Double Dragon Trilogy

Double Dragon Trilogy is DotEmu's 2015 compilation of the first three Double Dragon arcade games from Technos Japan: the 1987 original, Double Dragon II: The Revenge, and Double Dragon 3: The Rosetta Stone. They are side-scrolling brawlers in the plainest sense. You walk a lane left to right, a handful of gang members step in, and you deal with them using punches, kicks, elbows, knees and whatever lies on the ground — knives, baseball bats, whips and dynamite all turn up as pickups.

The first game follows Billy Lee and his brother Jimmy as they fight through the Black Warriors gang to rescue Marian. The Revenge opens with the gang's worse move and sends the brothers after the people responsible. The Rosetta Stone, the weakest-regarded of the three, sends them around the world after pieces of a stone and adds a shop for buying new moves and swapping in different fighters. Each game is a short, hard arcade run built to eat coins, which here has been reshaped to be played at a sofa.

What DotEmu adds is a layer of convenience around untouched design. There are two modes: Arcade, which plays the games as they were, and Story, which strings them together. There are three difficulty levels, a choice between the original 8-bit soundtrack and a remastered one, and fully remappable keyboard and controller controls, with Xbox 360 controllers supported directly. Local two-player co-op is the real draw. These games were designed around a friend standing beside you, and playing them solo is a much sourer experience.

It is fair to say the package has mixed reception. GOG shows a middling user rating, and reviewers at launch criticised the ports as recreations rather than the arcade code itself, the thin extras, and in particular the way Double Dragon 3 was handled. Expect a faithful feel rather than a museum-grade preservation project, and expect the difficulty to be exactly as unforgiving as 1987 intended.

On the practical side, it is Windows-only, the installer is around 130 MB, GOG lists Windows Vista through 8 as the supported systems and an Intel HD GPU as sufficient, and there is no DRM or online requirement. PlayBound cannot download it for you because it is a paid game, so the launcher's job is to locate your installed copy and give it a controller profile. It does not offer PlayBound-hosted online play, because the co-op is strictly local; for a long-distance friend, the screen-sharing couch party is the route.

For PlayBound it earns a place as an honest entry point into beat 'em ups: cheap, DRM-free, small, and best with a second pair of hands. It is the clean historical starting line that later brawlers such as Streets of Rage and Final Fight were built to improve on, and it is easy to understand what they improved once you have played these.