The DS gets Dragon’s Lair

Bringing a laserdisc game to the Nintendo DS seems like an odd choice considering Digital Leisure could have chosen to port Dragon’s Lair to the PSP. They could have sold it as a UMD movie and put very little work on the umpteenth port. While Dragons Lair DS sticks to the content of the original arcade game, new features are being crammed into the cart. You can play Dragon’s Lair on a single screen or utilize both screens by holding the DS like a book. Dragon’s Lair will also support the rumble pak and Digital Leisure plans to add in voice recognition. Presumably the voice feature will let players bark commands into the DS microphone instead of pressing buttons.

The new features sound interesting, but the announcement is unclear about video compression. Is this going to be a blocky mess like a Sega CD game or will Dragon’s Lair on the DS make history as a successful and portable laserdisc port? There is only so much space on a Nintendo DS cart to hold all the animated characters in Dragon’s Lair plus the bonus content from the Home releases.