Majesco recently announced Double Dragon Neon, an update to the classic arcade game due this summer. The “neon” in the title is less a play on “neo” and more a reference to the fact that Double Dragon was a quintessentially ’80s kind of game; the roaming brawler died at the hands of Street Fighter II right around the time that Kurt Cobain waxed poetic about deodorant and the ’90s sprang to life. Thus the game’s interface design of this remake is drenched with electric blue and hot pink, hearkening back to the days of Miami Vice, Members Only jackets, and that one rich kid in your class who wore 20 Swatches at once on one arm, each with a little rubber guard strap over its face.
But that’s not the only part of Neon that feels like it blasted its way directly out of the ’80s. The game as a whole is redolent of the bad part of the ’80s: The part dominated by terrible home ports of arcade favorites, insipid licensed NES games, and industry-destroying market crashes. It’s ugly, slow-paced, limited, and all in all comes off as… well, cheap.
