Commodore 64 Longplay [100] Double Dragon 2:The Revenge (EU)

http://www.longplays.org

Played by: MadMatty

Double Dragon 2 - The Revenge, an arcade conversion by Binary Design and published by Virgin Mastertronic in 1989.

“The Double Dragons, Billy and Jimmy, seek to avenge the death of Marian - and might even be able to bring her back to life if they can only penetrate the secret lair of the Shadow Boss.”

So Binary Design returns to bring us the sequel to last year's shitty conversion that took my money and left me feeling robbed. Can they redeem themselves with another Double Dragon conversion.

Upon loading this game you are greeted with the title screen and music which isn't nearly as good as the last game so it feels like we have gone backwards already. In fact it sounds a lot like a tune from Power Drift. So onwards to the game and we get a storyboard. Impressive, maybe we got a good conversation after all! Once ingame we notice the graphics which again look very c64 and ..passable although the player sprites could have probably been better. We have ingame music and some nice sfx so year, I think we could be onto a winner and the problems of the last game have been resolved.

But wait, the combat. The bloody combat, damn them all to hell! Again we have to use hit and run tactics else the opponents will give a very swift beat down no matter how fast you press that fire button. The collision detection is better, but still feels like a problem. Initally the ammount of enemies is alright, but later on as we progress it gets stupid and when you have multiple Boss level henchman that can come back to life it soon get silly and annoying or should that be frustrating. It doesn't take much to leech your life bars away and there are no Zero lives remaining. You just get the three lives and once it reaches one and empties, its game over. Brutal and that final level is just ridiculous. While i’m not expecting the game to be easy, in this case it's just massively unbalanced in the games favor. Back in the day, an Action replay cart was a must have if only to save progress when it's going well and not just to add infinite lives.

While it is a better conversion that the original game, the gameplay issue didn't get addressed. Overall the C64 conversion could have been better. The music and extra sfx are good but it's not enough to exonerate Binary Design for their sins and in Hell they must remain. Even the Spectrum version plays better than this one. -
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