The evil wizard Mordroc has kidnapped Daphne while Dirk the Daring was away, and now it's up to you to guide Dirk through a series of wormholes in time to get her back. Along the way you'll brave twisted renditions of Alice in Wonderland, the Garden of Eden, and a terrifying mummy's tomb before cornering Mordroc into a final showdown -- all in a day's work for any cartoon hero, of course. But storyline aside, how fun could it really be to play an animated motion picture with the Xbox DVD remote?
Eh, not very. Continuing the 'memorize-or-die' mentality of Dragon's Lair and Space Ace, Dragon's Lair II requires gamers to watch for telltale flashes in order to clear each level. When a platform flashes to Dirk's immediate right, the player has less than a second to press the right arrow on the remote before witnessing one of countless hilarious death scenes (and you'll be seeing them a few hundred times before getting close to completing this game). When Dirk's sword flashes, hit the Action button to kill something or swat an object out of the way. Gameplay continues in this manner throughout the title, for roughly an hour or until dementia sets in.
The worst part about all this lies with hardware issues, not really the game itself. Since all DVD players take a second to read information from different points on a disc in rapid succession, each action frame causes the animation to freeze for a brief moment, completely messing up the movie's flow and ticking off the player in the process. It'll take some getting used to, but this is the only way to play Dragon's Lair II on your Xbox -- if that's really what you want to do.