Battletoads/Double Dragon: The Ultimate Team (NES) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
545A playthrough of Tradewest's 1993 beat 'em up game for the NES, Battletoads & Double Dragon.
Played through as Billy Lee.
Battletoads & Double Dragon was as unlikely a crossover as anyone might have expected. Well, that is if anyone had expected anything of the sort in the early 90s - the concept of a "crossover" between different company's franchises was all but unknown in the western console gaming world.
Enter Rare, a trailblazing pioneer of NES-era software development. Licensing the rights to Technos' Double Dragon characters, Rare built a new Battletoads game that saw the dermally-challenged Zitz, Rash, and Pimple partner up with Billy and Jimmy Lee to take on the Dark Queen and her newly hired Shadow Warriors recruits.
Just one look at the game is enough to tell you that Rare spared no expense in bringing their "ultimate team" partnership to the NES. The original Battletoads was quite a technical and artistic achievement for the 8-bit hardware when it was released in 1991, but BT&DD pushes the envelope far harder, making it one of the most impressive games on the platform.
The characters are huge and have tons of animation. Your character will have his eyes bug out when Abobo comes punching through a wall, he'll dance around in the shape of a pancake after getting squashed, or go flying ablaze off-screen if he gets caught near a firing rocket engine. Neat stuff. There are tons of custom attack animations, and the backgrounds pull some reall cool tricks this time around as well - check out the floor's faked 3D line-scrolling effects in the Turbo Bike sections! Somehow, it puts on an even better show than the original Battletoads.
The sound is right up there with the graphics, too. The quality is up there with Rare's other NES stuff - the tunes are hyper-catchy and drive a good beat, and the sound effects are loaded with punchy bass giving every over-the-top kick, punch, and smash some real weight and impact.
And finally, the gameplay is where Battletoads and Double Dragon really shines. It is very much so a Battletoads game with Double Dragon characters included - the controls, stage design, and stage variety are all pulled directly from the Battletoads design manual, and it works beautifully. The big boot/big fist/head smash combo finishers are all here and as exaggerated as they've ever been, and the Lee brothers have been well adapted to the new style - I actually find them more fun to play with than the toads themselves. Even better, the difficulty level has been dialed *waaaaaaay* back from Battletoads. It's no walk in the park, but it is much more reasonable and forgiving. Even if you never got more than halfway through Battletoads before giving up, you might want to try this one. Rare listened to the critics and created a much more accessible game for all here.
The game was also released on the Game Boy, SNES, and Sega Genesis, but the NES version was the original, and it deserves a lot of props. As good as the 16-bit versions are, they did little to tweak the design of the 8-bit game, which really should stand as a testament to how completely solid the NES game truly is.
If you want a good beat 'em up on the NES and don't want to dedicate a year-and-a-half to trying to beat it, Battletoads and Double Dragon is an outstanding choice that matches, and arguably surpasses, the games that it was based on.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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