Double Dragon III: The Sacred Stones Two-Player Playthrough (Actual NES Capture)

This is a capture of me and a friend playing through Double Dragon III: The Sacred Stones on the NES. This is not an emulator. This footage was recorded directly from my front-loading NES using an actual Double Dragon III cartridge. I’m player one and Drew is player two.

This here is one of my favorite and most-rented NES games from my childhood (along with Simon's Quest). I received the original Double Dragon for my NES around Christmas of 1989 or so, and overall I thought it was an enjoyable game. But when I rented the two sequels in the early '90s I was completely blown away. The two-player simultaneous action, the new moves, the different characters, the environments... I loved nearly everything about the games (except those annoying platforms in the beginning of Egypt).

Double Dragon III is without a doubt a hard game, but that's exactly what I loved about it. I loved the fact that you earned new characters by making it past certain levels and the fact that they had different stats and abilities from Billy and Jimmy. I also loved how the characters had their own special weapons and how Billy and Jimmy could do double attacks such as the double cyclone kick.

My brother and I would rent this game and then typically make it to Italy or Egypt before we got a game over. But I had fun every time. I later picked up my own copy in high school (the late '90s) and beat it for the first time.

This game provides a compelling reason to own a turbo pad since it becomes a lot easier with one. My brother would always use our NES Max and I would use my NES Advantage. The NES Max is the better of the two for this game since its turbo buttons almost always pull off the cyclone kick and hair toss without fail. The NES Advantage’s turbo, on the other hand, is more likely to mess up cyclone kicks and less likely to do hair throws (when you see me doing hair throws here I'm disabling the turbo and doing the button combinations manually). But the NES Advantage still helps for sure.

In this playthrough we used my typical strategy that I developed in the early '90s and honed several years later. I save weapons for bosses and cycle through characters when they're low to avoid deaths. I also discovered that jump kicks work wonderfully on the mummies in Egypt. While this wasn’t a no-death run this time, we only lost a single character at the end.

Enjoy this footage of one of my favorite childhood games.

Recorded with the Hauppauge HD PVR and a composite connection at 60 frames per second. I used a Toshiba model D-R550 DVD Recorder to upconvert the NES's native 240p signal to 480i so that the Hauppauge could capture the console's audio/video signal. I'm using an NES Advantage joystick and Drew is using an NES Max turbo controller.