DRAGON SPIRIT - the very name conjures up a cheap Chinese hellbrew, the kind of electric soup which is bought with multiples of "the price of a cup of tea". Nothing could be further from the truth.
It's about Dragons, and we're not talking about the only computer in the world with a processor so slow that you can hear every tick. No, we're talking napalm breath here.

The first thing you notice about Dragon Spirit is that it's in the standard Tengen Atrocious Plastic Box, the one that kills all known instructions dead. The second thing you notice is that the loader makes the drive sound like an elephant after a night on the beans.
Disc protection is a necessary evil, but when it tries to bend Amy's drive in the noisiest way possible, the evil surely is unnecessary.

Basically, some dumb princess has got kidnapped by some lowlife, and it's Nerdbrain's job to do the fetching. The local quack has you that you're a dragon. "Here," he says. "Eat these dubious mushrooms. Incidentally you're a dragon now".
So off you fly to kick some heads. Well, give them a thorough singeing at least. And while the subject of heads is still within its sell-by-date, you start off with three of them, each capable of blatting out air-to-air and air-to-ground destruction.

As you flap your dismal way along the narrow river valley - made all the narrower by the programmers - you realise that it's YABS - Yet Another Boring Scroller.
Where a scroll would be described as smooth on the other thing, in Amiga terms this one is found wanting in the rapidity department. It's way too slow. And it gets even slower as more things appear.
Everything that could cause a young dragon harm wobbles in a most alarming way, and indeed this is the only reliable method of determining hostile intent.

The automatic rapid fire is useful, considering the game would be impossible without it. Unfortunately it sounds exactly like a very slow marine diesel engine and soon begins to grate.
Later moments of the game include exploding phoenixes and the brilliant ruse of recolouring alligators used in the first level to look like fire salamanders.

In playability trials between Dragon Spirit and a dead crab, 9 out of 10 game players preferred the latter. The two clear advantages of dead crabs are that they're edible and they don't try to dismember the disc drive.

Dragon Spirit is one of those little known arcade games which came and went without too much fuss, although it went down well with almost everyone who played it. Dragon Spirit then resurfaced in Japan as a very successful PC Engine game, and now it is over here on the Amiga.

At first glance, the coin-op does not appear as anything more than your standard vertically scrolling shoot em up - kill the bad guys and collect the weapons. It is not until you sit down to some serious gaming that you really find out how good it is, but it has to be said that the Amiga version does lose out in translation. The original's strength was its fast graphics and quantity of weapons. The armaments are here but the speed has disappeared. Each level contains a variety of mythical dragons, phoenix's, to name but a few. Once again, there is the standard end-of-level foe to defeat.

You power up by collecting pods. These cause you to weirdly mutate. You can get three heads, breathe fire, gain electric shields. Wow! Unfortunately, some of this does you more harm than good - one thing in particular reduces your dragon to a pigmy sized with homing missiles which wears out leaving you unarmed.

The graphic conversion of Dragon Spirit is near to arcade perfect, but it is not until thing actually start happening that you realise how sluggish the gameplay is. The graphics are neither complicated or overly large, so why does it play so slowly?

Apart from the lack of speed Dragon Spirit is still a good game and a good shoot em up, though there are slack periods when you wonder is something is missing. It also seems like a good opportunity to make a contribution to the Amiga/PC Engine debate: having now played both versions of the game I can conclusively reveal that the PC Engine version is head, shoulders and ankles above the Amiga's graphics, speed, colour and sound. So there you go - a good game which falters in the conversion.

The princess Alicia has been kidnapped by the evil serpent demon Zawell (Extremely Original Plots Inc). In a massive coincidence, you just happen to be transformed into a fire-breathing dragon so you can rescue her!

Spewing fireballs from your three heads, you fly through eight vertically scrolling levels. As you fire you simultaneously drop bombs, killing enemies on the ground and breaking open magic eggs which hatch bonus firepower icons (including extras head, shields, and longer range fireballs and bombs). This all seems easy enough but colliding with airborne enemies or bullets soon causes you to lose your head, or at least one of them! Two hits and you'll be quickly falling to earth - you'll also lose all extra weapons and heads.

Each of the multiloaded eight levels is infested with many hostile creatures, some airborne (mainly formation-flying birds) and some on the ground which can't be hit but fire loads of bullets. There are also wombat squirrel thingies with beaks which start off on the ground, then launch themselves into the air. Plus, of course, the inevitable huge end-of-level nasties which include an even bigger fire-breathing dragon, giant spider, and huge, carnivorous pot plant - obviously a remnant from Day Of The Triffids!