Double Dragon II: The Revenge

SECOND CHANCE SUCCESS

We wish we had friends like Nick. We rarely get back stuff we give away, but he does

» NES » 1989 » Technos

I’ve won a few games in competitions over the years, and the first one I can remember was Double Dragon II: The Revenge. Having won a new kettle just when we needed one at the first time of asking, my mum would always enter the school tombola thereafter, and one year we won this game. The only problem was that we didn’t have a NES, so we gave the game to the only person we knew that did own one, a friend of mine named Isaac. When I was given a NES some years later, I was curious to see what I’d missed out on and asked him if I could borrow the game. I had no expectation of keeping it, but he very kindly gifted it back to me.

I got home, put the game on and less than an hour later, I had turned it off again. I made a couple more attempts at playing it over the next few days, but never got very far before frustration set in. If you’ve never played the game before, it has a distinctive control system in which the B button is designated for left-facing attacks and A for the right. This was different to the original Double Dragon on both NES and Master System, and pretty much any other beat-’em-up I’d ever played at that time, and I loathed the game for it.

Only last year did I begin to regard the NES version of Double Dragon II: The Revenge with any kind of fondness. I was convinced to give it a second chance while testing out the control fixes for the Evercade, and was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed it. With prior awareness of the control oddities and a greater tolerance for them, I was better able to appreciate its positive attributes, particularly cool environmental hazards like being dragged towards an open helicopter door. I hadn’t given much thought to giving the game a second chance before that, but I’m so glad I did as I’m now able to appreciate that stroke of luck from all those years ago.