Dragon's Lair for Blu-ray Disc and HD-DVD

Dragon's Lair is available on both Blu-ray Disc and HD-DVD, but I found the Blu-ray version harder to work with in terms of disc loading and game play on the Blu-ray Players I used, including the Sony BD-PS1, the Samsung BD-P1000, and the LG BH100 Blu-ray/HD-DVD combo player. Also, you cannot play the HD-DVD version of Dragon's Lair on the BH100, due to the fact that this player does not have full HD-DVD interactive capabilities.

On HD-DVD, Dragon's Lair is not only a fun game to play, but is a great way to get acquainted with HD disc format capabilities. Dragon's Lair enables a different home theater experience.

Dragon's Lair was developed and marketed in the 1980's as an arcade game using the Laserdisc format, and, thus, has a unique place in both game and video disc history. Now, this historic game is available in HD-DVD and Blu-ray Disc, via Digital Leisure, for the consumer.

Done in traditional 2D cell animation and transferred in full 1080p to HD-DVD, Dragon's Lair enables the player to take the identity of Dirk the Daring in his quest to rescue a princess. Along the way, Dirk has to confront typical video game dangers, such as monsters, evil demons, and other physical obstacles.

The HD-DVD comes with a brief, easy-to-read, user manual thatexplains how to player the game using an HD-DVD or Blu-ray Discplayer remote control. For HD-DVD, I used the Toshiba HD-XA1 HD-DVD player (firmware ver 2.3) and found that although game play was similar to the arcade experience, the remote commands were not always quick to respond, so I missed a few actions that resulted in Dirk's early demise. Of course, this being a video game, I had 5 chances before the game was prematurely ended and I had to start from the very beginning.

In addition to Dragon's Lair itself, the HD-DVD and Blu-ray Disc both include extra features on how the game was created and some great split screen examples of earlier versions for the Amiga, DVD, CD-Video, and Laserdisc in comparison to the new High-Def Disc version. The examples definitely show that the new 1080p version definitely an improvement.

If you want to have an enjoyable evening with your friends or family, Dragon's Lair is a fun game to play and will also get you acquainted with interactive HD formats.

Based on my experience with both the Blu-ray and HD-DVD versions I was given to evaluate, I would have to give a combined rating for both versions a 3.5. However, I would give the HD-DVD version alone a rating of 4.5.