Retro Gaming Australia

Double Dragon for the NES is somewhat infamous for being one of the only home ports of the game without two player co-operative play. If you can overlook that, it’s a decent port, but given that co-op was one of the main selling points of Double Dragon, it’s a bit like a BLT without bacon.

The classic side-scrolling beat’em up Double Dragon II: The Revenge was released on the Japanese 3DS eShop this week as part of the handheld’s Virtual Console service.

Released for the Famicom in 1989, the home version of Double Dragon II differs greatly from its arcade counterpart – featuring different level design, additional story sequences, a different final boss and a different ending.

The Virtual Console release supports Download Play, allowing two players to play co-op with a single copy of the game, and will set you back 500 yen. We hope to see the game outside of Japan in the near future.

Battletoads & Double Dragon: The Ultimate Team was an unlikely crossover between characters developed by Rare and Technos respectively, brought together under the one roof by TradeWest. Plays more like the former than the latter, but without the ballbusting difficulty associated with other Battletoads efforts.

Double Dragon III marks the point at which the series was driven into irrelevance, due to its sheer crappiness when compared to contemporary brawlers like Final Fight. The game introduces a third playable character, Sonny, who is basically a yellow version of the Lee brothers.

The Nintendo Entertainment System is a difficult system when it comes to picking the best games. It’s one instance where the phrase “rose tinted specs” really comes into action. Many great video game series were started on the NES, but many of them do not hold up today. We have selected the absolute best games on the system to showcase in this article. If you want to start collecting games for the NES, these are ones that you absolutely must get.

The Essentials are games selected by the RGA team (along with a few highly knowledgable friends) and are the games we consider to be the best on the system – without question.

Our criteria for this list was simply that the game must be available in English, not just PAL. That does rule out a couple of quality Famicom only releases, but we will cover them in our upcoming NES Imports feature. Read on to find out our selections! (continue reading…)

They left out “Four times as hard!”

After the success of Double Dragon II: The Revenge on the NES, Technos decided to create an original version of Double Dragon III, rather than port the far more technically accomplished arcade version to the home systems. However, unlike The Revenge, the two versions of Double Dragon III share nothing in common beyond the same title.