Dragon Power
Reviewed by Charles White
Graphics: F+
OOOOOOk, I have zero idea what is what in this game, the graphics
are absolutely terrible. On the box there is a picture of this cool
looking muscled up kung fu dude and the guy you are playing looks
like a monkey. I'm not kidding, I thought he was a monkey the first
time I played it. His black belt has a lot of slack on it and it drags
behind him (I guess its supposed to look cool or something) and it
looks like his tail. The enemies are confusing. They are all made up
of 2 colors, either blue and white or brown and white, they look like
chopped off bear or wolf heads with feet. and when you kill them
instead of going poof or blinking into oblivion in that classic Nintendo
style they fly off the screen in the direction you hit them at a million
miles and hour. There is this wise old dragon you meet and he's just
a bunch of balls and a head (ok a lot of old Nintendo games where there
is a huge killer snake is always made out of invisibly connected balls
but this one is very stinky). The land is stupid looking, are those rocks?
Are those pipes? I can't tell. The game switches between overhead Zelda
style for when your traveling the ancient Chinese mountains (that look
like, um hell i don't know, they look like something) to side scrolling for
when you face a boss. The bosses are hilarious! They are so badly drawn
(?? programmed??) 98% percent of the bosses are deadly shogun
samurai's that look like 15 feet tall grisley bears with huge swords
mauling a little pink monkey who is always smiling. Later in the game
you go to outer space and you have to fight this 50 foot tall robot. This
robot, is silver, his body is a huge rectangle that takes up half the
screen, he has 30 holes on his rectangle body, he has a square head
with two eyes and stick arms and legs. These holes on his body are guns
that fire while balls, it is sad. And how tall is the monkey/man? There
are scenes of dialog where you talk to this blue haired girl and she
towers above you, I thought you were supposed to be a skilled 30 year
old muscled up Kung Fu master.
Music and Sound: F
Bad Nintendo music! When people say "it sounds like bad Nintendo music"
they are referring to Dragon Power's one and only 20 second music track
that repeats itself over and over and over and over and over and over
throughout the game. Its very annoying. Its bad Nintendo music. The sounds
are your standard beeps and blops, nothing special.
Game Challenge: B
What makes this game so challenging is trying to figure out what the
heck is going on. The land is confusing enough to navigate through. You
have this time meter thing that is always ticking down, everything you
kill and enemy these little black dots float around and you collect them
to make the counter go up. I have no idea whats going on in this game.
Game Play-Fun: D
This game is not fun at all! Lame action, lame story, LAME LAME LAME!
This game is so stale. The controls are very loose, I wish most games
could have this kind of loose and crisp controlling.
Frustration
Your counter runs out in one minute and it takes forever to defeat a
walking bear head so you can get his black dot. The bosses tower
above you, you have to go up to them and punch them to death while
they roboticly swing their screen length swords up and down. The
game is also LONG. This is the longest and stalest game I have ever
played. Its so LONG! I used some game genie (i always hated the name
GAME GENIE) cheats on it so nothing can kill me to check out the rest
of this horrible game before I let it collect dust forever and it took
me 3 hours to get through. I was killing enemies with one punch
strolling through this game with no problems and it took over 3 hours.
There are no puzzles to solve either, its just straight forward lame
action. I guess what made things so slow were the lame dialog scenes,
the words slowly spell out at 1 mile a year and these characters
have a lot to say.
Replayability: F
After one play you'll never want to see it again.
This should be a little hard to find. Its not a real gem and not worth
owning. You should not pay any money for this piece of crap. If you get
it for free they better include 3 more games with it!
Overall: F
Totally boring and lame game but I have to give them some credit, there
is no other game like this anywhere.