Game:

Bad Dudes (1988)

Duration: 2:09

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23

Well, this is...I'm not really sure. It's either totally awesome or completely lame, but the line is blurred to the point that it's hard to say. I think I'll err on the side of "What do you mean it's not awesome?!" for the sake of actuallly standing by my decision to play and share this game with others, and of course the decision to upload it and inflict its presence upon an even greater audience.

As an aside, when last I looked, I had a really hard time finding decent quality footage of this game to use to explain to friends of mine when words failed (you know I have lots of those)...so this can be considered me trying to fill in a gap that I stumbled into.

This...is Bad Dudes. Yes, I'm completely serious. That's the name for this little foray into Data East arcade history. Well, technically it's Bad Dudes vs. Dragon Ninja...or should that be "Baddudes vs. Dragonninja"? Seriously, the opening paragraph is enough to give me a rather unbelievable headache trying to parse it for both proper syntax and meaning. I mean, I already know what the game is about, and even I have to react with a dull surprise of "What?" whenever I read it.

Also, of course, this being the late 80s, I feel I may need to explain that once upon a time when disco and dinosaurs roamed the earth, "bad" meant "cool" (the latter of which is also growing archaic these days)...for what reason, I know not. The King of Pop even had a song to the extent of professing badness and the apparent admiration of one's peers being directly linked.

Thus Bad Dudes is so bad! It's also pretty bad, objectively, but bad in a good way that shows how bad it really is?

Just to further illustrate how bad this game is, we're briefed further on the premise of our assault and baddery (puns are bad too) by the baddest dude of them all, Duke Nukem...who would eventually go on to land himself a job at Apogee and then the rest would be history. Forever. Being in a bad game like Bad Dudes proves you're so bad that you'll be a memetic badass with all that badness.

Am I a bad enough dude to rescue Ronnie? Actually, no, I don't fit either of the stipulated criteria, but luckily Data East is just cranking them off an assembly line of identically bad bad dudes and they'll let me use one to get the bad deeds done three times over for only a single credit...and since the credits are free, bad dudes for everyone!

This is a half-blind run...maybe a little blinder than that, because P2 has never seen, much less played it before...and I've only ever played it once through, noting that it would be a lot more interesting with more than one person being exposed to the absurdity of it all.

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Stage 1

So yeah, the ninja (I refuse to say "ninjas") got Ronnie and we're apparently hot on the case, Duke just told us to go for it and so we decided to walk the streets waiting for a swarm of ninja to descend upon us and show us the way! I mean, that makes sense, right? The thicker the swarms get, the closer we must be getting, I should think...that's how a bad dude navigates!

The premise of gameplay is still just as simple as the storyline. You walk, ninja attack from all directions, you take out each one with a single punch, and you move along your merry way. Clearly these guys aren't familiar with the Law of Conservation of Ninjutsu...also known as the Inverse Ninja Rule, wherein the more of some supposedly badass force of destruction you're faced with, the weaker each individual one must be. So the baddest dude is the one who fights alone...or perhaps with just one other bad dude.

Oh, and our boss here is actually Karnov, or Jinborov Karnovski, the star of his own game and a mascot of sorts for Data East until its eventual bankruptcy...unfortunately, this is as much as you can see of the guy on a Data East Arcade Classics collection, since the rights to Karnov (and some other Data East properties) went to former Data East employees at new development company Paon, while the bulk of the rights to the old company's games went to G-Mode, the publisher for the collection this is a part of.

Just to be clear, this is not unfortunate news for the people who worked so hard to create him...just unfortunate for fans of Karnov that he is part of a broken family and Data East's children are living apart with different foster families.

Oh, right, sorry..."I'M BAD!" This whole description was longer than the stage itself, but they do get longer, I promise.

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