Gather 'round, ye brave young knights! It's Blazing Dragons!

In the mid-'90s, former Monty Python member Terry Jones teamed up with animation company Nelvana to create an animated children's cartoon about a medieval kingdom populated exclusively by dragons, to be aired on British TV. The cartoon didn't make it to the US until a censored version was shown on Toon Disney in the early '00s, but the game (developed by The Illusions Game Company, also responsible for a couple of non-Virtual-Stupidity Beavis & Butthead games and Duckman: The Legend of the Fall) was released all across North America and Europe in 1996, for both Playstation and Saturn.

The game and cartoon ended up diverging wildly in a number of huge and important places, most notably in how the show designed the characters as charismatic two-legged dragons in crisp solid colors, while the game went with these weird-ass wingless centaur lizards:



Since it'd be poor form to Let's Play a cartoon, this thread is all about the game! The game is a simple Sam-&-Max-style adventure with somewhat reasonable puzzles and nice production values. This'll be a short one and I'll be doing it solo, so as to give the voiceacting time to shine.

For our first episode, we'll be messing around in the castle's kitchen and learning how to repurpose inventions!


#1: Let's wash some dishes!

Those character designs are pretty strange. First that they have six limbs, and second that they have teeth better suited for a human or herbivore.

Short, punny and British, featuring the voice of Edith Bunker as random dragon-mom? I'm in!

...also live-birth, apparently.

But how are the dishes from the foreground getting into the sink...!

In our next video, Trivet tells some jokes! Also, we take a tour of Camelhot and the surrounding area in our quest to become a squire!


#2: Let's find and assist the Square Table Knights!

A common trait with this game's inventions is how none of them make any sense once you've repurposed them, if you think about them for even a second.

Dr. Fraud indeed! He lives in a kingdom of dragons, trying to convince a dragon that he's not a dragon?

Do we ever find out why Flame had that hair growth tonic anyway?

In Episode 3 of Blazing Dragons, all seems well at first -- until a diabolical plan finally takes shape and we're faced with a big new problem! Also, I finally remember to click at some things!


#3: Let's get our stuff and voyage to Manlandia!

("YES, LET'S!")

For all we know, she's completely bald underneath that headdress! Or maybe she was tainted by unrealistic standards of dragon femininity caused by viewing human-centric media. Whatever the case, the game never tells you, so I fear we may never know.

In today's episode, Flicker must covertly infiltrate a military operation and disable a steam-boiler-equipped rolling battle tank!


#4: Let's rescue Princess Flame from Castle Grim!

Words to live by. The only psychotic episodes worth listening to are one's own.

This game is pretty charming! I'm usually not one for adventure games, but if I had a copy of this lying around I could see myself playing through it.

Great voice-acting, too! Not something I'd expect from a mid-90s video game.

Part 4 had a "huge pile" of body humor, didn't it? I don't think it was just 'cause I wasn't noticing it before.

In this installment, Flicker must become a knight the only way an adventure game protagonist can: by cheating! Shamelessly!


#5: Let's defend Camelhot's mines and enter the Cave of Dilemma!

Adventure games of the era were real standouts in this regard! Even the criminally cheesy King's Quest VI had a stellar voice cast and direction.

If by "body humor" you mean "ass jokes", yes, absolutely! It seems to be a human thing concentrated to this area of the game. Our time in Manlandia has drawn to a close, however -- Castle Grim is boarded-up and "closed for repairs".

Darn, no strutting, and then SPLAT!

Probably a direct result of the genre. Given similar budgets to other games, I imagine adventure games needed to spend less on the actual DEVELOPMENT and could thus afford to spend more on the side things, like star actors.

In the spellbinding finale to Blazing Dragons, Flicker can finally compete in the tournament for Flame's hand in marriage!


#6 (FINAL): Let's win the tournament, save the world, and walk it off!

Keep an eye out for some in-progress shots of this game near the end! I think the fact that the invention book had a dedicated UI space at one point meant that the game was originally either supposed to be a lot longer or have way more inventions in it.

Yes, that's literally all of the game! Kind of an infeasible value proposition for the $48.99 this initially cost, but it was still a nice ride all the same. The ending implies there's a sequel on the way, so look forward to it at a Kickstarter near you!

Now that this is done I'll be taking some time off from LPs to work on a personal project, but I'll be back eventually with something more Spyroish next time!

Poop jokes specifically, yep.

It skirts the boundaries of its K-A rating, as you mention in part 5. Veiled references to homosexuality, and the whole scene with the lady of the lake.

That sequence opens up the question, the one that remains unanswered in everything from cartoons to alien invasion and horror stories: why males of every species are sexually attracted to human women. In a story that's otherwise like a documentary...

Grats Lobst! That was pretty entertaining!

I admit that I enjoyed the bullshit ghost and dryer puzzles because that's exactly the kind of things that would trip me up if I were playing it.

Nice job, Lobst! May your path to freedom not be blocked by something unpredictable and very heavy!

Awesome job, Lobst! This was pretty short 'n sweet.

I really enjoyed how you mostly let the weirdness of the game speak for itself in this LP. Not a bad little adventure, even if some of those puzzles were obtuse beyond all recognition!

That Crystal-D preview spot is just wallowing in its own awful nineties-badditude. I half expected a Sega scream out of nowhere at the very end.