Dragon's Lair & Dragon's Lair 2: Time Warp

It's fair to say that I have been a lifelong video game addict.  Given the quantity of quarters I pumped into the Dragon's Lair video game console in arcades, it's a morsel of nostalgia I couldn't pass by.  Dragon's Lair in the arcade was the first in a wave of "feed me your coins" games in that you are allowed to make only 3 mistakes (per quarter).  The first few plays your entire game time was probably 30 seconds, and even though repeated plays will train you to be able to play longer - the entirety of the story if you play it perfectly is about 10 minutes.

Dragon's Lair follows the story of Dirk as he traverses room by room through a heavily trapped tower in order to rescue the overly sexual Princess Daphne.  Directional moves flash on the screen that you must follow to continue, any misstep and you end in a painful death sequence.

A fun reminder of my past, I had never really played Dragon's Lair 2 - so that was a fresh bit of animation to enjoy.  However, it was a bit more unforgiving in sequence length - and I'm not sure I got much enjoyment of the animation as I let my eyes try to absorb the screen details looking for the arrows and sword icons of my next move.  In the original game, the rooms had no more than 5 or 6 interactions before the next checkpoint, Time Warp evokes rage if you make it through 30 successful clicks in a scene and fat finger the last one because you have to start the entire sequence over.

Even with starting scenes over and countless fumbled clicks, I finished both games in a little under an hour each.

I probably pumped over a hundred quarters into the coin op game - so for myself, it was great to relive something from my past.  If I did not have that experience, I would be disappointed with how short this game is.  This game would be perfect as an iPhone game and receive my recommendation, but as a PC game .. wait for 75% off.