Sunday, 15 March 2026

Dungeons & Dragons Games Vol. 14: DragonStrike (MS-DOS) and DragonStrike (NES)

This week on Super Adventures, I've finally got another excuse to Photoshop together a title image. The weird thing is, I started adding the ripped cover effect to it before I noticed that the Amiga version's cover already uses a torn paper effect (you can see it the top left behind the dude). That's such a weird coincidence. Their effect is better, but I think mine came out looking okay.

Anyway DragonStrike came out in 1990 and is the 10th Dungeons & Dragons game. Meanwhile DragonStrike (NES) came out in 1992 and is the 21st Dungeons & Dragons game. It was pretty common at the time for different systems to get wildly different games that all shared the same title, but in this case it's only the NES release that just had to be awkward.

Covering both games at the same time requires breaking the timeline a bit, but doing it this way means I get to compare them, so you're getting double dragons this week.


Personally I'd never heard the name 'Dragon Strike' until now, this is just the next game on the list for me, but it may be something you're aware of. Especially if you've seen the Angry Video Game Nerd's 'Board James' video on the board game.

In fact, I'm sure that a bunch of people have made videos about this board game, because it emits a worrying amount of smoke came with a VHS tape featuring actual actors doing D&D things in front of a blue screen.

But the Dragon Strike board game came out years after the video games and it doesn't seem like they're connected in any way. In fact the board game isn't really Dungeons & Dragons at all!

It was made by D&D publisher TSR and they apparently hoped that it would get kids into their D&D tabletop games, but it was its own thing, a competitor to HeroQuest. (Though HeroQuest didn't even have a VHS tape, so was it really a competition at all?)

Hasbro released a second Dragon Strike board game ten years later in 2003, which had nothing to do with either of the other Dragon Strikes and didn't even come with a videotape. But it did have a big plastic dragon sitting in the middle of the board with motorised neck-sweeping action, so that's pretty cool.

Finally Fighting Hedgehog released a third DragonStrike board game ten years after that in 2024, and this one actually is based on the video game! Kind of. 

It's not an official D&D product, but it does claim to be D&D lore compatible and you do actual dragon dogfighting on a hex grid. So there you go. It took 24 years but we got there in the end.


1990: DRAGONSTRIKE (MS-DOS)

Developer: Westwood | Release Date: 1990 | Systems: DOS, Amiga, C64, PC-98, Sharp X68000
Alright the first of the two DragonStrike video games is a 3D dragon combat simulator released for MS-DOS, Commodore 64, Amiga, NEC PC-98 and Sharp X68000. 

Wait, the Commodore 64? Really?

Those other systems could move a couple of polygons with their 386 and 68000 CPUs, but the poor C64 with its 1 MHz 8-bit processor had become a relic of another era. It was still a popular machine though, ultimately getting 11 D&D games, putting it close behind the Amiga (16) and PC-98 (17).

The X68000 was pretty successful itself, for an expensive high end gaming rig, but for some reason the only D&D game ever ported to it was DragonStrike. Maybe they'd assumed its owners were more into flashy arcade action than strategic RPGs.

Oh, a floating rock fortress, nice.

This was the second D&D game to be developed by Westwood Associates (the people who inflicted Hillsfar upon the world). They were bought by Virgin Games a couple of years later, but somehow found time to make five more D&D games before it happened.

Hang on, this picture is the cover to Champions of Krynn! The PC-98 port even uses it as its title screen.

Though to be fair the painting started off as the cover to Dragonlance module DL4 Dragons of Desolation, so if any game should be using it, it's the actual adaptation: Shadow Sorcerer. Incidentally DragonStrike's own cover art was originally from module DL3 Dragons of Hope... which was also adapted by Shadow Sorcerer.

Hey, they even made sure to include the secret TARDIS from Keith Parkinson's original painting.

DragonStrike came with eight cards which describe the enemies, and they call this floating fortress a Flying Citadel. The card says it used to be a regular fortress before some mage or dark cleric lifted a chunk of the ground it was built on.

It mentions that the sight of these airborne artefacts is demoralising to opposing troops. Mostly because they transport armies of evil, but there's also got to be a thought at the back of their minds that the magic could stop working at any moment, dropping the thing on top of them.

Relax DragonStrike, you don't have to sell yourself to me any more, I bought you already. Well to be accurate I bought a D&D bundle on Steam and found that this was included.

The Steam version uses the same launcher as the other games, but there are only two PDFs included in the package this time, the manual and the cards, and there's no companion tool to add modern quality of life features.

There's no way to import characters from earlier games either, which makes sense as I'm pretty sure there'd been no other games about dragonriders from Krynn. The message box just said this was the first-ever.

Damn, I'm not used to D&D games giving me so much full screen VGA artwork to look at. This ain't War of the Lance, that's for sure.

I've no idea if this guy is supposed to be a famous character from the Dragonlance stories or if it's the player character. The manual gives no clues. Either way, with a moustache like that, he has to be one of the chivalrous Knights of Solamnia. I met one of these guys in Champions of Krynn, but I think this one's moustache might actually be longer.

It's not what I would've picked if they'd given me a character creator, but I'm not complaining. Though he might, if he gets that moustache caught in his helmet visor.

Oh, never mind, it actually is the War of the Lance.

I didn't do a great job in the War of the Lance wargame to be honest, I kind of led my armies toward inevitable defeat while the forces of evil conquered my capital cities. Fortunately the Knighthood had the sense to doubt my abilities this time, so I've been left behind to guard Sancrist Isle. Commanding the troops is someone else's problem and I have a feeling they'll do a better job than I did.

Suddenly two shapes fly overhead and my bronze dragon, Sirdar, stirs. We can't allow these enemy white dragon scouts to report back. Time to saddle up, adjust my lance, and...

... Preview the Landscape?

Uh, sure. Okay. Let's have a look at the landscape.

Oh, it's letting me fly a dragon around in 3D! I thought I was going to get a map of the island or something. I'm using the numeric keypad to steer instead of mouse or joystick because it seemed like it would be the least hassle and the game's sluggish enough for this to work fine.

There's not much for my dragon to actually do in preview mode, but I can swoop around a bit, admiring the grassy polygon hills. It actually seems fairly advanced for 1990, as when I think of flight sims from the time they've typically got very flat ground.

Putting a giant frame around it with the game's name at the top is less advanced, but at least it means that it's widescreen! More importantly, the polygons are only filling a third of the monitor, so it can triple the frame rate.

Okay I'm pressing F10 to exit so I can actually play this mission.

Damn, I thought the text said the War of the Lance "had just begun". Team Evil has conquered 37 territories and we've got 1, so it seems to me like the war's just about over. The Knighthood somehow found a general who's even worse at War of the Lance than I am!

The manual explains that the reason the war went so badly is because the good dragons have been sitting this one out. The bad dragons have their eggs and are holding them hostage, so they couldn't get involved. But they eventually learned that the Evil Army is corrupting the stolen eggs to make evil draconians, and now they're pissed.

Alright, that must be Sancrist Isle on the left, seeing as it's the only blue icon on the map, and I'd better start defending it.

Damn, those cheeky dragons are buzzing around my house! I haven't even been given control yet and I'm already in the middle of the action.

Alright, I already know how to fly and I've got an arrow that points to my objective, so now I just have to figure out how to attack.

Wow, it really looked like I blasted that dragon out the sky with one hit! That's because it was a good place to make the GIF loop. What actually happened is... nothing. I heard an impact, I know the fire breath hit it, but the target didn't seem to notice or care.

There are three gauges under the window: red shows my weapon charging up, green is basically stamina for gaining altitude, and the blue shows what I've set the speed to. The thing about the weapon gauge is, it has to be fully charged before I can fire. You can count for yourself how long that takes, but I'll just tell you: it's 20 seconds.

Fortunately the enemies aren't making any effort to evade my shots, they're just soaking up hit after hit. They're not attacking me either, so we're just flying out to sea together! Are they even enemy dragons?


8 MINUTES OF FLYING IN A STRAIGHT LINE LATER


I was clawed by the enemy? But it's facing away from me! I'm clearly hitting it with my lance!

Well I took some damage there, but the green jar symbol shows that I've got ointment. This is basically a health kit I can use three times to heal either my dragon or the rider. Also the crystal ball on the left is my radar, showing that there's a dragon in front of me right now.

The crown is... just a crown I think. I'm just ignoring it. I'm from Britain, I'm used to seeing crowns on things.

The enemy dragons have been absorbing shot after shot, and ramming them hasn't been a total success either.

This could've gone worse though! Sirdar definitely earned points here by swooping down and catching his rider before he went splat.

There's got to be some trick to this that I haven't figured out yet. I'm doing something wrong. Flying around is easy enough and I got the hang of using the crystal ball and arrows to locate the enemies right away, but actually killing the bloody things is beyond me right now. 

I'll keep trying though. I still have a little health left.

That did it! Look at him spin to his death. Enemy is slain. All those hours I spent playing space sims and learning how to dogfight has finally paid off.

Though there's one thing games like Wing Commander and TIE Fighter have that this doesn't. Actually there are lots of things, like targeting and mission objectives and fast travel/time acceleration... but the thing I'm missing right now is victory music. Their soundtracks are dynamic, their music reacts to how the battle is going, and when you're doing well it lets you know about it.

DragonStrike doesn't have dynamic music. In fact it doesn't have any music during missions, aside from for a little tune that plays at the start, as if to prove that it could totally play a song if it wanted to. But it doesn't want to.

Everyone's very impressed that I took out the evil dragon scouts before they could report what we're up to, especially me. I thought I'd be stuck on that level forever.

Hang on, is this guy my character? I thought I was playing as the blonde guy from earlier. Either way that looks epic, and I'm not just talking about his seriously Solamnic facial hair.

Hey, I just realised that he's holding the same lance you see on the top of the message boxes and in the DragonStrike logo. It's in the Dragonlance logo as well actually. Wait, this is a dragonlance! How did it take me this long to figure that out? The dragonlance I was trying to find in Champions of Krynn got swiped before I could claim it, but it seems that I got a lance of my own in the end.

I've advanced to Defender of Crown! 

I haven't actually played that game, though I have played another Cinamaware classic, Wings. It's a flight sim from the same year as DragonStrike, 1990, and it looks like this:

Wings (Amiga)
Wings' landscape is a lot more typical for its era: very flat, but with details like fields modelled into it. DragonStrike has fewer details on the ground and a smaller window, but its hilly terrain feels like a step further in 3D graphics.

That reminds me, I was hoping to change some of the graphics settings and I haven't found a way to do that yet. 

Okay, the game's saved. Hey they've upgraded my crown by adding a flail. That crown truly is defended now.

Alright, mission two is about protecting good dragon ships from evil wyverns just off the cliffs of Cristyne.

This is a D&D universe, so you can label things as 'good' and 'evil' and actually know that it's true. Cast a 'detect evil' spell on them and it'd say 'Yep, they're evil'. Meanwhile we're the unambiguous good guys, flying with the good dragons.

Aha, I've found the options menu! Turns out you can bring it up any time during gameplay. Here you can switch between wireframe and polygon graphics, increase the detail, redefine keys, hide the lance, and turn the enemies from sprites to polygons. I don't know if I've ever seen that option in a game before.

Also it has a 5¼-inch floppy disk save icon instead of a 3½-inch disk! That's how old school this is. It's not literally saving to floppy disk though, as it's hard drive installable. 

Hang on, where's the ointment icon gone? Do I not get a refill between missions? Did the game really give me three healing items at the start and expect me to make them last the whole game?

Now I'm fighting proper polygon enemies! It's been going about as well as it always does. 

The game's lying about my dude falling and hitting the ground though, as that's blatantly water beneath him.

It also mentions that I shouldn't have tried to stab the enemy dragon from below, which is a bit confusing as I didn't think that I had. But at least now I have a clue to what I've been doing wrong.

It doesn't help that they've got nothing better to do than chase after me, so we're all just flying in a circle.

Oh, I figured out something else as well: dragons have two breath attacks, both running off the same slowly recharging breath gauge. My dragon's secondary weapon is 'repulsion gas' and that's what I've been firing at enemy, so it's no wonder it wasn't killing anything! 

The primary attack is a lot more effective, but I still only get three shots per minute so it functions more like a missile. I got frustrated enough waiting 3 seconds between attacks in Secret of Mana, so waiting 20 seconds is painful for me. Especially as the bloody projectile moves so slow that the enemies just move out of the way.

Commodore 64
It could always be worse though!

I had to try out the C64 version as I needed to know how they got this running on an 8-bit computer, and the answer is... not well. You can tell that it's the same game and it runs at semi-playable speeds, but the landscape is entirely flat and combat is even more awkward.

Amiga 500
I gave the Amiga version a try as well and that's much closer to the PC game, just with fewer colours and less CPU power. It struggles, especially on a standard A500, and playing it in slow motion doesn't make the game any easier. I kept overshooting my target when I turned and had to pull back around the other way.

Though on the plus side you do get the proper floppy disk save icon on the settings menu.

The Sharp X68000 and PC-98 versions aren't going to blow you away either, making PC the clear winner once again. To be fair, the DOSBox settings the Steam version comes with are probably giving it a 386 33 MHz machine to play on, which is pretty damn fast for 1990.

Damn, the game likes to give you some fantastic looking artwork as a reward for winning. That is really not bad for just 122 colours.

Though it looks like a dragon sneezed on the place and that's not far off the truth. A black dragon came over and melted everyone with acid breath, so now I'm heading out to take her on in a one-on-one duel. What could possibly go wrong?

Oh... okay!

I didn't expect that to go so well. My dragon even did a victory barrel roll afterwards... unless I did that myself somehow.

Something I am doing deliberately is bringing my speed down when I want to make sharper turns. That's one feature games like Wing Commander and TIE Fighter don't have (that I'm aware of). At least not until TIE Fighter's 1998 Windows release with all the texture-mapped spaceships, if I remember right.

Hey, I got a reward for beating the black dragon: a Cloak of Protection! Extra armour will definitely come in useful, plus it'll look good with my dude's epic moustache.

Can I have some more health ointment as well please? You see, the only gave me three at the very start of the game and I used them all up in the first mission. No? Okay then.

But I did get an invitation to join the Order of the Sword!

I had a look in the manual, and it seems like there are three paths through the game, which are determined by which orders you join. Someone who does well in the Order of the Sword can go on to join the Order of the Rose and tackle even more dangerous assignments, while someone who stays in the Order of the Crown will have the easiest time.

Hang on, I remember seeing a crown, a sword and a rose together in a picture somewhere recently. In fact they were on the Champions of Krynn title screen.

Champions of Krynn (Amiga)
So now I know that these items represent the three orders of the Solamnic knights. And there's that floating citadel next to them, plus the black, white and red moons of magic that influence the ebb and flow of arcane powers. Man, I'm basically a Dragonlance expert at this point.

Anyway, the Knighthood's leadership says that this is the only time they'll ever offer this promotion, so it's now or never. Seems a bit unnecessary to make this a once-in-a-lifetime deal, unless they're relying on FOMO to make knights sign up for suicide missions. 

But go on then, I'll join the Order of the Sword!

Wait, what? I have to give up my enemy locator arrow or my brand new Cloak of Protection to join up? And they're only telling me this now? What sort of military order asks you to hand in your armour when you sign up? Surely I'd be more effective during missions if I could survive them.

Man, this sucks, I only just got that cloak. I didn't even get the chance to wear it! If only I'd kept hold of one of my health ointments, I could've given them that instead.

At least I get to ride a new dragon now, and hopefully wreck some boats before they can offload troops.

My last sidekick was Sirdar, a 300 year old bronze dragon prince with lightning breath who loves fighting. Princes shouldn't really getting into combat but the situation has gotten so bad that they're all needed on the battlefield.

Now I'm flying the silver dragon Argent, who has better stats and ice breath. He was considered by many to be too frail to fight in the war, so now he's got something to prove and tends to throw himself into danger. Silver dragons are the friendliest kind, and like to hang out with humans and help, so he's not the worst ally to have.

See, I've been reading the manual! In fact I've looked through it a couple of times and I still can't see any mention of how to use the lance properly in combat. Though I have learned that this particular picture's from the cover of module DL6 Dragons of Ice.

Damn, if you get too close to these boats arrows start raining upwards, chipping away at your health.

Hang on, I just realised that the blue text is the dragon talking to me! That's awesome. So it was Sirdar himself who said "Wow, that was close!" when he swooped down to catch my falling rider earlier.

Man, I'm sick of waiting for this breath gauge to charge up. I don't even have any other options this time, as I can't bite or stab the ships. I just have to wait out the 20 seconds, preferably somewhere where I'm not being shot at.

At least there are only three boats and then I'm able to fly off and continue the mission.

Hey is that a dragon over in the distance?


FOUR MINUTES LATER.


It turns out that it was a dragon. An agile dragon skilled at dodging my extremely slow shots and keeping me distracted so his buddy could one-shot me from behind.

So now I have to spend a couple of minutes fighting the boats again, and then three minutes flying to the ice again for the rematch. Over and over and over, until I get it right.


SIX TRIES LATER


Sorry, I just don't have the patience or the interest to keep going any more. I tried the mission 6 times, spending 45 minutes on it, and I'm out. Granted some of that time I had it paused so I could check the internet, but it was still long enough! It's not the challenge that bothers me, I did choose the harder route, it's the waiting.

I do appreciate all this unique failure text for each mission though. And I didn't even need to look up a journal entry in the manual to read it!


It's possible that Westwood got a bit too ambitious with DragonStrike, as they tried making a dragon jousting simulator with an actual 3D landscape at a time where flight simulators kept the scenery flat and Wing Commander was too scared to do air combat at all. The game came out 17 years before Lair bombed on the PlayStation 3, and if Rogue Squadron geniuses Factor 5 couldn't come up with a good dragon sim to literally save their own company, what chance did the team who made Hillsfar have?

Well, it's better than Hillsfar at least, especially if you're playing the MS-DOS version in an emulator fast enough to get a double digit frame rate. But the combat's simultaneously too simple and too complicated, as all you do is blast boats and chase dragons around, while the act of actually killing them requires coming at them from the correct angle to do a decent attack. Plus the absurdly limited health item, the ultra-slow charging weapon and the lack of checkpoints made getting anywhere a miserable experience.

But it has some nice art and it's something different. Plus at least you don't have to get stressed about landings.




1992: DRAGONSTRIKE (NES)


Developer: Westwood | Release Date: 1992 | Systems: NES
Okay, the second game I'm playing has the same name, DragonStrike, the same developer, Westwood Associates, and it even has the same title screen... mostly. (They've edited it a bit to remove the guy you play as and the weapon the setting is named after.) But it's an entirely different game, released exclusively on the NES!

The NES got five Dungeons & Dragons games in total, which beats the Master System, Mega Drive/Genesis, PC Engine/TurboGrafx, SNES and so on. But the ports had a habit of coming out two or three years after the computer release and DragonStrike isn't an exception. Here's the complete list of NES D&D games: To be fair, Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest also took 3 years to make the trip over from the Famicom, so there may have been some kind of time rift surrounding Nintendo of America's HQ.

It's always nice surprise to find a D&D of this era with some music playing, and an even better surprise to find that it was by Command & Conquer composer Frank Klepacki! This was his very first game soundtrack after joining Westwood at the age of 17, and they must have been happy with what they heard as they got him doing the music for Eye of the Beholder II, Warriors of the Eternal Sun and Order of the Griffon as well.

This two player mode is also new for the NES game and passwords instead of saves is new too. I suppose there was no point spending the extra cash to add battery backed up RAM to the cartridge if the save data would've been just a few letters long.

This time I get to pick my dragon, who are just labelled Bronze, Silver and Gold. They could be the same dragons from the other DragonStrike though.

In the other game you ride a different dragon depending on the path you choose to take through the story, with bronze being the easy path and gold being hard. Here the difficulty select is on the next page, so you're just picking your stats (and colour).

S is speed, A is armour class, B is breath weapons and H is health, so my old buddy Sirdar the bronze dragon seems to be the hardest to kill. I'll go with him, and put it on medium difficulty (like always).

That's a familiar map. There are fewer bad dragon icons though, so things don't seem as hopeless! Also I'm starting in a different place, and Sancrist Isle already has a good dragon symbol on it.

My mission (according to the manual) is to free the continent of Ansalon from the vile dragonarmies by guiding one of the good dragons.

It's funny how many games give you a password for level 1.

Alright, my first mission is to defeat a fleet of warships, so basically what I was doing in the DOS game. Oh, plus I have to kill the kraken, who is apparently doing a bit of a team up with the bad guys. I guess if a gigantic mythical sea monster seems interested in joining your naval assault, you just go with it.

The game looked like a regular top-down shoot 'em up at first, scrolling up the screen vertically, but instead of banking side to side with the d-pad you turn in an arc. So I flew back the way I came and found a blue heart on a rock! This is a NES game though so the heart could give me anything really, extra weapon power, experience points...

... oh it's health! Okay then, I'll take that. I started with half my health bar empty for some reason, so every little helps.

There's something else the game has given me: music, during gameplay! It's a big change after all those Gold Box games, plus the DOS DragonStrike as well. You can tell that what you're seeing here is two years more advanced than that primitive 3D polygon flight simulation.

Well, the boats are still raining arrows at me, so that hasn't changed. Though I can't figure out how to hit them back. I've got two breath attacks and neither are working on it. They're not even connecting.

I've got no dragonlance this time (ironically) so ranged attacks are all I can do it seems. I guess this answers my question of why the dragons usually have a rider when they're intelligent creatures who are perfectly capable of carrying out missions on their own - they need someone to hold the stick.

Oh, so you're the one who's been throwing rocks at me from the cliff? You could at least turn around and face me when you're launching boulders at me, instead of just standing there with your arms in the air. And don't think I didn't notice that your sprite is leaning 45 degrees to the side, you horrible Ultima VI-looking caveman. 

Also an enemy dragon has come over to play! They turn in arcs just like I do, so this is going to be an actual dogfight.

Yay, I actually killed a bad guy! In fact I sent him spinning off to his doom, which is maybe a bit over-dramatic, but I'm not complaining. I don't like how I lost weapon power during the fight though!

The game has a system where my firepower is tied to my health, so the worse I'm doing, the worse I get. It's not very common in games and I'm going to assume that's because no one likes it.

I want that necklace the dragon dropped though! I love a bit of loot, especially if it does something.

Well the necklace didn't protect me from arrows. Or that wall I just flew into.

I was flashing, so I assumed I was invulnerable! That's the universal symbol for invulnerability.

The game didn't give me any lives or checkpoints, so that's it, game over. I somehow did even worse in this than I did when I started out in the DOS game! Though I suppose that only put me against two fairly harmless opponents at first, while in the NES game even the landscape's trying to kill me,

There's a bit of obvious tiling on that rock. Well, obvious on a sharp monitor screen at least.

Anyway, the important thing is that I failed. But I can still continue! I'm not sure if the game has pulled a Castlevania and given me unlimited continues, but if it's giving out passwords every level then I can come back as much as I want either way. It's not like I have any items or experience points to lose.

Okay, I'm browsing through the manual a little bit before I get back to level one, and it says that I'm actually playing level two right now! Medium difficulty starts you off on the second mission with your health bar half-full, so it's like the opposite of those games where Easy difficulty only lets you play the first half of the game. Here, the tougher you make it, the less you play.

I also learned that the amulet only protects from dragon breath attacks, not arrows and rocks. Plus I can climb and dive using the d-pad! That's the crucial piece of information I was missing.

There you go! Dive to attack the boats, climb to attack the dragons and eat their hearts (or whatever else they've dropped).

I wish I could say the game's become a lot easier now that I know how to play it, but I still have the problem of my dragon being way too close to the edge of the screen. It's not giving me much room to react, and when I can't react in time I take damage. When I take damage I lose weapon power and it takes more shots to kill anything. I really don't want to take damage.

Ah, I thought this might happen. Not the turtles firing rocks at me, I didn't foresee that, but the way the screen just stops scrolling when you reach the top. It's not going to let me out of this level until I've finished my objective here. Hopefully it just wants me to blow up the boats and that's it, because sniping those little cavemen guys off the rocks is a pain in the ass.

Hang on, red potion, what does that do? Ah, the manual says that it's health. Lots of items are health in this. There are also at least four items that give you protection from stuff, not to be confused with the shield which increases armour. There's also a wing, which increases speed, and a blue potion, which increases speed...

I'm just going to grab whatever I see and not worry about it.
A FEW SUNKEN GALLEONS LATER


Oh right, the kraken. Forgot about that.

Once I blew up all the boats I got a little jingle letting me know I could now fly off the top of the level. So I did. But instead of giving me a congratulations message and a password, it made me fight this thing! I'm glad I beat it on my first try as I've got a nasty feeling I would've had to repeat the whole previous stage if I hadn't.

The fight took me 1 minute 15 seconds and I don't think I need to describe what happened as you're looking at it. It went just like this. Except the GIF doesn't really convey the tension of knowing every hit you take from the boss makes it less likely you'll have the weapon power to effectively fight it.
LEVEL 2 LEVEL 3: PASSWORD JJHHRG


This level looks a bit better I reckon, though I don't remember coming across a swamp level in the DOS game. Then again I don't remember being able to fire my breath weapon more than once every 20 seconds either, so it's far from the only change.

You can see here how I'm trying to keep the enemy in sight without getting shot, but it's not working great. I'm doing a pretty good job of timing my shots so that I fire when I'm facing diagonally, but that doesn't help if I'm not lined up or the thing's ducked underwater. I'm the only one who should be allowed to duck under shots!

Level 2 (or I guess 3) also has you fighting these tiny camouflaged dudes on the islands below you, along with beholders! I haven't seen a whole lot of beholders so far in these D&D games and this is not the game I expected them to appear in. Unfortunately for them I'm not a wimpy party of adventurers, I'm a bloody dragon, mate. So I'm not feeling overly threatened.

Though a black dragon came over to harass me while I was swooping around trying to kill a squid monster, and it turns out they could soak up a lot more hits than I could. Probably because my weapon strength was as low as my health.

Okay, I think I'm done with this. I'm just not into how awkward it is to be in the right place, facing the right direction, at just the right moment to hit my target, without flying right into their bullets. I'd have to put in a ton of practice or get very lucky to even see what the rest of the game looks like. Game's difficult!

Though I just remembered something else about it... it has passwords! And I have the internet.


LEVEL 13


Okay I've jumped straight to a later level where you have to fly around black holes in the bubble dimension. I suppose I could try flying into them, but it doesn't seem like a good idea.

I skimmed through a video of the DOS DragonStrike to see if you visit the bubble dimension in that and no it's all green and brown landscapes right to the end. The NES game has gone way off-script.

Though these later stages seem to have more dragon fights, which is the closest the game feels to being a 2D remake of the DOS game. Lots of twisting and turning as you try to get behind them while they do the same to you. Next time I run into a dragon in an RPG I'm going to have a new appreciation for all the crap they have to go through in a day.

(I'm still stealing their hoard of loot though.)


LEVEL 14


Another password took me to the 'giant wobbling chain' zone. Or maybe we're just tiny dragons now, I don't have a clue! All I know is that this place was full of black dragons and they didn't appreciate it when I stole their hearts.

Okay I'm done now, turning it off.


Westwood's two DragonStrike games are opposites in a way. They're both about dogfighting with dragons and sinking ships, but PC DragonStrike was an ambitious 3D flight sim that experimented with a new kind of gameplay designed for the cutting edge of hardware, while NES DragonStrike was a simple 2D shooter uninterested in pushing the limits of its outdated system. The PC game came out too early to be much good, with its awkward combat and bad framerate, and the NES game came out too late for what it offered to impress anyone.

The NES game is faster, there's no waiting, it even has music during gameplay, but I feel like there has to have been other games by 1992 that did the same thing and made it more fun. I didn't enjoy either game a whole lot to be honest, but then I wasn't very good at them either so I suppose I wasn't experiencing them at their best. 

Though I don't think any of the NES D&D ports let you experience the games at their best, and I can say that now that I'm done with all of them! It had a good run however, getting its last games in 1992, same as the Amiga, PC Engine, X68000 and Mega Drive. But this was the final 8-bit D&D game.

Sorry it took me two weeks to finish this, but in my defence I wrote about two games this time.

Next time on Super Adventures, it's another game! I'm not going to tell you what it is though, you have to guess from that picture on the left. Or wait a day for someone else to get it. It's either Dungeons & Dragons or it's not. I hope this helps.

Do you have any opinions about DragonStrike or DragonStrike? If so, now's your chance to leave a comment.
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