Dragon's Lair makes an impressive comeback
 |
|
||||||||||||||||||||
VIDEO GAMES
Dragon's Lair
SPECS
Capcom, Digital Eclipse, Nintendo Game Boy Color, Rated E for everyone, $24.95.
www.capcom.com
Digital Eclipse, a relatively unknown video-game design company in the United States, has achieved the un-understandable. It has taken a nearly 20-year-old video game, adapted it for a 12-year-old video-game system, and created a technological breakthrough.
Why would anybody care about an ancient game running on an obsolete system? When the game is Dragon's Lair, one of the best-remembered games of the `80s, and the system is Game Boy, the most popular game system of all time, any working union is bound to create news.
The problem with adapting Dragon's Lair, which was first manufactured in 1983, to modern game systems is the game's graphics. Stored on laserdisc, Dragon's Lair featured cartoon animation instead of computer-game graphics.
The programming was little more than a collection of video clips spliced together by a game engine. It was the story of a knight named Dirk exploring an enchanted castle as he rescued a princess.
Players would see an animation showing Dirk facing some new danger. They would be given a moment to respond by moving Dirk to safety by having him pull his sword, then the game would show an animation of Dirk moving on to the next situation if they got it right or dying if they made a mistake.
While Dragon's Lair's game play most resembled a multiple-choice quiz, its graphics made it a sensation in arcades. Don Bluth, the former Disney animator who went on to make such movies as "The Land Before Time" and "Titan A.E.," created the animations.
As hand-drawn animations, the graphics in Dragon's Lair require much more storage space than the computer-drawn objects in most games. Other arcade games of the '80s contained less than a megabyte of code and fit on a few ROM (read-only-memory) chips; Dragon's Lair required a laserdisc. It required far too much storage to fit into a game cartridge.
With its limited game play, huge storage requirements and astounding graphics, Dragon's Lair only worked on consoles that read CD-ROM such as PlayStation and Saturn. Permutations of Dragon's Lair were released for Super Famicom (released in the United States as Super Nintendo Entertainment System) and other cartridge systems; but these versions were side-scrolling adventures with standard game graphics that bore little resemblance to the arcade game.
Then an independent game developer called Digital Eclipse created a compression scheme for running full-motion video clips on Game Boy Color that it first used in the Game Boy version of Disney's Tarzan.
"Tarzan got us huge recognition, so we wanted to push that technology a little further," says Digital Eclipse creative director Mike Mika. "The natural thing that we thought of was Dragon's Lair. Jeff Vavasour (chief technical officer) came up with the idea. It was sort of a `lets try it and see if it can be done.' "
It took Digital Eclipse nearly eight months to complete the game.
"We created a demo that we presented to Rick Dyer and Don Bluth (the creators of the original arcade game)," says Mika. "Once we got a hold of Dyer, he was excited about doing it. Then we did a road show. We showed it to Capcom (Capcom USA, American subsidiary of Osaka-based Capcom) and various other publishers, and it was Capcom who in the end said they wanted to go ahead with it."
Even with their compression technology, Digital Eclipse engineers were not able to pack Dragon's Lair's 15 minutes of motion picture-quality cartoon animation into an 8 megabyte Game Boy cartridge.
"Most of the credit has to go to the artists who refined all the frames of the game," says Mika. "In order to get the compression to work properly, they had to do a lot of repeated tiling in each frame."
In order to scale down the game, artists had to find ways to reduce data in the art. Backgrounds with small details were sometimes replaced with single-color blocks.
"They went through, and they actually dumbed down every frame of the game by hand as much as they could under a really tight schedule. They had under three months to do it," says Mika. "There were a number of artists working day and night."
With 15 minutes of animation running at 10 frames per second, the Game Boy Color version of Dragon's Lair contains approximately 900 individual frames. The modifications not only included blocking out small details, but weeding out sounds and clipping unnecessary effects such as parallax scrolling between layers of animation.
"As the space started getting smaller and the time started running out, we had to make certain sacrifices," admits Mika.
The final result, however, is impressive - possibly the most impressive technological display ever created on Game Boy.
HARDWARE
e-Mail PostBox Companion
SPECS
VTech, (888) 468-8328, 32KB RAM, 448KB storage, black LCD screen, keyboard, operates on two C batteries, 2.4 lbs., $69.99
www.vtechconnectusa.com
Intimidated by computers but like the idea of e-mail? VTech's e-Mail PostBox Companion uses a regular phone jack to connect to Yahoo Mail and the Yahoo Address Book without a computer.
The full-size, sturdy keyboard has a standard layout. The special buttons to connect or write e-mail are large and well-placed. The screen is easy to read, the software simple to navigate - and if you get lost, there's a Main Menu button to take you home.
You can access your existing Yahoo account or create one with the device's setup wizard. As many as five users can be set up on separate passwords.
The Companion hooks up directly to several brands of printers. The device holds as many as 500 messages, and more can be stored on a $19.99 add-on memory card.
The downside: a separate monthly Internet service bill. You can't use your own ISP with the device, which automatically dials a local or toll-free number to connect. Services start around $10 a month. Another drawback is that the device can't receive e-mail attachments. (You can see them at mail.yahoo.com using a PC.)
But if you just need a way to get text-only e-mail, the e-Mail PostBox Companion is a simple solution.
-- Kate Seago
Dallas Morning News
SOFTWARE
Photoshop 6.0
SPECS
Adobe, Windows 98/Me/2000 (Pentium, 64MB RAM, 125MB disk space, CD-ROM drive), Mac OS 8.5 (PowerPC, 64MB RAM, 125MB disk space, CD-ROM drive), $199
www.adobe.com
If you are a serious graphics artist or, like this reviewer, if you mistakenly fancy yourself to be such a person, working with Adobe's top-of-the-line Photoshop can be such a delight that it's probably worth the money. Nevertheless, the great majority of people who read these reviews will find the $75 Photoshop LE more than adequate.
The biggest reason to lust after version 6.0 of Photoshop is the miracles it works by adding support for vector data, which allows one to create seeming miracles by drawing shapes and using a new palette of Boolean commands to make them evolve into beautifully elegant forms.
The vector magic jumps to life when applied to text that can be expanded and contracted infinitely without losing any definition. Without it, when one attempts to greatly enlarge, say, a headline, you end up with ugly, jagged edges.
The vector graphics mean that every piece of artwork can be created in a form that can be shrunk to the size of a postage stamp or blown up to cover the Goodyear blimp.
A major Web-friendly enhancement called weighted optimization automatically analyzes a graphic and ensures that when it is compressed into an Internet-ready JPEG or GIF file, the amount of compression will be less at parts of the picture where fine detail could be lost and greater for less complex elements.
Photoshop veterans also will appreciate some efficiencies in the interface, which now anticipates the commands one most likely will use with each tool and accordingly displays those options in the toolbar.
-- James Coates
Chicago Tribune