Retronauts - 689: Dragonstrike

Episode Date: May 12, 2025

Nadia Oxford, William SRD, and Greg Melo talk about DragonStrike, a retro flight / combat game based around D&D's Dragonlance universe. Retronauts is made possible by listener support through Patreon! Support the show to enjoy ad-free early access, better audio quality, and great exclusive content. Learn more at http://www.patreon.com/retronauts 

This week on Retronauts, it's time to put on your dragon pants and pick up your dragon lance and do a little dragon dance. Welcome to Retronauts. I am your host for this week. Nadia Oxford, the only podcaster who can talk a brass dragon to death. I'm going to talk about Dragon Strike, a game that exists in two very different forms across the PC and the NES. Joining me on this flight are two very special guests. Actually, I should have asked beforehand, William, how do you want me to pronounce your YouTube channel, William S.R.D? Yeah, William S.R.D. is perfect. Yeah. Thank you so much for being on. You have some really cool stuff on your channel. So I want you tell us a little bit about yourself in your channel. you. So I am a, well, somewhere between a video game reviewer and essayist. I cover all the video game adaptations of tabletop franchises like Dungeons and Dragons, World of Darkness, Warhammer 40,000, and sometimes smaller franchises as well. And because of that, I have stumbled across a couple of years ago and became deeply obsessed with the topic of today's

video. Yeah, I was, uh, someone flagged me down on blue sky and said, uh, if you want to talk about Dragon Strike, I got someone right here for you and looking at your videos. It's like, yep, you're the dude. Yeah. Glad to have you on board. It's, it's quite fun sometimes when you cover a game and suddenly you become, that game just becomes like a part of your reputation. It's, it's quite fun. You like adopt a game. Ironically, my reputation, I'm so sorry that we're leaving out, Greg. We'll get to you in a second, I promise to God. My reputation is kind of based a little bit around this game in several ways, but a very interesting link I learned about, and of course I was blowing this right up front, is that,

like, I love quintet. And if you look back, you will find a quintet episode somewhere in this archive that has me, I think, Anthony John Ainello as well. And the person who made the music for the PC-98 version of Dragon Strike is a guy who did the music. for illusion of Gaia, which is just I love that kind of thing, because it's such an unique soundtrack, but we will get to that. I promise you, for now,

let's introduce our very special second guest. Greg, mellow, let it mellow. I'm very special. Thank you. I'm excited to be here. I'm a long-time listener, first-time talker.

A long-time drawerer. Long-time drawer. I'm not drawing for this episode. I don't know who has dibsies on this, but I'll get you next time. Absolutely. There's always time for dragons. Yeah. That's why we're here today, actually, because as I said before, we are talking a little bit about Dragon Strike.

And just to kind of go over briefly, it is developed by Westwood Associates, published by Strategic Simulations Inc. SSI. And basically, it's on the PC is kind of a combination in 3D flight sims slash dragon combat game based very heavily on Dungeon Dragons' War of the Lent's Dragonlands campaign, which is like my jam. 100%. You play a chicken McNobody who starts off on guard duty for the Knights of Salamnia, and as you clear more levels, however, you get higher challenges and you kind of take back more enemy territory. And this is something I find extremely interesting about this game, because, again, as a Dragon Lance nerd, I love the fact that it takes place right at the turning point of the War of the Land. So to kind of catch you up on the story at this point, the war of the land has gone on for a very long time.

Taquises, the a.k.a. Tiamet, she's commanding the bad dragons, and the bad dragons are kicking everyone's ass. And towards the end of the war, actually, that's when the good dragons shone in. And they have their own reasons for doing so and their own reasons for sitting it out to this point. But the point is, you are on the back of these dragons and you are trying to reclaim territory, basically, that has been just ambushed by the forces of darkness. And William, one thing I actually really liked about your video on Dragon Strike for the ANS in particular is you mentioned how this is rare for a game, but this is like kind of a dark setting for a game, isn't it? Like, you're really on the cusp of defeat. You've got to claw your way back. It absolutely is.

And it's such a, it's part of what makes this game fascinating because you think like being a dragon rider, that's always what we would associate in fantasy as like the highest power level. Of course. I know. That's the highest it goes. Whereas Dragon Strike takes that concept and goes, no, yeah, you're like up against all these season Dragon riders and you're some nobody. These guys have been fighting for like 20 years on Dragonback. You're just, it literally says in the manual, you have two weeks training. Yeah, I noticed that in the manual. And Lord Gunther is like, oh, I hate myself because I'm sending children off to war. Well, in the various dragons you can ride, they have, like, descriptions on them. And most of them are like, yeah, all the riders of these guys are dead. Yep. They've all been dying over and over on these dragons.

It's such a unique tone to take. I think that's part of what makes it so cool. It's funny. I think it's so interesting, like, the concept of a dragon rider because dragons aren't stupid. They're sentient. You know, it's not like you're riding a horse. But let's just stick a person. person on there anyways. Like that, it'd be like if I got into a fist fight and I had like a

smaller person on my back, just like, bring me closer and, and, like, hit him better. That's how I get into all my fistfights. Yeah. I know it's explained in the lore of like, you know, the dragon lances can kill dragons and all that good stuff. But conceptually, it's just very funny how they have to like kind of wrestle with that. Well, and on top of that. I've always wondered about that myself, yeah. On top of that, like, dragons, especially in dragon lints, they have ranged breath attack. So it's like having a guy with a lance on your shoulder while you have a gun. It's even silly. Yeah, I think the, they get into it in the dragonlance books. I think it's Dragons of Spring Donning, the third book and the Chronicles, which gets into the dragon riding part,

and that's when things start to turn around. And yeah, there is actually a sequence that I remember very clearly where they only had enough of the kind of a magical silver or whatever to craft a few dragon lances and the rest were all just like fake and the idea was to do psychological warfare because they you know they were just regular lances they would hurt a dragon very badly but not like really the magical lances the ones that really killed them so yeah there was there was a reason to have people on dragon back i understood that i i get that the one that what that makes me wonder is pern or but i don't know um yeah you start off actually like this is the uh kind of the d and d slash Dragonlance campaign, sorry, a catalog of dragons.

So you start off on, technically one of the weaker ones, bronze. I don't know, like, how it works exactly. It kind of applies that, you know, even the bronze dragon that you're riding at the beginning of the game is quite small next to the white dragons that you would chase. And white dragons are usually much smaller than bronze dragons. So the point is you're on kind of a real, I don't want to say it's like a, a nash, The equivalent of a nag that you have a horse, but it was definitely not a high-end dragon, like a silver or a gold. But you work your way up to that, which makes me kind of sad, because what about the dragon is like, oh, you're leaving me behind.

That makes me sad. But you're right. I think the instruction book, William, mentions that the dragons, like, they have had riders that have died one at the other. And it's a good instruction booklet, to be honest. Like, all PC games will get into that. It does a lot of a heavy lifting on world-building the game. Yeah, because in the game itself, it's quite sparse. Yeah. I mean, that's the thing that I just like missed about manuals that I would just obsessed about over. As a kid, when I'm not at my computer or my game consoles, I just like pour over that. And that's just like the kind of thing where it's just like, cool, this will get me through a car ride or a family dinner or something like that.

My dad has the TV. Yeah, yeah. My dad's doing taxes on our gateway, you know. My dad's watching the hockey game. Yep. Thank you. There's also the NES version of this game, released in 1992, I think published by Pony Canyon, it's something else entirely. Obviously, the NES wasn't really capable of handling the 3D graphics of the PC version of the game. So it's a top-down, kind of an auto-moving shooter.

It doesn't really, it scrolls like up as well as side to side. And it has two pains of gameplay, like the top and the bottom. Like you can fly high, you can fly low. And depending on the pain you're on, that's the, you know, that the enemy attack will either go above you or below you. and, but in the, as a trade-off, you know, you have to be either above or below, depending on the enemy, to use your breath attack and kill them. It's a hard game. It's, again, it takes place like around the War of the Lance, but unlike the PC version, unfortunately, they don't have the real bitch and pixel rendition of Larry Elmore's artwork. Yeah, yeah.

That's what I miss most. You have the title screen, which is kind of, uh, meh. But, uh, the NES version of the game, we'll get into. to that because it has its own merits, I find. Like, I don't like it very much, but it is certainly worth talking about. But before we do that, let's talk a little bit about how we got into Dragon Strike specifically. I'll start. I was in school, let's say this was around 1998, and someone in my school got stabbed, and everything went into disarray that day.

So I was just like, well, I guess I'm not going to bother going back to class. I'm just going to go to the computer lab and talk to this one guy about Final Fantasy 6, and I did that. And while I was there, someone I left behind an old GamePro magazine from like 1992. And so I just kind of started going through it. And I saw a review for Dragon Strike on the NES. And I was a huge, like, Dragon Lance fan by that point. And I had no idea they were Dragon Lance-based games. So I was like, wow, that's incredible.

And the review was like, honestly, this isn't great. is pretty much what you would expect, but that's how I learned that there was this game out there, because the review mentioned, this is an adaptation of the 3D game, which was much better. So I eventually found that game and played it. I remember playing it actually on my, I had like a Toshiba 486 laptop that I used to write on, like, some of my, the first laptop I got so I could do some of my writing, like, on the go. And I put, I put the game on that and works quite well. Like, it's a real, low-spec-d-d-doss game. Westwood's, like, talent for running or for making games that run real smooth was on display with both Dragon Strike games. They both just, like, they feel pretty good, and they run just amazingly. Yeah. One thing I do have to say about Dragon Strike for the N-E-I is, thinking back on it, there's

no flicker. There's no slowdown. Yep. And that's, you know. Yeah, I guess there isn't. Yeah. Which is good because there are a lot. of bullets. Yeah. Yes. There's a lot going on on that screen. But how about you, William? How did you get

into Drag Shrine? Yeah. So for me, it was when I started making YouTube videos about D&D video games, I kind of stumbled across it. And I came from, I came at this from the side of I'm a long time like D&D player played video games my whole life. But for some reason, I never actually put the two together. I've never played very many d and d video games so i have always been kind of coming at it from a tabletop fan who's like going back and discovering all these games i missed uh and then while i like when i was first getting into that i just started looking at this like broad list of all the d and video games which is a crazy number of games it's like 80 of them uh yeah wow that's a lot the one that right away, like the moment I looked at the first list, I was like, hold on, a flight simulator. There's a D&D flight simulator. What's going on here? And so I just became like hyper fixated on this. And it was one of the first ones that I ended up covering. I think it was like the fourth. And then just over the years, I just kept on spiraling into the fact that the Dragon Strike video game is more

like a forgotten Dragon Strike sub-franchise, and I just keep on spiraling and being like, oh, there's a Dragon Strike N-E-S version. I should cover that. Oh, there's a Dragon Strike board game that isn't related. I should cover that. Oh, there's another Dragon Strike board game that's a spiritual successor to the original video game. Oh, wow, I should cover that. Yeah. I love that there is a spiritual successor. That's great. How about you, Greg? What did you? How did you get into this mess? Yeah. I mean, it was kind of like a dual pronged approach, because I was introduced to D&D by a weird kid in my Spanish class. That's how it happens.

Him and his dad, who went by the name Dave the Giant, both in and out of game. I love that. That's the best way to learn about D&D. And then my dad was one of those guys who would just bring home computer games from work that, like, a friend gave him on a sketchy-looking floppy disk with, like, Xerox. manuals because you need the manuals to play the game. Yeah, for the piracy checks. Yep. Yeah.

And my dad was just like really into like flight sims and stuff like that. Like we had F-19 on the DOS, which was fun also. But I was always more of a fantasy guy and he brought home Dragon Strike and he's like,

get a load of this shit. And then I got a load of that shit at a very slow pace because my computer was not very good at the time. One frame at a time, slowly. Yeah. Once I got to those dragons, I saw some real shit.

Yeah. Yeah. By then I was 18. Yeah. You'd age and become, like, a family man and everything. Yeah, you just let it. I had already read all 190 of the Dragon Lance novels by then. Are there 190?

Or is that just a number you pulled? It's about 190. It's about 190. I started, like, scrolling through, and then I was like, I'll take their word for 190. I think something like 60 of them are short story collections, but it's still a lot of books. Yeah. There's a lot of dragons and a lot of lances. Are you guys fans of Dragon Lans specifically?

Yes. Yeah. I'm familiar. I read the first trilogy, and I haven't really gone past that. I know there's a second trilogy that people seem pretty hot on, but no, just the first three books. I actually recently reread the, fairly recently reread the Chronicles and the Legends. And Legends is still incredible. That's still an incredible trilogy.

I recommend it wholeheartedly. It's a much, much more mature than, I mean, I love Chronicles, but it's definitely like, this is a D&D campaign that we turn into a story. Legend is much more, you really see Margaret Weiss mature as a reader, as a writer there. Yeah, cool. She's pretty great. I'm actually doing, like, right in parallel with this, I'm doing a Dragonlance read-along book club podcast thing as well. And it's really fun to revisit them. because I haven't re-read Dragon Lent since I was a kid.

It was probably my first, like, epic fantasy series that I read. So you must know Shivam, the bot or do you? I don't, actually. Oh, you, I got to introduce you to. Like, he is the master of Dragon Lentz. Oh, fantastic. Would love to meet him then. And I think he has a podcast about Dragon Lass.

Oh, cool. I wouldn't mind, like, going on. And, yeah, I, um, there was a, there was a summer where I got grounded. for having bad marks and so I got my NES taken away from me and I went to the library and I discovered Dragon Lance and just really kind of got I was always into drag and stuff like that as a weird kid I think like all of us um I have to ask one question Greg was Dave the giant or whatever was he giant was he really big he was huge he was a very large metal singer um he had this real low voice um he deserves the name then yeah yeah he totally And he was like a lot of fun just hanging out with like his son and this random kid from Spanish class and, you know, punching slimes and stuff in a dungeon. And it was great. It was the perfect when you're a kid and you don't know what the heck D&D is. That's like such a great introduction to the game. I still think about him every time. I saw him pretty recently and he's still much taller than me. Everyone's toddler to me. I have to ask you, as an artist, were you kind of inspired by those really bitching pixelized versions, like a set of Elmore's artwork? Like, that kind of preceded every level?

Yeah. I mean, that's the thing that I love about this era of games. And this game is no different. I love when you beat a level and you see like the new thing, you know, a flying castle. half-acid-melted corpse. It's like a reward, you know? And it's great. And especially on a CRT, I mean, it's great in high definition.

And, you know, you can slap some shaders on there these days. It's not too hard. But there's just something about it where, and like you just sit with it. Like the game like goes to black for a second. It's almost like your computer's having a hiccup. Yeah. And like the music cuts out. And then you just see the splash.

of something amazing and like the all 20 seconds of Dragon Lance's soundtrack kicks in. And it's like, hell yeah. I'm a cool guy on a cliff with a bitch and mustache. And this is great. Yeah, I loved

the artwork for this. And it's freaking dragons. That's the thing that I think is like really funny about Dragon Lance as a whole is that like a lot of people who just aren't into do d and d or just like oh sweet dragons oh there's books oh there's you know a calendar or whatever oh there's figures and then like it's just like a rabbit hole that goes deeper and deeper

and the next thing you know you're playing like a goddamn dragon flight some game that's so so yeah like like i mentioned before this is just like a perfect marriage of all the things i loved and yeah the artwork and this is great yeah i think one of of my favorite things about the Dragon Lance artwork is because, you know, you got really cool representations of characters and dragons on screen. And then quietly, if you take your eyes off the foreground, you realize that this is where Larry Elmore was doing just the best landscape work. Just gorgeous landscapes he was drawing. And most people don't look at it because you look at the subjects, but wow, he did incredible landscapes. He is an artist. I am I very much.

much because as I understand it, he had a stroke and had to reteach himself how to draw. Oh, did he? Yeah, it was a long time ago that I read that, so I might be inaccurate. But as I understand it, like, I don't know if it was his dominant hand. I think it might have been, but he had to basically rehabilitate himself. And he's just, when I see his art, I think, Dragon Lens. And I'm so glad they went with that for Dragon Strike. Yeah.

And let's talk, who developed the game because they are also responsible for classics like Command and Conquer. And that would be Lewis Castle and Brett Sperry. Is that pronounced right? Brett Sperry? That's the love that. I love that. Yeah. I also want to point out that Lewis Castle is seemingly responsible for the Lion King on consoles back in the day.

And in which case, I am sad because that game hurt me, hurt me deeply. those monkeys It looks good Yeah Oh it's beautiful Beautiful game It sounds great too On the SNES

Oh yeah Actually I think I played that It's been a forgotten memory Till right now Huh It is legendary Because as we were saying It's a gorgeous game

Gorgeous soundtrack But it was one of those games That they screwed up Because oh my god Rental Market So They took one They took a really hard level

And really frustratingly hard level And made it like the second level And so it's just like or a major drop-off, which is a shame until you remember the cheat code, just B-A-R-R-Y, and let you go to any level you want. So do it, kids. Don't suffer the will-to-be stampede. Yeah, 90s Disney platformers were like a blockbuster staple. Yep.

Yes. But also extremely hard. Can't tell you how many times I went through that Aladdin game. Yep. So many apples. For the Genesis, I've never actually. play the S&S one. Like, I've been meaning to because I hear it's better. I mean, I play the Genesis one to death. It's one of those games where you were over at a friend's house, you would rent

Aladdin because it was like everyone could agree on it. At least it wasn't the Simpsons games, which is another thing I suffered sleepovers. Like, hey, we're going to rent a game. Oh, boy, which game is that? Bart versus the world. Oh, God, kill me now. Yeah, I only played the Genesis version as well. We had like, we would borrow one of my dad's friends cabins like for a two week period every summer and they had a Sega Genesis there and Aladdin was like the only game on that thing that I enjoyed because I can only I could only frustrate myself on Echo the Dolphin so many times. Oh God. Yeah. Just kind of a brief tangent. One of my favorite stories about my personal stories is that when I was a kid,

I was in the hospital for a while after surgery and they had, I was really, I was really, really depressed until I realized they had an SDS. And I was like, and the only game they had was Mario was missing. But I'm just like, oh, God, this is making it worse. Get me out of the encourage me to get out of the hospital. Just go home. You're playing a bad game and you're learning. And you're sick. And you're sick. And your, your face is swollen to the size of a basketball because he just had jaw surgery. Oh, what a life. Anyway, one thing I found very interesting in your video about Dragon Strike on the NES, William, as you're talking a little bit about Westwood as a studio that was used to adaptations, but maybe not so much the demake

that Dragon Strike was on the NES. Did you want to talk a little bit about that all? Sure. Dragon Strike, as a Westwood property, just in general, is kind of an interesting point in their development history, because they were very much being groomed by S. S-I to be one of their top studios to make D&D sub-license games. And they had just made HillsFar, and it was promising that they managed to push the pre-existing engine so far, but HillsFar still wasn't very good. And then they still got the chance to make Dragon Strike and, you know, do something very experimental, and it did okay.

And then right after they did Eye of the Beholder, just like the best D&D video games. of the era you know so it was like a stepping stone of uh you know getting getting into form to make eye of the beholder uh it's the last step before you know the legend uh and when it like previously they they had done just so much work with uh game remakes and stuff uh or not not so much game remakes, but like ports to other consoles of different video games. And a lot of the time, the ports they made were more like remakes because they were kind of trying to like flex their skills a little bit, show off, see if they could get themselves some new, new stuff. So when they ported, ported Dragon Strike over to NES, it was just a new game entirely, because that's

just kind of how Westwood did things. Which happened a lot on the NES. Yeah. And that game, we'll talk a little bit about the NES game now. It's the NES game, even though it's not perfect, I find that it has some interesting differences in its environments. You go to space. Yes. That's really, dragon communism untouched space. You get city battles too, and that's very welcome. That was very neat.

Like, to be honest, I have not really finished this game. On the end, you get your choice of three dragons, that is bronze, silver, gold, same as the PC game. And you get your choice of difficulties, but it's hard, even on easy. It's just like, I went for the silver dragon, and you learn quite quickly that the silver dragon is very quick, but harder to control. And one thing that will kill you or rather get you in this game is the fact that your breath weapon, I think, scales with your health. So that is this, like, it's very common in shooters to, like, if you have an option or you have a power up, you die, you get hit, you lose that power up. But it feels like in other games like that, like I adore Corba Triangle or, you know, Gradius and all of that, it's so much harder to get yourself back up into fighting shape when I think you mentioned your video, William, that you can have a great run. And then all of a sudden you have a death spiral, quite literally, because you can't, you know, health pickups are quite split.

bearing. And I feel like there were still some good ideas here that I wish had been used better. But the idea of going into space, I think that's where you find Tekeesis. And as I recall, she's just hanging out in space. Because when I saw the video, I thought, okay, does this game maybe have the mind fliers in space? And I'm thinking of Alders Gate 3 because I say that. That's really cool. But nope, Tekeesis is there. It's like, okay, cool. I know that in the book, she was kind of half-formed by the time the Dragon to Spring Donning book finished. She needed that one element of the jewel to kind of put into the altar. And they have the altar there.

And he can tell it's the picture that Larry Elmore had drawn of Taecis and the elf girl. What's her name, Lorana? Yeah. There's a picture of her, like, kind of chained up in front of Tekeesis. It's really freaking cool. And you can tell that's the basis for a space dragon fight. But I was watching this fight that someone else is doing because I'm just like, good Lord. There's five heads, like 3,000 projectiles flying at you.

Again, no slowdown. There might be a bit of flicker, but no slowdown. I have never finished this game. I never will. Have either of you finished this game? Yeah. But I, you know, I have no regrets for the fact that I was using an emulator and I would just save states. So I didn't have to completely restart every level.

That's okay. I think that's a big flaw of the original game is that the difficulty was so high. and then you had to restart completely from the start of the level. There should have been a lot more checkpoints. There's, I think you get one life, no checkpoints. There are two breath weapons, and I think I forgot to use one. Maybe that was my problem right there. You might have answered this already, Greg.

Did you play Dragon Strike on the NES? I played it a little bit, and I played it in preparation for this recording, and I did not have an emulator. I'm a weirdo, and I like to play on hardware. I loaded it up on a flash drive and did not have the luxury of sanity. Oh, no. There was definitely a moment where my wife heard me yelling from upstairs, and I was just like, ah, computer crashed work, call. I'm okay.

Yeah, and it is funny. Like, it's so maddening because in a way you want to reward someone for, like, playing well. but to be punished like that, it just gave me, you know, I'm working backwards, but in my own personal history, it gave me flashbacks to Demon's Souls, where you just, congratulations, half your health bar is gone, because you lost in the tutorial. How sad for you. But it's funny, though, even though it is like a different style of game, there's something to just like, That dog fight kind of just like, we're just going to play grab ass in circles until one of us is going to crash or shoot the other one. I think the thing that just like driving me mad is just I need it like widescreen. Like I kept getting hit by shit from off screen and that's probably why my wife heard me yelling.

She's like, you're just like stupid dragon? Yeah, stupid dragon. that's the name of my co-worker and I'm not yelling at an old video game. But it's interesting. There's a lot of, that's the thing. It's so frustrating. It's like there's a lot of really good ideas.

But it's just like in that era where if you're not making a total banger, you're probably still finding your footing, figuring things out. And it came out at a very particular era where shoot-em-ups were an existing genre, but bullet hells weren't yet. Right. And Dragon Strike on the NES clearly wanted to be a bullet hell, but they didn't have the mechanical language for it quite yet. So there's a lot of flaws for that reason. Yeah, when I was looking at Dragon Strike for the NES, at first I was like, oh, this is a very plain looking game.

And it is. But William, you pointed out something very valid. That's the fact that when you are playing a shooting game, you want to know where you are and what you are shooting. And even though you have these people who are just kind of standing there and should not even animated, they shoot arrows and throw rocks, it's just, well, at least you know what you're getting into. And to be on, to space background, just pretty cool. The space background's really cool. Yeah.

You also have it like a dummy thick hitbox, too. Oh, yeah. You don't necessarily have. Yeah. And, you know, you play like a bullet hell game. It's like you got like a dot and the rest of the graphics is just like window dressing. But this is just like driving a beautiful. Buick. Yep. In the sky.

That's what it feels like, doesn't it? Yeah. And the dragons have very, they're slow to turn around. And that's a big problem. Because I would, there used to be a bullet hell, like, kind of dragon game that I played. And God, it was ages ago back when the mobile game market was like almost viable. But it's such a cool idea. Like, I think there's, it was a call for the NES. There was a game where you become a dragon to shooting game. Was Dragon Spirit, I think? Or was, it was by now. Oh, I know which one you're talking about. I don't remember the name, though.

Yeah, I don't know off the time of my head. Yeah. Yeah, like, I mean, shoot him up where you're a dragon. Like, that is really dope, but you make it a bullet hell, it's even doper. But it didn't really have that going on, unfortunately. I will say one thing that kind of ticks me off a little bit about the graphics for the NES version of the game. And this is very, this is very persnickety of me. when you have your selection of the copper, sorry, of the bronze or silver or brass or gold dragon,

the picture of the bronze dragon is a white dragon, they just recolored it, and I find that extremely annoying because, again, they took a picture from Elmore. Specifically, there's a picture he drew of a white dragon, capsizing the ship and the dragons of winter night, I think it was, in the beginning of that. they fight a white dragon and I'm like okay well I recognize that dragon and it ain't a white dragon also this dragon this game contains copper dragon and brass dragon erasure and I'm a little bit upset about that I hope someone is fired for that blunder I hope someone's fired for that blunder Yeah, actually, um, talk a little about the, I don't know how put it in the house. popular Dragon Lance was at the time because that was a little bit like I got into Dragon Lance later so I wasn't sure like how popular it was at the time when this came out if anyone

has any idea because I don't oh gosh what was the exact release year um it was like the release year of the of the PC game was 1990 90 yeah that would still be like pretty pretty much in the hey day yeah yeah I mean I had a cool older cousin who uh smoked work at an arcade, and he was the one who kind of got me into Dragon Lance, the greater concept. Yeah, I had a lot of, like, really cool older stewards. And, yeah, and so he had, like, he had all, he had shelves of that shit of the books and artwork. And, and, yeah, and I remember, again, like I mentioned, and not realizing that it was connected to this whole other board game.

And then as I got onto the board game, like, finding out later, it's related. and like how the whole thing kind of like materialized between um this this married couple uh why am i blanking on their names margot weiss and no sorry was uh laura and tracy hickman yeah there we go who introduced themselves as the hickman sisters sometimes because they're very funny yeah so yeah i mean that whole like how that was formed and like where tsr was at the time and and this was like the first d and d like multi media thing i guess it was yeah and that's so funny to think of now because it's like you know hasbro is will put out a movie and you see merchandise everywhere you know you see happy meals you see all this stuff um and this was like the real first like attempt at

it and um just kind of like looking at like all the their approach to the different modules and the adventures, and, like, some adventures were, like, more, like, source books where they would just have, like, lore or, like, you know, descriptions of places. I think there's one module that is just a war game and not D&D, and, like, some people who are, like, really into D&D, like, weren't too hot on that. And so, yeah, I think it's just so interesting that it all just kind of spawned out of TSR and the Hickman's wanting to be, like, Hey, there are enough dragons in dungeons and dragons. And dragons are pretty dope. What can we put dragons on?

And it's like everything. Everything. Yeah. Everything. I'll buy it. Yeah. Well, and the thing that's so funny about the way that the franchise worked is that the better dragon lance was at being a multimedia franchise, the worse it succeeded at being a tabletop role-playing game. Yeah.

Because the characters, because. came so iconic that it felt like one of those licensed games where, like, oh, yes, there's a Firefly TTRP, but like, you're, I mean, you know you're not the main characters of Firefly. You're, you're hanging out in someone else's world. And Dragonlance started to feel like that where like, ah, the heroes of the Lance, this is their world. And you can have some side adventures in it, you know. So it, which they wrote a lot of, too, in that universe. So it did succeed at being a, uh, Dungeons and Dragons like, multimedia franchise, but it remarkably failed as a tabletop setting because of that.

That's actually very interesting, yeah, because as someone who I know, of D&D, I have played it a few times, but, and I love Baldur's Gate 3, but I was, the modules themselves are not something I know a whole lot about. Like, I know that you could play Dragon Lass technically, but I don't know anyone who played it. And I guess for the reason you mentioned is that these, like, to this day, if you play drag, Dragon's crown, that wizard is raceland. Like, there is no ifs and or butts. Like, it's just that's who a wizard is now to me, to a lot of people. It was great for games and books, not so much for actually playing in a module, I suppose. Have you ever played a Dragon Lance D&D campaign?

No, I only know one person who has. Do you remember what they played as? I'm just really interested in that. Oh, no. I actually never asked them. I think they played a few. I'll have to ask her next time. it seems like outside of the fact the world's so established in terms of these characters like it would be a fun world to play and like the you do feel like kind of an extra soldier in in the dragon strike games which is the way you should feel you are this soldier who is up and coming and trying to become a great legend because again at the end of dragons of spring dawning there are these huge fights with multiple people and there's dragons everywhere and it's really awesome so It can work as a game where you are on the outside looking in.

It absolutely can. I really would have loved to see more like it in, like, heck, any module, but more Dragon Lans is always good with me. What came after Dragon Lans? Is that Ravenloft, or I'm not sure how it works sometimes? It was. Ravenloft did come after I'm blanking on the year, but I know it was Dragon Lans and then Ravenloft. also by the Hickman's. Yeah.

Oh, was that, was Ravenloff by the Hickmans? Yep. Yes. Oh, the reason I bring it up is just because of Simon's Quest. They stole the box art. They stole the artwork for the module for the box art for Simon's Quest. And I distinctly remember I was at a friend's house.

And they had the book for Ravenloft on the floor and you have that picture of the vampire in the background. What's his face? And I'm like, holy shit. That's a that's a that's a science. I didn't even think about the fact that maybe they were inspired by other artwork, but that's something Konami did a lot. So it was absolutely not surprising. Yeah, there ended up being just so many lawsuits and stolen pieces of IP and stuff all over early D&D. Oh, I bet. Final Fantasy famously came across a few of those, like the be the beholder. They're going to have a beholder. No,

you're not. You're just not. Yeah, well, like the original Final Fantasy, like their entire monster selection was just the monster manual of AD&D. Why not? I mean, Yoshitaka Amano drew some beautiful renditions of some classic monsters. There's artwork that recently went up of like he has the Warrior of White fighting like

I don't know, it's like a red dragon or a bronze dragon or something. It looks incredible. Yeah, I love his artwork. So I think though there's a couple of things they couldn't get away with and the Beholder was definitely one of them. Yeah. And one quick correction. I just double-checked the

because I spoke too authoritatively. The first Dragonlance Adventures was 87. The first Ravenloff module was 83. Okay. So that sounds more correct. Yeah. Okay. But yeah, the influence of like D&D and like Final Fantasy and Dragon Lance is so funny

because you look at, you know, our two good, bad dragon gods here. They're basically Bahama and Tiamet. Yeah. Just with, they're, you know, re-skinned, you know, the evil one is a multi-headed dragon queen. And I don't know too many stories of Bahamut turning into a friendly wizard. The wizard, it's bads, featherfall. Yeah, I think it's just so interesting. And, again, like, so much of, like, the iconography of, like, Dragon Lance is just, like, it's just kind of permutated out into other properties that, yeah, like you said, Nadia, like, this is just what it looks like.

now, you know? Yeah. William, do you know very much about, for example, the PC-98 port of this game? I was looking at it, and I actually consulted Friend of the Show. I don't, actually. I don't know if it's much different. Yeah, I consulted Friend of the show PC Audie, and he was saying how the game ran very slowly on the PC-98, and boy, howdy, it sure does. Now, I'm kind of thinking to myself, like, was it the PC-98 or the PC-80? Because I'm thinking, well, this game came out on 92 in Japan, and that was around the same time that we got the N-ES game over here.

And I was looking at, again, this rendition of the game with a completely different music. It's really fantastic. And, yeah, it's slow, but the graphics have this strange, smooth over quality. Like, the PC, admittedly, the Japanese PC market is. one of my more like, you know, blank spots is something I'm working on. But I just find it very interesting that they ported that. And I actually like looking at the videos of play-throughs for this game and seeing all the Japanese people saying, wow, I love this game, but boy, it was pretty hard. Because, yeah, both games were pretty difficult. Oh, yeah. And the one

criticism I have to give for the original game over the NES game is that the, PC game just seems to stop. Like, your last fight is with, I think the red and black dragon armies, which is, I can't remember where exactly ended in terms of Ward the Lance. But it just, it didn't have a showdown to Kis, the way that the NES version did. I think the final boss is like a skeletal dragon. And then the narrative just kind of ends. Yeah. Kind of, I always wondered if that was just because, like, they ran out of time, ran out of money.

But it's a little disappointing, nonetheless. But, yeah, come to think of it. I guess I was going to ask you this question, too. Maybe you know this. Why, in the first place, were Bahamit renamed to Paladin and Taecis? Do you know? It was just for the fun? I don't know.

The only specific thing I know is that they are confirmed in the lore that, like, they are both, like, multi-dimensional beings. And they're not like, ah, this is the Dragonlance version of that. Like, no, Tiamat and Takedas are the same being, but, you know, when Tiamat like pops their head into the Dragon Lans setting, like, transforms into Tachesis. That's all I really know. A change of clothes. Yeah. Yeah. By a change of clothes going by the artwork, a change out of clothes.

Yeah, there's a lot of that in the, uh, in the, uh, in the, uh, in the, uh, in the, uh, Chronicles as well. Boobies. But as to why they made them different, I'm not sure. I think they might have just liked the idea of a queen of darkness. Oh, who doesn't? Who doesn't? We have a note here, R.I.P. Rick Parks.

And I am unfortunately ignorant on specifically what aspect of the artwork Rick Parks did. Who could fill me in on that? That was the spright work, wasn't it? Was he the sprite artist? Oh, yeah, the artist behind the eye of the beholder and everything, yeah. Oh, what a shame. He couldn't have been too old. Yeah, he was not very old.

I think he died in his leukemia. Yeah, he was pretty young. Oh, it's a shame. And a lot of that art is just gorgeous. Yeah. Yeah, I am actually quite ignorant. We were talking about this earlier about the Genesis D&D games. Like, I know, I think I was scared away because the NES, again, War of the Lent, had the

Dragon Lance game. Was it Heroes of the Lance it was called? It just looked really bad. It's famously bad. I'm actually going to be covering it next month and I've been dreading it for literally two or three years. Even that long, huh? Yeah, well, my very first D&D video game video I put as a stretch goal that, you know, I'm like, if we reach X number of likes, I'm going to review the worst d and d video game ever and i'll always take you up on that it was going to be that uh and i i hit that goal uh and i booted up once and i was like i can't even figure out how to play this thing it's infamously bad yeah and so i just went you know what i'll cover the other contender for the worst d and d video game which was uh descent into under mountain uh which what's that for

That's for DOS, I believe. Oh, like Dragon Strike. And it's just taking the descent engine, like the old flight games descent. Yeah. And just hacking that engine into a dungeon crawler. Oh, my God. That sounds like a mess. It does not work at all.

It's really bad. The dungeon crawling freak in me is just like, that sounds kind of dope. I mean, the one thing that it does have is that because of the engine that they hacked it into, they have, like, levitation mechanics that you can do. You can drink, like, a potion of levitation and get into cool places. Like, I get the flying, like, it sounds like, I get the idea that they took, like, a jet bomber and put it in dungeon and, like, that's, you had to play this game now where you're a plane in a, in a dungeon crawler. That does sound kind of dope, actually, but it sounds like hell. It was not that, though. It was just, you, it's a regular.

d and d game except they built it in a flight engine um that is the funniest thing ever today yeah i i don't know why i think it was just because um the the rights for d and d video games had just been lost uh and so it was a new company that had it i i covered this forever ago the memories are now fuzzy but uh yeah it was a new company had it um and they were trying to like rush out this game oh no it was one of the last SSI games. They were trying to rush this thing out before they lost the license. And they had to spend all of their dev time trying to make this engine vaguely work because they owned the descent engine and they were like, we want to use it for something. And they spent all of their dev time hacking the engine and none of the dev time making a good game.

And somehow this game is still better than the Dragonlance game on the NES. It is, yes, definitively. The NES game is so bad that the first time I even saw it, I did not recognize it as a Dragonlance game because it just looked so gray and generic. And you're absolutely right. You can't figure a thing out. But I guess on the Genesis, ironically, since the SNES system is known more for RPGs than the Genesis, that's where they hit some kind of stride for consoles at least, huh? Yeah, absolutely. I'm not sure what it was, but they had two Genesis games.

I've only played the one so far. I want to play the other. It looks very similar. And those are like the most unknown D&D games of the era. And I'm not sure why, but they're really good. They're probably the best ones of the early 90s outside of Eye of the Beholder. Many opinions are in that statement, but you know. Yeah, of course.

Yeah. Who did they lose the license to? Well, they lost it to Interplay. Really? Well, okay, more specifically, SSI had all of the, they had the license for all of D&D. And then very briefly, Wizards of the Coast tried to split up the license and give it to give different settings to different game companies.

And we don't know who got what. That doesn't appear to be public information. But we know that, I think it's, was Activision. Someone got Ravenloft, and they made a really bad Ravenloft fighting game. Oh, is that Iron and Blood? Yeah, Iron and Blood. That's infamous. Infamous. And that's basically the only product that came out of the split license. No other studio actually managed to get anything out other than Interplay, who got the main Forgotten Realms license. And that's also why all of the video games, games like Baldur's Gate and stuff, that's why they were all forgotten realms, is because that was the chunk of the setting that Interplay had.

Interesting. We don't know when they got the rest, but they clearly did get the rest at some point. The license is very cloudy, but it, like, plays a big point in the history of which games were being made and why. That's really interesting. I'm recalling EA published I Beholder for GBA. Yes. Really?

That was another kerfuffle. That's another long story. Those are words that should not go together by the sounds of it. Was it like a... It's not great. I was just kind of... I'm a dungeon crawling guy, and I had an analog pocket that I recently got, and I was just kind of like going through the games and seeing stuff that didn't play.

And I said, I had the... Well, holy, that would be really fun. And it was an EA port of the holder for GBA. That's exactly what that string of word sounds like. Wow. Was it like, okay, so was it like a 3D? Because I know the GBA could do like kind of pseudo 3D really well, but I guess it didn't really work out this time. Any, the GBA can technically do 3D.

It is possible. It shouldn't try to do 3D. Yeah. It's good at certain things and it should just stay in its lane. Yeah. That's understandable. I'm going to be able to be. I'm going to be.

See, here's my problem with the world today, besides everything else, is that there's so few good games that are like Dragon Strike that really put you on the back of a dragon, put you against hopeless odds. The last game I maybe played like it was Panzer Dragoon Ultra, but that's not nearly what I would. want out of a Dragon Lance game. Why is this genre so neglected? Unless I'm missing something completely that's off in the distance that I just don't know about, why do we not have more? I mean, if you remember layer for the PS3, that garbage piece of, like, mistake, it was supposed to be a Dragonlance game. And unfortunately, they turned it into a showcase for a control that didn't work. So I will die bitter about that.

I didn't know that it was supposed to be a Dragonlance game. Isn't that sad? Didn't know that. What, like, wow, we just went into like a wrong timeline between how that game came out and the license. Man, that's a bummer. That really is a bummer. It's just something about the license. Like, going back very briefly, there is an ongoing series called The Worst Fighting Game by MacMet Muscles and is just like him evaluating different games and like fighting games and how bad they are.

I'm pretty sure the number one spot right now goes to Iron and Blum. Ludd for being the worst. Something might have usurped it or come close to it, but yeah, that was, again, another example of like, hey, taking an engine and just putting it somewhere it doesn't belong.

And not really a flight engine going into a dungeon crawl or not anything as interesting as that, but yeah, I would, it should be mentioned actually that this game, Dragon Strike, it came to seen quite recently. Like, I think it's been a few years, but the fact of the matter is, someone remembered

it and put it on Steam and I think that's great. I did not check the modding community. I really should have, but I would love a future where we see another version of Dragon Strike with 3D. Take the hell, take Microsoft flights him and put some dragons in it. Please.

I will even play this in real life, like call it a near sequel, I don't care. Or Dragon Guard sequel. Which, to be honest, when I was looking at the level in the NES version of the game and they have the dragon flying it, Kind of a very modern-looking town, because I know it's supposed to be like a medieval castle town, but it looks very modern.

I'm like, oh, shit, this is Dragon Guard now. Yeah. I don't know if I'm the only near sicko here, but... You're not... Dragon Guard is just, it's a slog. It is what it is. Yeah. But I love me some Yokotaro dragons in the modern age causing the destruction of man sort of stuff.

Yeah. I mean, that's the thing with the DOS version of Dragon Strike. is that it's so cool by, like, you really have to use your imagination to fill in a lot of the gaps. Yeah, a little bit. You can't see the archers that are shooting at you. You just have to know if you fly too close to this one house on a cliff, you're going to get pelted until you die. And also, this is just like a random thing. There's no nighttime levels.

Nope. Yes. That's nighttime sunset. That'd do a lot. Yeah, there's just, like, your mind has to, like, fill in a lot of the imagination. with this. And I'm okay with that, but by the end, it escalates so quickly. It starts with you're just kind of like fighting like a couple dudes who are just like hanging at idling and waiting for you to kill them. And then it escalates to, you know, you've got multiple armies flying

around, airs going everywhere, there's ships, you know, and. And it still just looks like a greenfield. Yeah. And I, let me ask you all this. The graphics settings, did you play with sprites or polygons? I played with sprites I think I played with polygons I'm pretty sure yeah I toggle between the two because the polygons

it's just like a Star Fox 64 ass like bird thing floating which I love but there's like I don't think you can actually see a rider on there and oh if I played with sprites would I have been able to see the riders

oh oops you can see the riders you can see the riders okay yeah I definitely didn't see that when I was playing I just saw the polygons flying around. Yeah. I do appreciate, though, that you try to give you some level scaling where when you start,

you are chasing the dragons. They are not facing you, so they can't really use their breath weapons on you. And it's just a tutorial on how to speed up, how to use your breath weapon, and how to just kind crash into things. It's like jousts. You've got to just kind of crash into there and hope for the best. But, yeah, it's a... The original game is very elegant in many ways, and I think it's so deserving of...

of a remake. Question is, I don't know what the hell Hasbro wants with Dragon, with Dragon Lance, let alone D&D. I don't know if they know what they want from it. So I don't think. They put out a book recently. They did. Yeah.

And a new rule set and everything to go along with it. Oh, that's right. See, I know they had a new novel set, but I didn't know they had, I forgot about the rule set as well. Oh. Yeah, they kind of, they refreshed. They, you know, people call it. 5.5 or version 2024 or whatever.

It's not, it's not hugely different from 5E, you know, by design. But I do remember that they did put out a, either a source book, I think, for Dragonlance. And there are some kerfuffle around that. I think there was like a lawsuit involving the Hickmans and. Oh, I think you're right. Dragon Lions fans, you know, they like their Dragon Lands and Hasbro is a conglomerate that just wants to turn everything into a lifestyle brand now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's funny just how many lawsuits are involved with all this.

Like, we were talking about Ravenloft Iron and Blood earlier. I don't think it was specifically an Iron and Blood specific lawsuit, but Ravenloft caused a whole kerfuffle because, you know, the Hickman's made that setting. and the Hickmans also made Dragon Lance, but T.S.R and then eventually Wizards of the Coast owned both those brands. And then there was a lawsuit because when Lord Soth, one of the villains of Dragon Lance, died, they started just, they were just like,

yeah, when he died, he got transported to Ravenloft. Oh, is that how that happened? Yeah. And then he was the villain in Iron and Blood. He's the one who you're all fighting to defeat. That's right. Like a 3D model of him. and that caused a big lawsuit because Lord Soth was not cleared by the Hickmans to be in a different setting, even though it was also a Hickman setting.

It's, it just, it causes, there's so many lawsuits that have happened over these. I didn't even think that would be a conflict, like, but I could now see how it would be because I remember like, okay, why is Lord Soth and Raven in Ravenloff or whatever? It made sense, it's a death night. Like, yeah. Frankly, the ending of what happens with him and Kityara in the end. end of Dragons of Spring Dawning. That's terrifying. And maybe he didn't need to exist after that because that was good enough for me. But they brought back, like, you know, how it is, they brought back everyone. I do have to admit the, there was the, the secondary set of Chronicles. I can't remember

where they were called specifically, but I liked them a lot. I thought they were well written. You had, you won, I can't remember what the first one was, but the second one. It wasn't the one that was recent, recent. It was the one that was like before that. Like, they had a story about Kiddiara, Dragons of High Lord Skies. That was what it was called. That was great. I love that. And they had one about Raceland.

And that was also great. Think Dragons with a timeglass mage. And I've, new generation, I haven't read it yet. I've heard mixed things about it. Have you read it yet? Well, I don't remember. A lot of it was, because my podcast where we're doing the reread, we're still just on the first book right now. Right.

So in my teenage years, it was very scattered because, uh, we would just read what the bookstores and libraries had. We weren't terribly organized. We were a bunch of teenagers. We didn't even actually know this was connected to D&D. We just had this book series we liked. It's a little vague at first, isn't it? Yeah, and there were so many books.

There were over 100 books that we'd just be like, that's a Dragonlance book. Let's buy it. And then we just trade it back and forth between our friend group. So I don't remember which ones I've read and which ones I haven't. It's actually funny when I think about it. Dragonlance. Yeah, I didn't really realize it was connected to D&T until I started playing more Final Fantasy. And I'm like, wow, these blue dragons use lightning, just like they do in Dragonlance. And then I realized eventually, oh, that is a TSR thing. That is an overall, just they have a chromatic dragon. That's what they do. They go around spitting fire and lightning and crap like that. So I don't know. I like interconnected multiverse stuff like that long before Marvel did it. So good stuff overall. You know,

Yeah, maybe someday. Actually, before we finish, this is another question just kind of had for you, Will. You mentioned like the splitting of the properties. Would that be around the time that we had the, what was it called, the War of the Souls in Dragonlance? Like they did the Dragons of Summer Flame Flame. And they had, they got rid of the gods and they brought in the true moon or some crap or I think in Final Fantasy 4. I don't know. I think I only read one Dragonlance book that was that late in the timeline. and it was so different that it was like incomprehensible to me. I was like, heart magic? What are we talking about now? When did this become a thing? I'll be honest, I don't remember it. Yeah, so I don't know.

My memories outside of chronicles and the new generation, those are the only two series that I like have clear non-jumbled memories of. So I'm afraid I don't really know how the splitting of the game. game license affected Dragon Lens, if at all. Yeah, I'm not sure if the timing is quite right, but it just kind of feels like Wizards of the Coast came in and said, hey, everyone, we're doing things this way now, and a lot of things that you said got fragmented, but it could have been a separate issue. I'm sure someone in the comments will fill us in because you commenters are very awesome,

and I hope we've enjoyed the show as much as I have. Yeah, did you, either of you have any final thoughts about this really interesting, cool game? Will, you go first. Oh, sure. I was actually just going to kind of push back to a question we didn't quite end up talking out in full, which is why I think nobody's making games like this anymore. Oh, please answer. And I think it's because of the original Baldur's Gate. Oh.

You know, we were talking about Heroes of the Lance before, and we also briefly mentioned Gold Box, I think. So the gold box games were like the D&D CRPGs. Then there was the silver box games, which was everything else, all the weird stuff. And it was mostly, you know, it started out with Heroes of the Lance. The silver box didn't get to a good start. No. But then the subsequent games were a lot better. And even when they kind of got rid of the gold box and silver box, there were still those two

strategies of like, here's the CRPGs and here. here's everything else. And Dragon Strike is one of those, like, legacy of the Silver Box games. It's one of the Everything Else games. Oh, I thought it'd be a gold game. No, the Gold Box games were purely on the Gold Box engine, and then all of its successors were modified versions of it, and just eventually just kind of CRP's in general. And throughout the 90s, there was this sort of gold and silver box diverted approach.

And then we hit Baldur's Gate, which was such a smash hit that everyone went, ah, this approach, the CRPG approach has won. And it very much affected tabletop-based fantasy games forever after. When you think about those games, when you think about like a D&D video game, your brain goes to CRP's now. So that legacy of the Silverbox games, the everything else tabletop games, has more or less died out. And it's quite sad because there's a lot of room for great things like a Dragon Lance remake. We had mentioned very briefly before we said, you know, a Dungeons and Dragons, Stardue Valley type game. That would be a Silver Box approach game. There's so many great things you could do that are not CRPG.

using tabletop stuff and I just I want to shake these companies and be like, come on, do it. That's, yeah, that's a very interesting insight. That's a good way to looking at it. Never thought about that. And I think a point counter to that

is that RPGs now are like almost like another layer that you put on to other video games. Like the idea of like what RPG now is so, I don't want to say muddied because that's not negative, but it's like it's just been incorporated in so many other games. games, right?

Like, Street Fighter has an RPG style mode to it, right? Where, so I think there's room, but yeah, to your point, well, like, yeah, Baldur's Gate just really, just kind of completely changed how people kind of thought of CRPGs and, I don't know. I think we can do a Dragon Strike, and it's not as RPGE, even though I mean, I still love a stats screen in a Dragon Strike game, but yeah, I do like, I do like just seeing. all those meters and bars and having an inventory and even the radar is like a dragon orb like from

yeah do you guys notice you can trade the radar away I was just going to say that that's so yeah so when you're you're you know it's a branching campaign right and if you want to change orders like you got to sacrifice items and that's right most people just sacrifice the healing stuff but if you're a fucking sicko you can sacrifice your radar and your little arrow pointy thingy and you have no way of finding and you're just blind just bear back wow you you've got nothing but the flat polygons to tell you where they are and it is not a very good it's not a very good draw distance either you can't see the other dragons on the horizon what's your what's your reward you get to keep your healing items yep okay is a thing okay so wow yeah because i remember

I had never finished this game, but I had played it quite far into the campaign. I remember now, like, yeah, okay. I didn't do that, though. I'm pretty sure I get up my healing. I just forgot to use them anyway. You don't heal in between battles. I learned that the hard way. Thanks, Fisband.

Dick. Yep. I love that. He just shows up. He's like, you look like shit. Here's some ointment and then just pieces out. He's gone. I actually love the fact that they mentioned the instruction booklet that Fisband volunteers you. So it's very much the thing that Fisband does where it's like, hey, I'm going to go into this inn and start shit.

Oh, well, I guess you guys are on the road now. Bye. That's just what he does. How about you, Greg? Any final thoughts about this really cool game? Yeah, I mean, it's one of those things where, like, the surface level, you just get it. And then there's just so many interesting wrinkles. Like, I love the, I didn't even, it didn't, it took me a second to realize that there's wrenching paths, you know, like, which I associate with Star Fox. because, you know, that's...

Yes. I love Star Fox and I love that, that branching paths. I play the third level all the time. I can, I used to be able to do that without hits. It was, I used to be crazy. So, I love that. I love that you have separate hit bars for the writer and the dragon. And so, like, there's just so all these little touches.

And like, yeah, the way that you can just give away your radar, uh, and you hold on to your healing items, like the fact that the radar is like a tanning. thing and not just a HUD element. It just, even though it's a flight sim, it has so much that RPG DNA that I love. I love that, like, how every level, I love the narration for every level, even though it's kind of like silly because it's like, the good dragon showed up and the bad dragons were like, blah. And then you fly off.

Like, there's something like funny about like, there's a good army and a bad army that, like, when you read it, it sounds kind of stupid. A little black and white. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, you know, but I mean, that's Dragon Lance. Yeah. But I love the narration and that your death is narrated. That's really cool.

They really hammer home that, like, you died and the world moved on. Like, that there's just something to that. There's all these, like, little wrinkles to it. And I think the core, like, interplay of, like, how all the mechanics work when you're flying is just, like, so elegant. I like all of it. It's just, I need a little more horsepower. I need more than a frame a second. I need more than PowerPoint frame rate. And maybe to see the archers. But, yeah, despite everything, I have a weird soft spot for it and how ambitious it was. Also, your dragon can land and eat people. Yeah. Your dragon just turns around and says, I'm hungry. Let's eat. And then you, like, park them down. And then you just eat some likes. And is there any point to that? All I know is he says he yells he's hungry, but he'll still fight until...

I've not found any mechanical effect, but the rulebook says it's real bad. And the rulebook says it bad because then he'll, like, I don't know what the effect is, but he'll keep haunting you. Like, he'll get real hungry. He'll just be like, I'm hungry. Let's eat. And you've got like nine arrows in your face. And you're just like, I need to shoot this ship. And he's like, I need to eat a guy.

I need to eat a guy. We got, like, we're surrounded by nine dragons. Yeah, but I need to eat a guy. All right. Let me pull over. It is like pulling a little McDonald's for the kids. Dad, I'm hungry. All right, fine.

Eat this person. Yeah. It's an orc. It's okay. He's in the bad army. He's a bad guy. So it's fine. He doesn't have a wife and kids.

Yeah. So this has been a lot of fun. I've had a really good time. And I've learned a lot about the Dragonlance and D&D license in general. And if this is a lot. a just, sane world, just as it is not. We will someday see some kind of remake to this game. There is a spiritual successor, though, isn't there?

Like, I don't know if it's out yet or if it's coming out. It's a board game, right? Yeah, the board game. It's actually, I mean, the, you guys can see in here. I've got the board game right behind me. Oh, cool. You can't really see it super well. But to the audio listeners, there's a board game called Dragon Strike that, I guess all

the listeners are audio listeners. But yeah, there's a Dragon Strike board game where you, it was someone who had played it as a kid and they remembered it. And they run a wargaming company. And they found out that apparently you can just like make a board game called Dragon Strike. And Wizards of the Coast doesn't have that copy written in such a way that prevents you from doing it. So it's a spiritual successor rather than anything else. it's just called Dragon Strike and you control little dragon figurines

and you try and get them to joust each other and it's remarkable how if you've played the video game specifically the flight sim version not the NES version it's remarkable how they got that the difficulty with like

lining up your curves and turns and stuff they so accurately got that in the board game that's really cool it's quite fun it's for up for up to four people, you battle eight dragons. It's really good. I'd recommend it. That's awesome. Why don't you go ahead and tell us a bit more about your YouTube channel, etc.? Sure. Yeah, you can find me at YouTube.com slash William Srd. And like I said, I cover the video game

adaptations of tabletop franchises. D&D is very much the bread and butter. If you liked any of the stuff I was saying today about how just utterly bizarre and complicated the D&D video game licenses. I cover that stuff all the time. Every single game I talk about, I'm like, all right, and here's the way that the license affected all the things wrong with this game. That's so cool.

Cool topic. Yeah, thank you. And then you could also, if you want to follow along with Dragon Lance, you can find me at a little podcast called It's Called a Lance. I like that. Awesome.

How about you, Greg? Anything you want about? Yeah. So when I'm not contributing occasional cover art to retur knots, I am making a webcomic. If you like dragons and fantasy and a little bit of horror and, shall we say, meddling kids, my webcomic Monsters and Mysteries has a little bit of that, a lot of bit of that. It's my baby. And you can find that at MNMcom.com. Next month, I'm starting a new chapter, which has a big little red dragon on it. I just put a cover art out. I'm real excited for that. That's awesome. Dragons are always cool. Dragons are always getting excited of it. Yeah. Always get excited about dragons up here and here. As for myself, I have been your host. I'm Nadia Oxford. If you

enjoyed this episode, please visit our Patreon. It's over at patreon.com. forward slash retronauts. You can support us there at one of our tiers. Like at the $5 tier, you can get two extra full-length episodes a month. You'll also get episodes a week early and add free and access to the Retronauts Discord.

The ultra-64-dollar level of the Patreon, unless you set the topic, got Retronauts once every six months, plus you get all the other good stuff. And if you can give us a hundred a month, you will land a chance to be a guest on the show every four months. You know you want to get on here and talk about

more dragons. You do. As for myself, again, I am the co-host of Axel Blagot as well. We cover RPG's old and new, Eastern, and Western. We have a lot of writing and streaming going on these days. I'm doing a weekly newsletter at the $5 tier, which if you like games writing and are kind of missing that old-fashioned, down-home, cooked, country, fried, whatever the hell, games writing that used to exist. I got a lot of that going on. I've been at this for 20 years, probably more, and it's the way I eat. I eat you when you read my words. That's how it works. But until next time, when Takisus rises, don't go dragging your ass. Thank you.

Thank you.