Double Dragon is an all-time classic, bar-setting, beat 'em up game developed in 1987 for the arcades by Technos Japan and later converted to almost every home computer and video games console. The Sega Megadrive version was developed in 1992 by Accolade.
Review
STORY / GAMEPLAY Double Dragon is a "kick and punch everything that moves" style game, in which you take control of Billy Lee or Jimmy Lee, two young brothers that sport high martial arts skills. The Lee brothers were born and raised in a very dangerous city that's now swarmed by gangs that pummel the neighborhoods and jeopardize peace. The story starts when some members of a gang called "Black Warriors" punch and kidnap Billy's love interest, Marian. Furious by the incident, Billy sets off to find them, kick their heads off, eliminate their leader and finally save his beautiful girlfriend. But his journey is very tough, since Billy (and Jimmy) must beat up multiple enemies of various sizes and strengths, depending strongly on his fighting skills plus some weapons he gathers by eliminating armed foes (like knives, baseball bats and more). Billy must also confront big bosses and avoid traps that can instantly kill him.
GRAPHICS / SOUND The Sega Megadrive version's graphics are good (actually they are much better than the Amiga or Atari ST versions) offering colorful settings and fast action. Regarding the game's sound, there is an in-game music (which is close enough to the original score) but it can get repetitive after some minutes of gameplay. Unfortunately the sound FX are very poor though the Megadrive has all the potential to manage much better sound FX than this.
OVERALL The Megadrive's Double Dragon is comparably better than the Amiga and Atari ST versions and it
needed a little more work to reach the coin-op standards. Nevertheless, it's a good game that can get better (and more fun) in 2-players mode.
Screenshots
Sounds
Intro/Menu music:
In-game music sample:
Gameplay sample
Arcades (original version)
Hardware information
Megadrive (EU) / Genesis (Jap)
CPU: Motorola 68000 at 7.16 MHz in PAL, 7.67 MHz in NTSC / Secondary Zilog Z80 at 3.55 MHz in PAL, 3.58 MHz in NTSC MEMORY: Main: 64Kb RAM + 8Kb / Video RAM: 64Kb / Audio RAM 8Kb GRAPHICS: VDP Chip: 256x224, 320x224, 256x240, 320x240 / 512 colors (1536 using shadow-highlight mode),64 x 9-bit words of color RAM, 4 lines of 15 colors plus transparent, allowing 61 on-screen colors / Sprites: Up to 64 on-screen, 16/20 per line, 256/320 pixels per line, per-sprite priority / Interlace Mode 1 (no increase in resolution and Mode 2 (2x vertical resolution) SOUND: Main: Yamaha YM2612 @ 7,16MHz with six FM channels, four operators each / Secondary: TI SN76489 with 4-channel PSG + 3 Sq Wave channels.