Dragon Spirit

STORY / GAMEPLAY
In the kingdom of Mitgult, a serpent demon named Zawell escapes after a thousand years imprisonment and kidnaps Princess Alicia. A soldier named Amul is chosen to rescue her and kill Zawell. So the hero points his sword skywards and transforms into a powerful blue dragon that can breathe fire and drop bombs, as well as collect up to thirteen additional power-ups during his challenging journey. Amul must fight nine of Zawell's mightiest beasts, one at the end of each stage, before confronting Zawell himself. If you miss three points from your life-bar, you lose a life. Your basic weaponry consists of limitless bombs and the ability to spit fire-gobbets, but the projectiles can be enhanced by bombing eggs on the ground (!). The Blue eggs give you an extra head, and the Red ones give you an extra power unit (getting for instance a powerful flame-thrower). Your dragon can blast flames at flying opponents or drop bombs on enemies on the ground. A couple of unusual bonuses include earthquakes that reduce any ground-based enemies to rubble and a small dragon pill which transforms you into a mini-dragon ideally suited for dodging through a burst of closely spaced bullets. The difficulty level is rather high, especially as you progress in the game, but Dragon Spirit is a good shoot 'em up and can certainly keep its fans blasting happy with the only drawback being the lack of further depth.

GRAPHICS / SOUND
The graphics on the X68000 conversion look and move nicely, though they are not arcade perfect! The sprites and the backgrounds are colorful and the animation is great. Overall, the Sharp's Dragon Spirit is pretty close to the coin-op version (as most conversions are actually). This conversion is definitely better than the Amiga and the Atari ST, offering faster action and more details taken directly from the original. The Sharp's sound is almost identical to the coin-op's sampled sound effects of blasting and shooting enemies, while there are also some nicely composed in-game tunes.