Subject: REVIEW: Dragon's Lair II: Time Warp
From: [email-masked] (Jason L. Tibbitts III)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews

Dragons Lair II: Time Warp is the latest submission of ReadySoft's line
of interactive cartoon games for the Amiga. The software is engineered
masterfully under 512k and with full compatibility, but it seems the
difficulty and sound are off the mark.

Dragon's Lair II: Time Warp (TW)
ReadySoft Incorporated

Your mother-in-law climbs the table wielding a roling pin: "Kidnapped?" she
yells. "My Daphne kidnapped again?" You stare in amazement as the large, buxom
woman leaps across the table, ready to strike. The only exit seems to be
running, but where?

That scene is your first decision in ReadySoft's new interactive cartoon game
for the Amiga: Dragon's Lair II: Time Warp. Dirk the Daring, the lovable,
blundering knight created by Don Bluth animation in the laserdisc coin-op
Dragon's Lair, is back for a completely new adventure. His wife Daphne, who he
saved from Singe The Dragon, has now been kidnapped by the evil wizard Mordoc
and whisked away a captive in a magical wrinkle in time, being forced to marry 
Mordoc. Dirk must find a fumbling old time machine and go back to prehistoric 
times, even back to the days of Adam and Eve, and then back to take on Mordoc 
The Wizard in a fight to the finish. First, though, he must get past his 
mother-in-law.

This well-drawn game seems more of a sequel to their previous game, Space Ace-
another laser coin-op. ReadySoft, makers of the wildly popular A-Max and A-Max
II, has made vast improvements from their first cartoon game, Dragon's Lair.
The original Dragon's Lair (DL) was an excruciatingly slow-loading game that
needed 1 megabyte of memory to run, and  also needed to stop animation at
times to take a breath and show what scene was coming up next. No so with
DLIITW- the animation is so fast loading, that it actually makes the game a bit
more difficult to play; certain scenes need you to make your move before the
scene has completed fading onto the screen.

For those of you unfamiliar to this type of game, your movements are not moving
sprites around a medeval shoot-em-up. Instead you control what Dirk's reactions
are to certain situations. For example, in the above situation with his 
mother-in-law, Dirk must move LEFT during the time she is waving her rolling 
pin. A correct response rewards you with points based on quickness and timing 
of the move, while failure shows you an animation of your untimely demise; in 
this case being hit over the head with a rolling pin and crashing into a 
million pieces (a la Tom and Jerry).

The animation is smooth, and seems to be done near 10 frames per second at
times. The disk drive constantly loads scenes while you are playing another, 
but there are still gaps between many scenes, during which your score and lives
are displayed. There is a convenient save game feature which allows you to put
your point and score in the game on a floppy, ready to be loaded later.
Unfortunately, the six-disk game is not HD installable, which makes the fingers
do a little too much traveling during the game. DLIITW is also
non-multitasking and is heavily copy-protected, but the speed of loading makes
up for these faults.

It is unfortunate that ReadySoft did not test their game a bit more than
Space Ace. Some points of the game have speech which is badly sampled, making
the imperative dialogue completely garbled. At times, the samples will repeat
themselves in mid-sentence, making an amusing James Brown-like sound, but it
hinders you from completing the game. The game is also truly more difficult.
At times, it gives no indication when a certain move is necessary, and also
gives absolutely no hint as to where the move should be.

So, will Mordoc The Evil Wizard succeed in placing the ring on Daphne's finger,
removing her completely from Dirk? Will Dirk ever get past his mother-in-law?
Will ReadySoft fix these minor faults in an otherwise enjoyable game, therefore
making Dragon's Lair II v1.1? Only time will tell.

Dragon's Lair II: Time Warp
ReadySoft Incorporated
30 Wertheim Court, Unit #2
Richmond Hill, Ontario, Canada L4B 1B9
(416) 731-4175
(416) 764-8867 (FAX)

Reviewed by:
Joe B Reeves
1528 S. 6th St.
Ironton, Ohio 45638
(614) 293 7425
(614) 532 6673 in 4 weeks.
[email-masked]