Advanced Dungeons and Dragons: Shadow Sorcerer

The third and final game in the Dragonlance adaptation trilogy, the only one to never be ported to consoles, and a stark departure from the first two games in terms of style.  Indeed, it does away with the sidescrolling element completely to focus on real time tactical combat.  You lead a point team of four units (picked from a roster of about twenty) and attempt to escort refugees to a safe haven, traveling across a sprawling map and encountering various events as you go; mostly in the form of battles with bandits and monsters. In battle you can select a unit's general (automated) strategies as well as temporarily pause the action to pick individual actions for them to take, and after winning a fight you can simply select a command to fully heal up any injuries you sustained.  There is some light dungeon exploration, NPC interaction and item management involved too, though the main focus is on keeping your refugees alive, keeping morale up and getting them to safety, earning a higher score the more you keep intact; sort of like an early take on the Banner Saga. It's overall a bit repetitious and not especially deep, but for taking the action-driven D&D experience in a fresh new direction (one that would be replicated in later games like Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights to much greater success), Shadow Sorcerer is easily the best of the trilogy.

Developer: US Gold

Publisher: Strategic Simulations, US Gold
Released: 1991
Platform: Amiga, Atari ST, MS-DOS

Advanced Dungeons and Dragons: Dragons of Flame

Heroes of the Lance (the first adaptation of the Dragonlance novels and tabletop modules) was decently received on computer platforms while its NES incarnation was heavily maligned; both for its much worse graphics and just being an underwhelming game in general, providing nothing satisfying to RPG fans nor comparing favorably to other action-oriented titles on the system.  Strangely, that didn't stop them from trying again, though the sequel game would only be released in Japan for the Famicom.  Still, those who played it saw a marked improvement within only seconds of starting - there are now dialog scenes advancing the story at key points and a top-down world map (with visible monsters rather than random encounters!).  The presentation is much improved - still not great, but the graphics are much cleaner and the music isn't nearly as grating to listen to.  Even the action has seen much improvement, doing away with the dice rolls and having actual hit detection based combat, as well as the ability to jump and duck to evade attacks.  That said, it's still a very short game (beatable in roughly an hour once you know where to go), and the exploration element is still overly tedious, with both monotonous side-scrolling and top-down maps to make your way through.  Dragons of Flame is worth a brief look as a much-improved sequel to a notoriously awful game, but still far from matching up with other top-tier action-RPGs on the platform.

Developer: US Gold, Atelier Double (Famicom)
Publisher: Strategic Simulations, US Gold
Released: 1989, 1992
Platforms: Amiga, Amstrad CPC, Atari ST, Commodore 64, FM Towns, Famicom, MS-DOS, PC-9801, ZX Spectrum

Advanced Dungeons and Dragons: Heroes of the Lance

Released on computers as part of SSI's "Silver Box" line, Heroes of the Lance is a loose adaptation of the DragonLance series of novels inspired by the eponymous D&D modules, and a relatively unique take on the D&D format, focusing on real time action rather than turn-based strategic combat.  It's decent enough for a 1988 computer game, especially in a period where computers were still generally considered "business machines" and thus side-scrolling action gameplay like this was pretty novel (if not particularly well-suited to the hardware), but its 1991 NES port is a heavily derided game on the platform.  The ugly graphics, irritating music and stiff controls didn't endear it too much to fans of side-scrolling action games like Super Mario Bros, while RPG fans were let down by the absence of narrative and the general lack of depth to the game's combat and dungeon crawling.   Despite being an action game everything is still centered around dice rolls, so it's not a matter of skill-based attacking and evading; instead, you mostly just stand toe-to-toe with your enemies and hold down the A button to swing at each other until one of you dies.  You can attack at range with a bow and arrow or spells, but they're also governed by dice rolls and pretty ineffective besides, so there's little point.  Disarming traps is solely a matter of having the right character in the front of your party (or taking the hit - they rarely do much damage anyway), and the only real variety comes when you have to cast Protection From Evil to defend yourself from particularly spammy enemies.  Oh, and it's also possible to make the game unwinnable - if Goldmoon (or another character carrying her staff) drops into a pit, you're done; that staff is the only thing that can kill the final boss.  But most insulting of all is its length - while it takes place in a fairly large and convoluted maze, once you know the route to go through and how to counter the few curveballs it throws at you, you can beat the whole game in under ten minutes.  Even for masochistic fans of bad games, it's too short, easy and lacking in nuance to even provide any ironic entertainment value.  Hell, it hardly even seems worth the effort to pan it on my nerdy site about RPGs; everyone who knows of the NES port is already aware it's a sucky game that's widely regarded as one of the worst on the platform, and I don't have much to add other than to confirm it really is bad, but not in any interesting way; it's just another very lackluster port of a semi-popular computer game.  Unappealing, lame and entirely forgettable, NES Heroes of the Lance is a lousy experience no matter what angle you come at it from.

Developer: US Gold, Natsume (NES)

Publisher: Strategic Simulations, US Gold, Pony Canyon
Released: 1988, 1991
Platform: Amiga, Amstrad CPC, Atari ST, Commodore 64, FM Towns, MS-DOS, MSX2, NEC PC-8801, PC-9801, NES, Sega Master System, ZX Spectrum