Rise of the Dragon (ライズ オブ ザ ドラゴン ～ブレイド・ハンター・ミステリー～, lit. "Rise of the Dragon: A Blade Hunter Mystery"), is a point-and-click graphic adventure game developed by Dynamix. It was first published by Sierra On-Line in 1990 for MS-DOS, and then it was released on both Amiga and Macintosh a year later. The game was ported onto the Mega-CD by Game Arts for a September 25, 1992 release in Japan, with the U.S. version arriving a year after.
Plot[]
- IN A WORLD GONE MAD...
- The year−2053. The city−Los Angeles. Amid the foul air and dark, dangerous streets, A Dragon rises from the ashes of legends. Many fear him. Many fall before him. Only one will risk all to destroy him... and that one is you, "Blade" Hunter, Private Investigator.
- ONLY THE CLEVER AND RUTHLESS SURVIVE
- As Blade, you must unlock the Dragon's deadly secret while battling his gang of hired muscle. Fight with fists and weapons. Follow clues. Interrogate seedy informants. Use your guts and wits to bring down the Dragon and save the city from his ambitions!
- FEATURES
- A shocking, sci-fi adventure with multiple plot twists−the storyline grabs you tight and won't let go!
- Hammering arcade/action sequences−shoot the bad guys before they shoot you!
- Complex character intelligence−information learned in one area of the game is immediately applied in other areas!
- A visually stunning futuristic environment of nearly 100 different locales!
- CD quality audio track with unforgettable music haunting sound effects!
Gameplay[]
Rise of the Dragon is a first-person cyberpunk adventure that feature visuals resembling a comic book, using digitized photos of actors and hand-painted backgrounds. Each screen shows the current room from Blade's perspective. The mouse cursor is used to look at objects, magnify crime scenes, and move from room to room.
The game has a time meter that reflects the passage of time in the game. Each of Blade's actions takes up a certain amount of time, with some game events only occurring at particular times. The player must find a way to delay the plans of the game's villains, or the game will end after only three days and Blade will not have time to save the day. Travelling between locations can take up a lot of in-game time, so players must plan their moves strategically.
Several puzzles in Rise of the Dragon have multiple possible solutions. Blade's activities can influence the plot of the game later on. Game characters remember his earlier behavior, and if he says the wrong thing to key characters they will refuse to help him with his work, which can render the game unwinnable.
Rise of the Dragon features two arcade action scenes and an aim-and-shoot scene.
Development[]
Despite the difficulties of creating Project Firestart, Dynamix were convinced enough to continue their pursuit for interactive entertainment.[1] Their goal was to create an adult oriented story that contained interesting characters with personalities. To achieve this, they decided build an image production studio that included photography and lighting facilities, color scanning and image processing capabilities, and a photo development lab.[2]
Inspired by Blade Runner and William Gibson novels,[3] Jeff Tunnell and David Selle wrote the concept for Rise of the Dragon in late summer of 1988.[4] After working on some preliminary design, Dynamix realized that the technology wasn't yet strong enough to handle such a big project. They decided to put the title on hold and move on to David Wolf: Secret Agent, an EGA action game that served as a stepping stone.[5] Near the end of 1989, the company started work on Rise of the Dragon. Using the software tools that create David Wolf, the availability VGA graphics, and advancements of in-house video and sound technology, the company incorporated these elements for the creation of the Dynamix Game Development System.[6] The engine was set to work over a local area network so that the developers could work on the game at the same time. To minimize player frustrations, Dynamix created the VCR Interface to allow players more control over vital game playing elements to suit their styles.
With Jeff as the main director of the project, Dave Selle and Jerry Luttrell developed the plot as the technical base for the game was being created. Randy Dersham was assigned to serve as art director, with Dark Horse Comics artist Robert Caracol joining the team to create the concept art and characters. The music was composed by Don Latarski and Christopher Stevens using the Roland MT-32.
Wanting to have a darker gritty tone, storyboard sketches were drawn out from the story and game design. Backgrounds were then handed-painted, scanned onto a computer, and added over two hundred animations on top of them.[7] These include ambient lighting and digitized sequences from hand renderings. Text was imported through a special interpreter for the next stage of development, with programmers hard coding special cases for individual scenes and implementing the game logic to put it together. Finally, the QA department spent many hours of game testing to fix most of the bugs.[8] Rise of the Dragon ended up with 105 scenes, 12,500 individual animations, and 26,000 pieces of text.[9]
Sega CD[]
Developed by Game Arts, several differences existed between the Sega CD and DOS versions of Rise of the Dragon, the most prominent being the addition of voice acting to the Sega CD release. The graphics of the Sega CD version had to use a more limited range of colors than the DOS version, 64 on screen colors compared to the 256 of the computer, which gave it a green tint.
The Sega CD version added voice actors to the game (including Cam Clarke in the main role as William 'Blade' Hunter) and was given a MA-17 rating by the Videogame Rating Council. Unlike the ESRB rating system, VRC ratings do not indicate the reasons why a game received a particular rating, but mature content in the game includes profanity, references to a fictional illicit drug, cross-dressing, prostitution and partial female nudity. A scene with a French kiss and implied sex was removed from the Sega CD release.
The Sega CD version does not allow the player to skip arcade sequences.
Credits[]
Staff Roll[]
Voice Cast[]
Reception[]
Electronic Gaming Monthly deemed the Sega CD version "an almost perfect translation of the PC title". Though they criticized the absence of replay value, they approved of the gritty tone and "atmospheric" graphics, and scored it a 7.6 out of 10.[10] The CD port received a 90% from GamePro, declaring that "Rise of the Dragon is without a doubt one of the best games for the Sega CD, period."[11]
References[]
- ↑ Rise of the Dragon Hintbook, p. 5
- ↑ David Wolf: Secret Agent Manual, p. 14
- ↑ Rise of the Dragon Hintbook, p. 11
- ↑ Rise of the Dragon Hintbook, p. 6
- ↑ Rise of the Dragon Hintbook, p. 7
- ↑ Rise of the Dragon Hintbook, pp. 8-9
- ↑ Rise of the Dragon Hintbook, p. 12
- ↑ Rise of the Dragon Hintbook, p. 12
- ↑ Rise of the Dragon Hintbook, p. 13
- ↑ Electronic Gaming Monthly, Issue #59, p. 38 (June 1994)
- ↑ GamePro, Issue #48, pp. 60-61 (July 1993)
External Links[]
- Rise of the Dragon at Sierra Chest
- Rise of the Dragon at MobyGames
- Rise of the Dragon at GameFAQs
- Rise of the Dragon at Sega Retro
- Rise of the Dragon at Sega-16
- Rise of the Dragon at Hardcore Gaming 101
- Rise of the Dragon (Sega CD) at Museum of Computer Adventure Game History