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By Cloudmann Introduction: By 1990, when DD 3 hit the arcades, most of the Double Dragon fever had died out when Technos released the worst game of the trilogy. The arcade DD 3 was marred with slow, unforgiving game play, uninspired character design, an off-the-wall story and having to buy your way into all the good stuff in the game (extra moves, characters, lives, weapons). Fast forward two years. During a time when Street Fighter II is dominating the arcades, Tradewest decided to release a sub-par game on a generally unpopular gaming format (the IBM). While a lot of work was done, and this is a pretty close translation, it ended up being just a decent translation of a bad game.
Graphics: C+ This is the first IBM DD game that actually looks halfway decent. The characters are just about as large as they are in the arcade and there’s good use of color, but the frame rates are really choppy and all of the color dithering is kind of coarse. Overall, this is a nice-looking game, but the bad frame rates really make it look worse than it should and hinder the game play.
Sound: D- For the life of me, I can’t get my Santa Cruz to work with any of the 3 PC DD games! That said, the PC Speaker sound sucks and silence is golden.
Enemies: B- It looks like all of the arcade enemies are here. It also looks like they are as drab, uninspired and cheap as ever. Every hit takes about an eighth of your energy and most enemies (the level three ninjas in particular) are cheap and begin attacking you before you get up off of the ground or even before you re-spawn (which really sucks because you are not invincible for even a nanosecond after you die). Get used to that Game Over screenshot. You'll see it many times before you beat this dung heap of a game. All of your buy-in characters seem to be here too, but they look just as pixilated as everything else. Good conversion effort, but too much is missing.
Weapons: C+ Direct arcade accuracy. All the weapons (all two of them) are here and you still have to buy them. They’re still slow and they still suck. Don’t buy them and don’t use them.
Controls and Moves: C Aside from a much jerkier frame rate, this version plays just like the arcade: very slow and very boring. All of the limited moves are here and you can still buy more techniques from the shops. Buy, buy, buy… was the arcade version a quarter-sucker or what?
Modes: B One-player and two-player modes. That's it. There’s no three-player or versus mode, not that either of those things would make a better game.
Conclusion/Overall: C- Not too shabby of a game, but not too good of a game either. Double Dragon 3 is simply the mediocre black-sheep of the Double Dragon family. This conversion is reasonably close in all aspects (except maybe sound - I don’t know since it does not work on my sound card) and is generally a good effort that seems a bit rushed. But it’s just a good translation of an average game.
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