Bad Dudes

The Short


Pros
- Has punching AND kicking
- The intro is now internet-famous
- Every time you beat a level, a horrible, grainy NES voice says "I'M BAD!" That's just awesome.
- Ninjas
- Two player co-op

Cons
- Ugly
- Stupidly difficult
- Controls poorly
- Repetitive
- Can't hold a candle to games like Double Dragon. 
- Arcade version was better.

The screen that sparked a thousand memes

The Long


Bad Dudes is bad. There is no other way around it. I could sugar coat it or try and justify its poor gameplay mechanics, but it would be a waste of my time. It's just a poor representation of an arcade game that was only decent, similar to many other titles released on the NES back in the day.

Here is the arcade version. 

Essentially it's a simple, side-scrolling beat-em-up, but unlike games like Double Dragon you can't move in 3D space; you are limited to the 2D plane (ala Mario or Kung Fu). You fight through a handful of levels kicking and punching ninjas, and sometimes kicking and punching harder ninjas. At the end of the game you win the game. That's essentially how it works.

Here is the NES version. Notice a difference? 

The game looks ok in stills, but in motion it's just awful. The animation is extremely poor, especially the ninjas moving and the punching and kicking. And the walking. Ok, every animation in this game looks like total crap. At least it looks passable when it isn't moving. 

The game itself is a difficult drag. Like most arcade games at the time, it was designed to be a quarter chomper, which makes me wonder why we designed (and still design) games with this sort of unfair quarter-munching syndrome when we bought the stupid game. It was like when Metal Slug 3 on the Xbox was ported and only gave you three quarters, or Ikaruga on Dreamcast/XBLA made you earn more continues through playtime. WE ALREADY BOUGHT THE GAME. GIVE US INFINITE CONTINUES. 

"I'M BAD!" Yes. Yes you are. 

On a tangent here (since if I don't this review is going to be stupid short), at DICE last year they had a speaker who was one of the original arcade game designers. He pointed out that during that time, they didn't really care too much about the quality of the game or depth of the game (minus looking flashy enough to convince you to take a look over), but rather if it was an addicting game that killed you on a regular basis (kind of like modern day MMOs...keep soaking up your money by providing minimal rewards for large time/work investments). He was baffled that this aspect of game design has carried over into the modern age: why do we still have lives? Why do we punish a player by reloading (or having to watch a stupid Valkyrie revive us over and over)? Those were invented to drain quarters, not because they thought they were good game design. The 2D brawlers (like Turtles in Time, The Simpsons, etc.) were also just designed to provide enough reinforcement to keep you playing and dying to put money in. Why are we punishing the player when they've already bought the game, and these elements of game design were used solely to grab more money? Why do we complain with the Prince of Persia reboot axes dying completely (instead instantly restarting you at a checkpoint, where in that game can mean doing a long section over and over, hence there is still the sense of danger [having to redo a stage] without the penalty of going through a "Game Over" screen) but still tolerate crap like Too Human or having games where you die and go back to a distant checkpoint, after a game over and loading screen?

Man, this really went off the rails.

Maybe a burger will calm me down. 

The point is that Bad Dudes is crap, people pretend it isn't because they like the opening (and I'm assuming the ending, and the "I'm Bad!" awful voice sound after each level) and it should give you infinite lives because I bought the stupid game, you jerks.

I feel stupid giving this game a star rating, but I'm not going to break tradition now. One out of five.