Shenlong Zhuan - Magic Dragon (副理神龙传 - Magic Dragon) also known as simply Magic Dragon, is a port of R-Type released for NES/Famicom in 1994 by Magicseries Corp. The game seems to be developed by the same team behind Elfland, Abyss of Gloom, City Adventure, etc.
Overview[]
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Magic Dragon's gameplay.
The game is a port of R-Type, a game which was never ported to the NES/Famicom despite being on many other home consoles and at one point being distributed by Nintendo. This game is considerably shorter, being only 4 stages long when compared with R-Type's 8 stages. The game is likely based off R-Type I, the Japanese PC-Engine release with only 4 stages. An R-Type II with the remaining stages was also made, but no such equivalent is known to exist for Magic Dragon.
Many of the gameplay elements are the same, with the Force powerup being present. All the enemies and bosses are the same as the ones in R-Type, but feature different designs. The player gets 3 lives and 2 continues. The game itself is somewhat hardware intensive, with large amounts of sprite flicker and the HUD glitching whenever the sprite limit is reached.
The graphics and music are based off the original ones from R-Type, although they are much more crude and primitive. The game ends with the player's ship landing on a base followed by "END OF GAME".
Trivia[]
- This game has a copyright registered along with Elfland, Space Fight of Gun, Fantasy of Gun, City Adventure, and Abyss of Gloom. Likely meaning the same team who made those games, also made this game.
- Even though the game is named "Magic Dragon", there are no dragons or any type of magic in the game.
- Some unused tiles can be found in the ROM reading "Push Start" and "1994 Magic." As well as this, there is also some unused Chinese text reading "解放战争", which translates to "War of Liberation", the name commonly used in mainland China for the Chinese Civil War. This is probably a leftover from an earlier undiscovered Magic game, and also presumably places the developer in the mainland rather than Taiwan.
- The cartridge of the game uses modified artwork from Gradius III.