters on it. Can't really say that about most games. =)

The gameplay was as awful as the animation was amazing. If I ever played this thing it would have been dead-dead-dead-never again. But I did watch several people play it who knew what they were doing.

holy crap. i totally forgot, my arcade did that also. that was cool...

Well we are in the age of smartphones. Anything small can be HD now. It's impressive how far we've come.

The sound was pretty good as well.

Looks like 320x240 to me, judging by the menu screen. Remember that the DPI is going to be high (ish) on such a small screen, even with the bog-standard 320x240 resolution.

Open up a paint program and reduce an image to 486 × 440 pixels - that was the resolution on NTSC screens back then. Resolution is enormously higher today.

Be hard to replicate the CRT screens of yesteryear in that size.

What does 'Noice' mean? (・_・;)

@@fionaneufeld7908 Just some stupid meme that everyone quotes.

@@zusurs It's a meme? I thought it was just a joke version of "Nice"

@@TheKillerMime I thought it wwas the aussie version of nice?

We're all dissapoint.

All turned on, too, so it's a little noisy heck of an arcade :3

Pioneer PR-7820.

Most LD players are Pioneers :P

@@kaitlyn__L but it was built with that model. All DL, SA, and TQ games had only that one model. No others worked.

@@0311Mushroom indeed, I was just being facetious :)

@@kaitlyn__L tis cool. Side note, that is a tiny copy of a 7820.

You have to remember the time- it was 1983 and there was nothing like this in the arcades. Think Mappy, Mario Bros (not even *Super* Mario Bros yet), Gyruss... There were some color vector games, but besides those there was nothing reasonably high-resolution let alone laser disc quality. People really were lining up for the opportunity to pay 50 cents (double the vast majority of games) only to game over in under 20 seconds, then get back in line to try again. Also, this had to be one of the first times they would often put a screen on top of the game so people could watch. Yes, I was there and painstakingly memorized the required moves until I finally beat the dragon and rescued Daphne. Sadly, this was the only laser disc game I ever finished in the arcade. While I still spent tons on Space Ace which followed after Dragon's Lair, I never had the reflexes to complete it. And don't even get me started on Cliff Hanger- I never got more than 30 seconds into that one.

@Guy Incognito As someone who appreciates old arcade games, Dragon's Lair isn't a fun game. But it IS a good movie.

@@nicksrandomreviews thats a perfect summary

@@QunMang Yeah, the difficulty on the later laserdisc games was ridiculous. And they went full psycho on Dragon's Lair 2, with the mandatory collectibles you have to pick up if you want to get the good ending, on top of already being stupidly hard.

@@jasonblalock4429 Interestingly, given the area I lived in (Chicago), I never encountered a Dragon's Lair II machine. When the game was released for the Amiga I thought at the time it was a computer sequel to the original game. It wasn't until later I learned of the arcade game's existence. The Amiga version was definitely quite difficult. The only way for me to see all the game was to use the cheat that has the game play itself ("GETMORDROKDIRK" I think- typed at some point- I don't remember, maybe the title screen).

Yes tear down

are muffins really precious? Aren't muffins for eating? Delicious, hot buttered... damn! I'm so hungry now!

I hated this game, but so want this machine.

Yeah. It's Just Sooooo Cyute!

battery yes included oh yes!

They're called tabletop arcade games. You can buy them online for all kinds of different games.

Like it isnt there.

I actually have played it that way quite a bit. I plugged in a spare PS4 controller into USB 1 or USB 2 (I believe that determines which player you are), and all the functions were mapped to buttons fairly logical. The video output from this was detected as 720P on my capture device so I would suspect it will look fuzzier on newer 4K displays. I still use a 1080P display in my game room currently. The opening graphics of the NWT logo etc look very pixelated and rough but the actual game play I thought looked really good! I can tell they used an original LD master to rip this from instead of the newer remaster video as some of the original noise etc. common from a LD can be seen and I prefer it that way as it is more accurate overall.

@@IvoryTowerCollections FMV resolution is still much lower anyway, so if there's no any fuck-ups with upscaling, aspect ratio etc. it still should look fine, without any real difference okaying on 720p or 4K screen.

I haven't tried external controllers on mine, but I did hook it up to an external monitor over HDMI and it retains the 4:3 aspect ratio. Got a video if you want to see it as well.

Heh, yeeeeaah I was kicking myself while editing. Whoops 😄

I commented on that myself earlier. And right after he praised them for "Attention to detail".

@@LGRBlerbs But you were the first reviewer I saw who managed to get the disc out without destroying the sleeve in the process 🙂

Hahaha my OCD was kicking the inside of my head.

Now the game wont work

I throw *nothing* out when it comes to boxes. 👍

@@LGRBlerbs Hence your love of packing peanuts.

@@zembryoz haha he's probably got a in home ball pit filled with packing peanuts

@@cam182 it's more of an ironic death pit where he throws the bodies of people who send him packing peanuts

@@LGRBlerbs shut up you fools your making him angry.

I really loved the PC CD-ROM from the early '90's. Used to play that a lot in college. =)

Cliffhanger was cool, I did complete it once. Only ever saw two of the machines.

@@richardadams4928 I didn't learn about cliffhanger until after watching castle of cagliostro and I fell in love with the terrible voice acting

@@ITweeaboo Definitely deserved more attention, I really enjoyed it.

Thinkgeek used to sell a ceramic cup with silicone lid that looked like that.

That's badass! This game looks absurdly hard. When every wrong move spells death, it probably took a ton of quarters to master it.

@@caramel7149 Once you knew the sequence, it wasn't hard. Took a LOT of quarters for me to get there tho. Haha. Was thankful for the later home ports.

Lies. No one has ever beaten this game. lol

Dragon's Lair cost 50 cents so that's impossible.

Me, too. Took out Singe on the first try, with no lives in reserve and having never seen the sequence.

Wellll.... Check the site now.

it's a bad ass game, one of the best from the golden age

This is correct. While I don't remember seeing them on actual cabs when I was younger, that sticker is for those that wish to add it. I left mine off but yes, it is optional.

Immersion ruined!!

Apparently, this was one of the few LaserDisc players that reads from the _top_ of the disc. The laser assembly floats overhead, kinda like a record player.

@@LGRBlerbs Good god you're right. I stand corrected. Googled actual game LD and it has the label on shiny side after all. o.o; (though the one I found didn't have ANY label on the dull side) All autoflip players can actually read from the top since they move the head to above the disc, but they still obey the standard that labels go on opposite sides from data (side B is top in an autoflip player). This is a real oddity for a single-sided player!

It's about the animation. Getting to see the full film. That's the attraction.

We eventually figured that out, but not until we spent $20 in quarters trying to beat it. That attract mode was an irresistible siren song for 10 year olds.

@lass kinn it's exactly what it was. QTE the game, hard mode.

Looks so good but plays soooo bad.

@@rastas_4221 Keychain is $15