I just received my Dragon’s Lair X Replicade from New Wave Toys, which I had procured from their successful Kickstarter. Besides my bonus light up .50 coin slot keychain, it came with the standard stuff: Premium Collector’s Box, the machine itself, replica user manual, Daphne Kickplate Decal, charging cable, mini coins, laserdisc player with remote, laserdisc with sleeve, and a replica shipping box. You can see all of that here in the promo photo from their website:

The box is a surprising 14.5 inches tall:

Here’s my video after just unboxing it:

As you can see, it looks and sounds great. Build quality is excellent too.

Here’s what you find after opening up the back:

The attention to detail is top-notch.

When used in its intended form factor, as a tabletop, it looks, sounds, and plays great, even with the tiny controls. Of course, it also has an HDMI out and two USB ports so you can use an external display and external controllers. This is where it runs into some issues.

It seems only a very specific set of USB controllers are truly compatible. After going through a wide range of wired and wireless USB controller and arcade sticks, the only one that worked most of the way was an Xbox One controller connected over USB. Everything else either didn’t work at all, or you couldn’t use the sword. With the Xbox One controller, the only thing I couldn’t do was insert a coin or start a game, which are easy enough to do on the mini cabinet.

A bigger issue, however, is the video output quality, and even the sound output. The video does not do well blown up on a big HDTV – although it’s less noticeable in gameplay than when displaying text – and the sound was not quite right on my surround sound system, tending to want to play mostly – and sometimes entirely – out of the right front speaker and right rear speaker. Here’s a video:

The bottom line though is if you want a smallish collectible replica that you can play, you can’t beat what New Wave Toys did here. The attention to detail is astounding. However, if you have plans to use this with a TV and external controller, you’ll probably want to think twice. There are a lot of compromises here and tons of better ways to play this well-worn classic.