From the Memory Bank: My History with Video Games

Double Dragon - Fraternal Twins
If the first-born arcade original helped shape my gaming tastes, then what value did its NES sibling hold?

What made arcade gaming so unique and thus so special was that it wasn't technologically constrained, and its products didn't have to conform to any standard, whereas consoles and pre-Windows PCs were subject to technological limitations and the types of tightly controlled development environments that made it difficult for ambitious startups to innovate in the space and therein and push the technological envelope. So in comparison to the console and PC scenes, arcades had a wonderful Wild West atmosphere to them--one that made arcade-goers feel as though the next big thing could arrive any day this week.

Now, it's true that companies like the venerated Namco and Sega often produced multiple games for dedicated systems boards like the NA-1 and the G80, yes, but still there was nothing stopping any company (including Namco and Sega) from coming out of nowhere and changing all of the rules with a single new game as powered by an ultramodern, technologically advanced system board.

Look at what Capcom did, for instance: The company's early arcade offerings were notable, certainly, but generally on par with other well-regarded games. In the late-80s-to-early-90s period, though, it suddenly hit us with the freshly developed CP system and thus mind-blowingly advanced games like Final Fight and Street Fighter II, the latter of which took arcades by storm and created a tectonic shift whose reverberations were so powerful that they were felt even in the console and PC spaces. And everyone remembers how it was on the one random day when we entered our favorite arcade and saw a huge crowd of people gathered around that newly appearing Street Fighter II machine; in that moment, we knew that everything was about to change.

In my earliest years, though, I didn't have that kind of awareness. I didn't regard the arcade as a place in which technological innovation was constantly occurring. And there was a reason for that: As I've mentioned previously, I break my arcade-going days into three separate eras, and the first such era was a three-year period in which, well, nothing really seemed to be changing. For that entire stretch, the arcades in my area were ruled by the same lot: Pole Position, Mario Bros., Popeye, Elevator Action and enduring classics like Pac-Man, Mr. Do!, Centipede and Galaga--the types of games I liked but never adored.

So at one point I started thinking to myself, "If I can play these same games on our 2600 and do so while sacrificing only a small degree of graphical fidelity, then why do I need to keep following my brother to these arcades?"

Not long after, though, something big happened--something that made me see the light: Just when I was about to write off the entire arcade sector as "redundant," the year 1986 arrived with, out of nowhere, a new crop of arcade games whose huge advancements in technology and creativity worked to absolutely blow me away and consequently make me a steady arcade-goer for the next ten years. Among these amazing new games were Rolling Thunder (you can read about my history with this one by clicking the link above) and, of course, Double Dragon.

I don't remember where it was that I first came across Double Dragon, no, but I do remember how I felt the first time I gazed upon it: I was in complete awe of it. As I stood there watching the game's attract mode, I was blown away by what I was seeing: the large, lifelike characters; the "realistic" graphics ("That car and those buildings look so real!" I thought to myself in that moment of wonderment); and how much action was happening onscreen at one time. Never before had I come across a game that looked and played like this one. No--Double Dragon was something amazingly new: an action game whose multi-man action was occurring within a multi-plane space!

"Whatever this game is," I thought, "it's definitely next-level!"

My first experience with Double Dragon turned out to be rather short because I had a little trouble grasping its control scheme and thus I couldn't gain the skills necessary to make any real progress (I don't think that I was able to make it past the first stage). I pretty much blew through all of my quarters in that four- to five-minute period, and consequently I had no choice but to leave the arcade and head home.

Though, in that short period of time, the game had made a profound impact on me. It left me with a great number of powerful (though scattered) mental images about which I obsessively ruminated for the next few days. I kept thinking about how amazingly realistic it looked. About the novel "opening scene" in which the machine-gun-toting thug and his three buddies kidnapped the red-dress-wearing lady. About how insane it was that two players could team up and move about a "three-dimensional space" into which mobs of enemies could swarm and do so from all directions. About how you could knock the weapon out of an enemy's hand and then take it as your own. And about how those large golem-lookin' enemies could break through walls and do so spectacularly and with obvious ill-intention.

I was even fascinated by the little things, like the heroes' ability to climb fences and pick up and toss barrels and crates and thus take out multiple enemies at once.

Everything this game was doing seemed so fresh and new! (It speaks to the power of the first mental images it left when even today they're the first images that come to mind the moment I start thinking about Double Dragon.)

All I knew was that I couldn't wait to get back to the arcade and play Double Dragon again!

And played it again I did--multiple times in the following weeks (I had no trouble finding Double Dragon machines because they were so ubiquitous; apparently the game was a big hit). All that time, I continued to be amazed by it.

And the more I played Double Dragon, the more I appreciated its little touches, all of which helped set it apart from every other action game I'd ever played. I liked, for instance, how an enemy of one type could pick up a weapon that was brought in by an enemy of another type ("How is that even possible?!" I'd think to myself, having been convinced that such a mechanic had to be the product of some new form of programming wizardry); and how a hero could maintain possession of a weapon as long as he could keep it onscreen and, additionally, hold onto it during a stage transition and carry it over to the next mission! Lesser games went out of their way to restrict those types of occurrences.

Also, I thought it was great how you were able to utilize what was usually a cheap enemy-exclusive tactic: grabbing a foe from behind and holding him in a prone position so that the second player could come over and get in some free shots. Whenever I'd use this tactic, I'd feel as though I was breaking the rules of gaming ("You're not supposed to be able to use the bad guys' moves!"), and I loved that Double Dragon would allow me do such a thing.

"I mean, this game has it all!" I couldn't help but think.

In the following years, however, I didn't play Double Dragon all that much. It wasn't that I bored of the game, no. It was more that I preferred to play it with a friend, and, unfortunately, it was just always working out to where I was alone any time I came across a Double Dragon machine. Thus my play-throughs of it became few and far between.

Still, though there were long periods of time in which I didn't so much as lay eyes on the game, there was never a point in which I forgot about or couldn't vividly recall the game's awesomely rendered scenes: the backlot with the stacked barrels and the strangely oversized cat that could be seen sleeping atop the area's leftmost trashcan. The section comprised of neatly arranged girders and complex-looking pipework. The factory conveyor belt onto which you could knock enemies--ideally that nasty green-colored Lee-brother clone--and thus condemn them to helpless, plunging deaths. The woodland with the topped trees, atop which the purple-pants-wearing enemies would perch themselves in preparation for the surprise attacks they'd launch the moment you'd move to within proximity. And that carpeted dungeon whose portals gave view to the main villain--the machine-gun-toting guy--as he strolled along the background as part of the process of joining the party.

These, to me, were some of the most memorable scenes in gaming history, and I'd never forget a single one of them.

The game's cabinet didn't supply any information pertaining to Double Dragon's backstory or cast of characters, so for the first few weeks or so, I knew next to nothing about the game's world or the identities of the characters who occupied it. I actually came to know characters' names by listening to what turned out to be unexpectedly accurate arcade-goer chatter (I say "unexpectedly" because it was typical that kids would make up stuff in order to sound knowledgeable and thus gain "insider" cred; in this case, though, everything the arcade-goers said about Double Dragon turned out to be true, which kinda shocked me. To this day, I wonder about how they came to possess such information).

So you had the well-coiffed William, the whip-wielding Linda, the vest-wearing Roper, the gun-toting Machine Gun Willy, and, of course, the giant granite-skinned Abobos--all of whom comprised what I considered to be one of gaming's most iconic enemy casts. I still wasn't sure why they needed to kidnap Marian--the girlfriend of Billy Lee, the game's main hero--no, but, really, I wasn't all that concerned about such details (it was "just a video game," after all); all that mattered was that a kidnapping occurred, and it gave us the excuse we needed to hit the streets and beat down hordes of thugs!

(It wasn't until more than a decade later that I learned, to my great surprise, that the Double Dragon series was set in a post-apocalyptic future--a fact that made its world and its characters so much more interesting to me; so much more fun to think about. "How do people operate in a technologically-advanced-but-rather-empty world?" I'd often wonder.)

That chatter, also, answered another one of the questions I had: "What, exactly, do you call this type of game?"

Well, the word was that Double Dragon represented a new type of action game--a sub-genre of action called the "beat-'em-up" (as far as I knew, it was the first of its kind). And I was already a big fan.

So I can point to Double Dragon as the game that introduced me to beat-'em-ups and triggered the process of my falling in love with them. Theirs was a genre to which I'd forevermore continue to gravitate. In the future, I'd derive endless enjoyment from the likes of Ninja Gaiden, Final Fight (my favorite beat-'em-up ever), Golden Axe, Bad Dudes, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Streets of Rage. I'd spend hours joyously playing through beat-'em-ups in arcades; on consoles (the NES, Genesis and SNES); and wherever else I could find them. And it was all thanks to Double Dragon, which ignited the flame and did so in spectacular fashion.

But as I said: In the following year or so, I saw less and less of Double Dragon. I'd rarely play it, and when I did, I'd limit myself to one quarter's worth of action, which usually amounted to about a mission and a half. It didn't help that local arcade owners seemed anxious to phase it out and replace it with newly released shoot-'em-ups and top-down and single-plane action games.

It seemed as though Double Dragon and I were destined to grow apart.

Right about this time, though, something interesting happened: On a seemingly ordinary day in June of 1988, I visited my friend Dominick's house lookin' to hang out with my bud. The moment I arrived there, I was met with some pretty exciting news: Double Dragon, Dom told me, was coming to the NES (at this point in time, I didn't yet own an NES, and I was completely out of the loop when it came to knowing the console's release-schedule, so there was no way I'd have heard of such news)! Better yet, it was being released on this day, and he and his family were going to go to the store and pick up a copy! And, also, I was going to get a chance to play it with my friend!

I couldn't help but wonder, though, how you could reproduce Double Dragon on the NES--on a console whose specifications were so limited in comparison to the common arcade machine's. I couldn't wait to find out!

Their whole crew was psyched about the game's release. To them, Double Dragon coming to the NES was a huge event (naturally they were all big fans of the arcade game). As someone who had never personally owned a console or a video game, I wasn't able to fully understand the type of exhilaration they were feeling, no, but I was nonetheless completely sucked in by it!

So Dominick, his mother, his two brothers (and one of the brother's friends), his sister and I piled into their brown station wagon, and then we drove over to the store. I remember this trip really well because it entailed an event that recurred so frequently that it was forever seared into my brain: Dominick's older brother, Joey, kept repeating the phrase "All I did was Abobo the chicken!" (this was of course a take on that old Adobo commercial--a really "clever" pun). He did this all throughout the trip--for both the drive over to the store and to the one back to the house--and then for pretty much the rest of the day.

"That must've gotten old after about an hour or so!" you say.

You'd think so, wouldn't you?

And, well, you'd be absolutely right.

But you know what? It was fine. It was all part of the fun of that day. It was all part of the buildup to playing a home version of Double Dragon! And I was excited about the fact that very soon, I'd be doing just that!

I have to say, though: As I watched Dominick play it, my excitement quickly faded. To my great disappointed, Double Dragon was not the frenzied brawler I remembered seeing in arcades; rather, it had been turned into some sort of slow-paced platformer and a pretty rough-looking one at that. Each member of the crew seemed to struggle with the jumping controls.

I got a crack at it when the controller cycled around to me, and quickly my fears were confirmed. Forget making jumps; the real challenge was instead getting a jump to actually work. If you wanted to jump, you had to press the A and B buttons simultaneously and at the exact same time. And I mean exact; even a delay of .0001 seconds between presses would be enough to stop the jump input from registering. The other problem was that pressing the A and B buttons simultaneously on an NES controller was difficult because the buttons were aligned horizontally, which meant that if you wanted to attempt a jump, you had to awkwardly turn your thumb sideways and use its tip to press both buttons but only after doing the math on and adjusting for curvature differences between the tip's separate points.

The result was that the jumping input felt completely unreliable.

And man did I struggle with the jumping controls. I couldn't correctly time the jumping input, so it became my tendency was to fumblingly walk off of platforms and drop directly into pits. This caused me to have so little confidence in my ability to execute jumps that I'd constantly psych myself out and create the conditions for guaranteed failure. Thus my average Double Dragon experience would entail a whole lot of walking off building ledges and falling several stories to my death.

Soon I began to fear the game's platforming segments--particularly that terrifying dilapidated-bridge segment in Mission 3. It was required that you execute a do-or-die jump over a watery gap, and I'd fail to do so 9 out of 10 times. Typically I'd drain all of my lives in this one segment.

This one issue made me not want to play the game. (The arcade version's creators, in contrast, were smart enough to realize that Double Dragon's stiff and inflexible jumping controls weren't suited to platforming, so they made sure to minimize that aspect of that game.)

"What the hell happened here?!" was all I could think as I continued to both play and observe the game. "Where's the frenzied multi-man action?! What happened to all of those cool fighting moves (we weren't yet aware of the game's leveling system)?! And where in the world is Jimmy Lee?! How can you forget to include him! I mean, this is supposed to be a multiplayer game! It's supposed to be 'Double' Dragon, not 'Single' Dragon!"

You could say that I was totally flummoxed by what I was seeing.

As the day went on, my disappointment only grew, and I kept asking myself the same questions: "Really--the NES can only handle two enemies at a time?"

"Where's the enemy variety--namely the recolored and reskinned versions of the characters? Where are the mohawked Abobos, the green Lee-brother clones, and the alternately-toned Ropers and Williams?"

"And why are the weapons disappearing after the segments are cleared? Why are you not allowed to take them with you?"

I was very much aware that the NES had its limitations, sure, but I didn't know that it was this limited in what it could do. "The best we can get from this console is a heavily-stripped-down version of Double Dragon?" I thought to myself. "And it's one that barely looks the part?"

It was an entirely different kind of game, and I wasn't happy about that. And, really, I don't think that Dom and his family were all that thrilled about it either.

We still played it a bunch, yeah, but we did so while lamenting the fact that NES Double Dragon just wasn't what we hoped it would be; it wasn't arcade Double Dragon in our homes--the kind of game we greatly desired.

Another thing that bugged me was how they altered the Double Dragon story to justify the axing of co-op multiplayer. Turning Jimmy Lee into the leader of the Black Warriors and thus the main villain and having him be the one who masterminded Marian's kidnapped was just silly and shortsighted, I thought. It was an interesting way to set up a recreation of the arcade game's final scene, in which Billy and Jimmy (in instances of co-op play) battle to win Marian's affection, sure, but then it also killed any chance of the brothers teaming up in a future NES Double Dragon game!

"I mean, they can't team up together if one of them is dead!" I said to myself. (Of course, we know how that one turned out: Technos found a way to bring Jimmy back and contrive a reconciliation between him and his brother. So I was the one being silly, I guess.)

In the end, my opinion was that NES Double Dragon was completely fraudulent. It didn't look, play or control anything like the arcade original, and because it didn't, it was a much lesser game.

So naturally I decided to get myself up a copy of Double Dragon in the months after I became an NES-owner (I don't remember how, exactly, I came to own the game, but I'm inclined to think that I received it as a birthday present after requesting it). That's how it was during my "copycat" phase: If a friend or cousin owned an NES game--one that he had allowed me to play for more than two minutes--then I had to own it, too. And it was that compulsion that led me to make some of the worst purchasing decisions in my life.

Though, in this particular case, the copycat-driven purchasing decision actually turned out to be a pretty good one.

"Now wait a minute," you say with a bemused look on your face. "How can you say that buying NES Double Dragon was a 'good decision' when just months before you held the opinion that it was inauthentic rubbish?"

Well, you see, dear reader: As someone who now had a more personal relationship with the NES and thus a much more nuanced view of its hardware limitations, I started to see Double Dragon in a very different light. And after spending a lot of alone time with the game, I came to appreciate how its developer (the name of which I didn't know because, as I've mentioned in the past, I tended to ignore any of the text placed at the bottom of title screens) was able to take a technologically advanced, complexly designed arcade brawler and transform it into a simple, unique-feeling action-platformer that did well to play to the NES' strengths. It highlighted what made a "console" game different from an arcade game: It allowed you to (a) dictate the pace, (b) have more control over the action, and (c) find enough time to enjoy its aural and visual qualities.

So that's what I did. And playing it that way was what led me to realize that NES Double Dragon was, on its own merits, a very good action game, and it had certainly succeeded in forging its own unique identity. For those reasons, it was indeed it was right at home on the NES, and it deserved to be placed among the console's most classic action games.

I realized, also, that I'd failed to pay proper respect to the game's soundtrack. It was legitimately top-tier! In fact, I would have told you that it was superior to the arcade version's! It was that good.

I loved, in particular, its rendition of the standout Double Dragon title-screen theme. As the best title-screen themes were apt to do, it was able to evoke a range of emotions--feelings of invigoration then longing then determination--and in doing so help you to form a connection to its world and furthermore inspire you to boldly traverse it. All of its other tunes were great, too; they were all at once evocative, tone-setting, mood-defining and, of course, totally rockin' (it was hard not to bop your head to them)! This was one of those games you'd sometimes play only because you wanted to listen to and take in its iconic music.

And it looked really nice, too--not as good as the arcade version, of course, but great for an NES game. Its textures were clean- and sharp-looking, nicely-shaded and appropriately dim and dusky (Double Dragon's is a post-apocalyptic world, after all), and it contained many in the way of finely rendered, interesting looking settings and environments.

Though, what I was really taken with were the little graphical touches: the imagination-stirring purple-shaded mountains as seen in the background of Mission 3's woodland; the purple and blue caverns whose luminosity suggested that their surfaces were being constantly barraged by radiation; and that alluring half-moon visual at which I'd always stop to gaze (it would never fail to give off that "you're almost there" vibe and inspire me to push forward to the end). Each time I'd play Double Dragon, I'd look forward to seeing these visuals--to examining them and thinking about what they were trying to say about the game's world.

The best thing that could be said about Double Dragon was that its visuals and music worked together to create a very vivid, very engaging world.

In those early days, that's what the Double Dragon experience was mostly about: observing its environments and listening to its music (because we sure as hell couldn't beat the damn game!). Though, my friends and I also had a lot of fun messing around with it--finding new and interesting ways to interact with its world. Most memorably, we discovered a glitch that allowed you to walk up up the wall-mounted elevator rails found at the end of Mission 1's first section. We got a kick out of the fact that you could travel through the screen's upper boundary and loop around to the bottom--back to the rails' base. We found it funny, also, that at any point you could press the attack button and have Billy detach from the rails and comically fall to the ground (though, there were instances in which he'd become permanently locked onto the rails, which would force us to have to reset the game)!

There was also the "weapons glitch," as I called it. Ordinarily, to our disappointment, weapons would disappear when the associated segments were cleared. Though, I learned that if you attempted to grab hold a weapon right at the moment of transition--right when the please-move-right chime started to sound--the action would sometimes complete, and you'd find yourself in possession of, well, something--namely a glitched-out striking weapon that you'd be allowed to take with you to the next segment! (This would be my personal life-finds-a-way moment.)

Engaging in this type of activity was all part of the fun, as exploiting non-game-breaking glitches usually was.

We didn't give much attention to the game's two-player versus mode (which was included, I guess, because of the Nintendo policy that demanded that NES ports include exclusive content) beyond our initial sampling of it. It was something that was cool to mess around with for a few minutes, yeah, but it just didn't provide the type of two-player action we were looking for ("Now if only they'd found a way to implement two-player action into the main game!" we commented, resentfully. "And why can't the characters in the main game look as good as the ones in this mode?!). Like Trojan's versus mode, it was a neat little extra that was worth a quick look but not much more.

I'm embarrassed to admit that I didn't have a full understanding of the game's leveling system until a couple of months later. So in those early days, I didn't know what the hearts were meant to signify--that each time you reached a certain point-total, your heart meter would grow by one unit, and consequently you'd learn a new move. My thinking, rather, was that Billy was more offensively capable than he initially appeared, but I just couldn't execute any of his other moves because either (a) I didn't know the correct button combinations or (b) I was terrible at inputting the button combinations I did know. (I'd have known what was going on had I read the manual, yeah, but for some reason I avoided doing so. I was probably thinking, "I've been playing Double Dragon in some form for three years, so I already know everything about it!")

Though, even after I read the manual and put it all together, I still wasn't able to consistently pull off moves like the uppercut and the reverse elbow. So finally I concluded that such attacks were "high-level moves" meant to be used only by "advanced players," one of which I certainly wasn't (not yet, at least), and that I should probably stick to moves whose button combinations were uncomplicated. And that worked for me; I was always able to grind my way through the game using punches and kicks and the easy-to-execute hair-pull combos (kick then grab, knee and throw). "I don't need any icky 'advanced moves' to play through and enjoy this game!" I'd say with defiant energy.

The problem was that my enjoyment of Double Dragon could only stretch so far. It was a fine game, like I said, but oh man--when it wanted to, it could it beat you down and crush your spirit. It was an "NES-hard" game whose multiple-Abobo encounters, harrowing precision-platforming, nasty stage hazards (particularly the cruelly sequenced falling stalactites and those infuriating protruding cement blocks with their seemingly random patterns), and drawn-out multi-man gauntlets represented some of the most difficult challenges ever coded into a video game. Each one could promptly destroy you--drain all of your lives in seconds. And because you had no continues, your margin of error was extremely small.

And, of course, I never stopped having trouble with the jumping controls, and this always worked to make the aforementioned platforming segments (especially the one in which you jump from one horizontally-moving platform to the next) all the more terrifying. (It's kinda strange that I've never had this problem with Renegade, its forebearer, which also requires that you press the A and B buttons simultaneously to jump. It makes me think that Double Dragon's jumping controls suffer from some type of latency issue.)

In those days, I managed to beat Double Dragon once--and that was during a marathon session in which I played through it about a dozen times. And I only won, if I remember correctly, because I got lucky and everything just happened to line up perfectly during that particular run (protruding blocks cooperated, Willy never opened fire and continuously walked into hair-pull combos, etc.).

So yeah--this was certainly a super-tough version of Double Dragon.

Though, for as tough as the NES version is, it's still nowhere in the league of the absurdly difficult Atari 2600 version, which I discovered by chance sometime in 1999. It was developed by a company called Imagineering Inc., and, honestly, its is quite the programming feat; the port features identifiable graphics, some nice animation, and pretty good renditions of Double Dragon's title-screen and stage themes.

Unfortunately, that's where the positives end. The rest of the game, I'm sad to report, is a total horror show. Its controls are so nightmarishly awful--so amazingly sluggish and imprecise and thus so unreliable--that it's almost impossible to pull of any fighting move consistently (it doesn't help that the 2600 controller has only one button, and all of Billy's fighting moves are mapped to it). Its hitboxes are completely indiscernible. And its enemies are so hyper-aggressive, and their moves have so much priority, that they're basically indomitable. And because they are, it's unlikely that you'll ever make it past the first screen. It's like that Gamefaqs review said: "If you managed to make it past the first screen, you're either very lucky or a gaming god."

It's an absolutely unplayable port, and the less said about it the better (though, I might betray those words in future and review this port, if only to play a part in warning future generations of the horror that might befall them if they choose to seek out this version of the game).

Really, I don't know what's more amazing: that someone thought it'd be a good idea to port Double Dragon to an ancient, severely limited console whose controller contained only a single button, or the fact that they were still making 2600 games in 1989.

   

The sad part is that I didn't play much of the arcade or NES versions of Double Dragon over the next 15 years. For whatever reason, I no longer felt the desire to play either of them seriously, and consequently I wound up neglecting both of them for the longest time.

Lately, though, it's been a much different story: In recent years, I've been frequently returning to both games and doing with great eagerness because playing them on the Nintendo Switch (via the Arcade Archives series and the Nintendo Online service) has reminded me why I had and continue to have a fondness for the type of action they provide. Also, more than any other point in my life, I'm happy that history played out the way it did and as a result we got ourselves two versions of Double Dragon--two wonderfully distinct, fun-to-play action games bearing its name. That's the type of special honor a game of its caliber deserves.

I have to confess, though, that I've since come to favor the NES version. It's objectively the better of the two. That's become clear to me now that I've had the opportunity to spend more time playing and closely examining the arcade version, which, honestly, I'd long been viewing through rose-colored glasses. It has a load of issues, I'm reminded: It's mechanically rough. It's plagued by slowdown. Enemies are so aggressive and so apt to counter or resist your every attack that you may very well spend the majority of your time not being able to move. And if you become proficient in executing the elbow attack, you can abuse it and thus completely trivialize the game's challenge and waltz your way to an easy victory.

The NES version has its annoying control issues (though, I've learned how to overcome just about all of them) and questionably designed platforming segments, yeah, but neither of those flaws detracts from what is the better-structured, more-polished game. (I have to say: The 10-year-old version of me would have hated the person who wrote the last three paragraphs.)

But make no mistake: I consider both versions to be especially worthy of my time. Both are fun to look at, listen to, and play. Both deliver a satisfying action-game experience in an ideal amount of time (25-30 minutes). And both are overflowing with nostalgic energy. And for those reasons, both hold a permanent place in my heart.

And the best news is that there are many other versions of Double Dragon out there. Right away, two in particular stand out to me: the Master System version (which features two-player cooperative play) and Double Dragon Advance for the GBA, both of which, I hear, are highly regarded. I look forward to getting a hold of these versions and finding out whether or not they can meet my lofty expectations. I'm certainly rooting for them to do that.

In the meantime, I'm going to continue to go about fondly remembering the original arcade version of Double Dragon and the impact that it made--the way it wowed me the first time I played it, the way it shaped the arcade scene and my perception of it, and the way that it contributed to my evolution as a video-game enthusiast.

And above all, of course, I'm going to keep on remembering to always--and I mean always--Abobo the chicken.