Double Dragon Gold 2011 (OpenBOR)
Alright, I actually finished this game and can now give you a proper rundown, it's a fan remake of Double Dragon 1 and 2. Double Dragon Gold is devided in three chapters, the first two copy DD 1 and 2 stories and levels without adding anything special, but the third one is some sort of author's revision of Double Dragon Advance mixed with DD3. There are no cutscenees or anything and storytelling is on the level of the first game - something happens to the girl and protagonists venture onward to break some faces. Each campaign consists of 5/6 short levels, you have to beat prior campaign in order to unlock the next one and the further you go the more difficult the game becomes. There are more playable characters now, Billy and Jimmy got a pair of additional palettes to allow for 4 player coop. After finishing each campaign you will be shown a hint about how to do a certain move, if you don't care about author's intentions than you can scroll down and find pictures of those hints.
The game fixed a lot of problems I had with the first Double Dragon - hp bloat (there are even hp bars for enemies now), controls, combat and most importantly there's no lag at all. Some of the fixes don't solve the problems completely but it's definitely better now.
Moommyyy
The combat system is basically Double Dragon 2, but special attacks are much easier to input, there are also moves from Double Dragon Advance with blocking and running, dedicated button was added for rear attacks and unlike in Renegade or Double Dragon 2 it always throws an attack behind you no matter which direction you are facing. Most of the weapons that were present in DD 1 and 2 and Advance are also available here, the most notable missing item is dynamite which didn't make it here for some reason. Enemies are also taken from said games with a couple of exceptions.
As you would expect there's plenty of author's changes and one you immediately notice is a complete destruction of game's difficulty via huge number of continues - 10, scroll down to the end of this post to find out how to reduce them. Others include reduction of enemies health, slightly altered encounters, sprites, attacks and AI. I don't have much experience with Double Dragon series so I'm just going to describe how I felt about this game in general.
In first Double Dragon your movelist was basically reduced to elbow strike, because it was crazy OP and approaching enemies face to face wasn't easy. OP moves are still present here (elbow was massively nerfed though) and you are going to be spamming them a lot, but I feel like combat is more varied overall because you can't rely on one attack only and even the said OP moves need to combined with others. For example enemies simply can't defend against running attacks so you use them if you want a reliable knockdown, but the damage of such attacks is low and if you want to beat punks faster you have to take risks, and here comes moveset imbalance.
The third campaign, the first fight. You're about to get gangraped from the start.
You want to knock down enemies because it's the easiest way to approach them, only elites and bosses are invulnerable when they wake up, so you can just stand and spam your attack near a downed punk for guaranteed hits. The problem is that hyper knee and tornado kick are absolutely fucking broken. Their damage is huge and they give a lot of invulnerability time, but they are kind of slow to fire, here comes the ultimate combo wombo. Knock down somebody with running attack and while they wake up your tornado kick/hyper knee has enough time to prepare, so stand over somebody and execute the special, watch enemy getting hit for a fuckload of damage and even if they have any wake up attacks that give them invulnerability they are not going to beat yours, because your invulnerability massively outlasts theirs. It also doesn't cost you anything to spam these moves, they don't drain your life and there isn't any power gauge. When it comes to weapons, whip is the deadliest one in the game due to it's huge range that allows you to attack anything without being in any danger of getting hit, but the further you go the rarer it becomes.
It's pretty easy, but I did not find it as retarded as DD 1 elbow spam. AI is very defensive here so enemies won't just walk into your attacks, though sometimes they walk offscreen for no apparent reason. You won't find opponents that are agressive until the end of second campaign, so most of the time you will be the one doing the first move, don't take it as a difficulty downgrade, because enemies have a great sense of reach just like in others Double Dragon games and will slap you in the face as soon as they can, they are also given a slightly better Z axis range on their attacks compared to yours, so it's not as easy to cheese them.
At first I found this game to be pretty tough, but once you learn the tricks I described above you will notice that it is easy, save for the few fights. Whatever you can't land your specials on can be spammed to death with running attacks, like Willy (who learned to shoot here btw and does that a lot) who might give you problems with massive range on his melee, but put him against the wall and just run kick him to death, he wouldn't even be able to do anything. Doppleganger fight in the end of second capmpaign is probably the most technical one since he has all the moves you do and that means i-frames spam, but he doesn't hit hard and I wasted him first try and lost about half of the life bar. The two final bosses are honestly pretty retarded, you will fight Willy once again but he will be supported by an infinite number of elite crooks (up to 4 at once) and there's only one wall to bang him against and it's smaller than the others, and final boss goes like this - make single mistake and you're dead, was nice to know you. Other than that there are no bullshit fights in the game, so you might want to lower number of continues to 3 or 2 (or even 1 if you are DD veteran) and leave the number of lives at 3.
I didn't know we were part of sado-maso clan
However there is a number of downgrades compared to DD 1, 2 and Advance, they are:
1) Enemies can't run
2) Enemies don't drop weapons when they are knocked down
3) Weapons don't show on enemies sprites, so you can't say if they are carrying something unless they die or attack
4) Enemies don't pick up weapons or at least are not inclined to do so
5) There are no throwable items and weapons (except knife) can not be thrown
6) You can not use specials while carrying weapons, this made me avoid everything except whip, because tornado kick and hyper knee are that good
7) Certain traps were replaced with others more primitive ones, like the pushing blocks in the final level of DD 1 are now spears coming from the floor
8) Doppleganger doesn't have shadow attack, at least I didn't see him using it
9) There are no Five Emperors in the game, you fight Raymond and his recolored clones instead
10) Some enemies lost their unique entrances, like big guys no longer break walls they just spawn off screen
11) Amount of health doesn't influence recovery speed after getting knocked down, everyone gets up at fixed speed no matter current health level
There might be something else that I didn't notice or just don't know. Overall I liked this game and it is the best experience I've had with Double Dragon so far, it also introduced me to some of the kickass music from the series. Double Dragon Gold might not be an amazing "remake", but it's an enjoyable game nonetheless.
No additional screenshots this time, because there's not much point as the game copies DD 1 and 2 and I didn't make many. Moveset is available in the game itself as well (make sure to scroll it to the end, so you know how to do tornado kick), so here are the pictures of secret moves that are shown to you after you finish one of the campaigns. And after you beat the game three times you can play as any character in the game except doppleganger.
Gameplay video
EDIT:
My only problem is that you are given 9 continues from the start, which is way too much and removes challenge and I haven't found a way to lower it
I managed to find a way to do that. You will have to unpack game's .pak file, but getting it to work was a pain in the ass.
Download OpenBOR assests or whatever here, the things that we are going to use are located in "tools>borpak>scripts" (but download the entire archive just to be sure) there are 2 .bat files (packer and paxplode) that don't work without an .exe file, which is missing for some fucking reason.
Grab the borpak.exe here and put it in the same folder as those 2 .bat files, now paxplode.bat will unpack .pak files, to do so just drag them over .bat file. After the unpacking finishes a "data" folder will appear in the same directory where your .pak was, this folder contains all the resources of the game. For Double Dragon Gold open level.txt file and find lines that define the number of continues and lives for each episode, edit them as you please, I assume it works similarly for other games, don't forget to save the changes. After that you need to pack that "data" folder back into .pak file. How do you do that ? Drag the folder into packer.bat ? Of course not, because it doesn't fucking work (at least it didn't work for me)! Create new .txt file put this line (without quotes) over there "borpak -b -d data mod.pak" and nothing else, change the format of the file to .bat (through "rename file" option) and now you have a packing tool. Place the .bat file you created and "data" folder in the same directory where borpak.exe is located and drag the "data" folder into .bat file, now it actually works and will pack your stuff into "mod.pak" file. After that you can rename it and put back to "paks" folder and finaly play the game.
What the fuck is that ?! Why the fuck you have to do all this shit just to change the number of lives and continues ?! Fucking why is it not an ingame option ?! What an absolute fucking mess!