So, we meet again. Dungeons & Dragons: Chronicles of Mystara is a collection of two classic side-scrolling arcade games Capcom released back in the early t0 late 90’s (ya know, back when Capcom still did cool shit) and holds a special place in my gaming nostalgia. You see, I have many, many arcade memories. Playing Punch-Out!, Pit Fighter, Rolling Thunder, and the classic Jurassic Park pinball machine at the mall is one of them. Hearing the wakka-wakka of the Pac-Man table top machine at the bowling alley is another one that strikes the feels, no pun intended. But for D&D, it was after school at a local convenient store where I pumped quarter after precious quarter into the unforgiving, evil mistress that was Tower of Doom. It shared the corner with one other arcade game, X-Men Children of the Atom, another Capcom classic (fuck you Capcom for not making awesome shit anymore). While X-Men still managed to swallow quite a bit of my hard-earned dough, it was Tower of Doom that kept me coming back.
The “choose your own adventure” choices that the game provided, in the form of asking the player which direction they’d like to go, opened up a level of replayability we’d never seen before. One day I might choose to save the village, the next I might head forward into the forest. Where before I chose to take the mountain pass, next I’d go through the cave instead. Did I dare fight the dragon? Yes I dared. Once. Then after about four bucks I decided I’d never do it again.
The game displayed both the best of the genre and its worst. It was pretty, fun, and addictive, but it was also infuriatingly cheap. It was designed to munch quarters, and munch it did. Cheap hit loops, like being stuck in between two hellhounds as they repeatedly set your character ablaze, was enough to make you want to throw your blue Icee at your feet and scream made-up obscenities until the pimple-faced cashier asks you to leave with his squeaky voice and his stupid hat. It was aggravating and expensive, but we ate that shit up.
But the final joke is on you, Capcom. Because I bought your Chronicles of Mystara collection for like, 3 bucks during a sale. I then proceeded to play through both of your arcade games from beginning to end. And I died many, many, many times. But this time, instead of pumping in another quarter, I just hit the Start button. I saw you keeping count, too. I mashed my buttons, died, continued, and mashed some more buttons, and by the time I was done I spent what was probably close to fifty or sixty dollars in imaginary quarters. And you didn’t get one extra cent.
So take that, Capcom. And seriously, the fact that I’m even having to play this instead of a new side-scrolling brawler is a fact you should be ashamed of. I want 90’s Capcom back, because they were awesome. New Capcom sucks ass.
