But was I a bad-enough dude to curb my penchant for purchasing shoddy console ports?
For the first two decades of its existence, arcade gaming represented one of medium's strongest pillars. Those of us who were immersed in the scene knew that the arcade was the place to go if you were looking to play the newest, most-technologically-advanced video games and at the same time get a strong sense of where the medium was headed. It's where you went whenever you were hankering to play the latest, greatest entries in the genres with which arcades were most synonymous: shoot-'em-ups; arcade-style sports and racing games; and action games.
For me, personally, arcade gaming was mostly about that last entry on that list. It was about heading over to a local arcade on a summer afternoon and becoming utterly engrossed in the most visually impressive, most electrifying action games the medium had to offer. I mean, I liked to dabble in other genres, sure, but the fact of the matter was that I spent the majority of my arcade time playing action games--twitch-based side-scrollers, beat-'em-ups, fighters, and hybrids of the aforementioned (those like the fighting-brawler Street Smart and Technos' outstanding WWF wrestling games, which combined wrestling, fighting and brawling).
Quite simply, action games were my favorite. My heart belonged to them.
So for years, it was standard that I'd spend my arcade hours mowing down hooded goons, tossing around hulking street brawlers, stomping Abobos, and taking out all manner of baddies with stylish fighting moves as practiced by Albatross, Karate Guy, and the Lee Brothers. And all the while, I couldn't stop thinking to myself, "Man--there's nothing cooler than this!"
That's how it was, at least, until the summer 1988--until the day when suddenly I came across Data East's latest arcade release: a slick-looking, testosterone-fueled beat-'em-up that desired to achieve a whole new level of coolness!
Its title was Bad Dudes (well, its actual title was Bad Dudes vs. Dragon Ninja, but my friends and I always referred to it as simply "Bad Dudes" because somehow we never noticed the subsequent text; we were either oblivious or, like, really dumb), which, I thought, was quite interesting.
Well, OK--I admit that the game's title didn't do much of anything for me. It was the late-80s era in which hipness and edginess were highly valued qualities, yeah, but, still, "Bad Dudes" sounded super lame--like something thought up by a marketing team comprised of out-of-touch suit-wearing freaks who were trying to pander to a hypothetical "youth" demographic with a title that sounded "dope" and "gnarly." The name was so head-shakingly stupid that I was hesitant to dignify it with an act of inserting a quarter into the machine's coin slot.
I mean, that title was really bad, dude. (It became clear, later on, that the title was meant to be ironic. At the time, though, my friends and I weren't smart enough to pick that up.)
The attract mode, contrastingly, spoke of an amazingly cool game! It had two tank-top-wearing musclemen fighting hordes of ninjas! There was a ton of onscreen activity, with enemies absolutely pouring onto the screen and doing so from every direction! The visual design was fantastic! And the fighting action was wonderfully frenetic-looking!
This was why I went to arcades, man!
Most importantly, Bad Dudes was very accessible. It controlled really well, its hero character moved spryly, and its fighting moves were easy to pull off. Also, its action was highly engaging: The game moved along at a brisk pace; there was, as mentioned, a mesmerizing amount of onscreen activity; and you were able to capably tear through mobs of enemies with your hard-hitting karate moves (it helped that the enemies weren't damage-absorbent and instead died in one hit)! And, early on, it featured two of the best sequences I'd ever seen in a beat-'em-up: one in which ninjas rode in on a truck's roof and ambushed you, and another in which you did battle atop an in-transit multi-trailer truck while ninjas rode in on cars' roofs and proceeded to enter the fray!
What was also cool was that it borrowed Rolling Thunder's level-hopping mechanic! Any game that included such a thing--and in effect paid homage to Rolling Thunder, one of my all-time favorite arcade games--was instantly tops in my book.
Oh, and the Bad Dudes could throw flaming punches! Billy, Jimmy, Bimmy and Flimmy couldn't do anything like that!
Bad Dudes felt like an ode to both the action genre's best games and the action-focused summer blockbusters that had been rocking theaters for the entire decade. It managed to capture the spirit of genres from two entirely differently mediums--from two forms of entertainment for which I was equally fond. I mean, here I was playing as a clone of the era's burly action-movie stars, beating up ninjas, and attempting to save the president of the United States! For a child of the 80s, that was what dreams were made of!
Bad Dudes' action was highly derivative, sure, but that didn't bother me; I didn't consider it to be a negative aspect. Rather, it was quite the opposite: Bad Dudes' familiar-feeling mechanics were what helped me to instantly form a connection with the game. They're what made it an instant hit with me. I liked it a lot, and I knew that I'd be returning to it in the future.
And that's exactly how it went: Bad Dudes became one of those games I'd seek out and play any time I went to an arcade. I'd rush over to that machine eager to begin tearing through hordes of ninjas. Usually I'd play it alone and have a great time doing so, but there were also plenty of instances where a friend (whichever one I managed to drag over to the machine) and I would engage in a spirited, banter-filled cooperative play-through. We'd be so engaged in the action that we'd never think to ask questions about what was going in the game--pertinent questions like "If the White House's top brass has at its disposal the army, the air force, the navy, the marines, the FBI, and the CIA, why the hell would it send two underdressed street brawlers to rescue the president?" No--we just accepted it for what it was: the type of whacky scenario that could only take place in a video game. And, honestly, games having those types of silly, nonsensical storylines was one of the reasons why we had such a fondness for the medium.
At the least, Bad Dudes' eccentricities made for good comic material. It was always fun to joke about President Ronnie's appetite for burgers (because "Haha-- presidents aren't supposed to eat 'normal-people' food!"). And we were always on the lookout for opportunities in which it make the most sense to raise our arms into the air and shout "I'm bad!" You know--opportunities like when we were currently finishing a stage in Bad Dudes or greeting the pizza-delivery boy.
Good times, man.
Since it was a common thing for semi-recent arcade games to make their way to the NES, I wasn't at all surprised when I flipped to the final page of my first non-dedicated issue of Nintendo Power and saw the name "Bad Dudes" (sans the "vs. Dragon Ninja" part of the title) on its "Game List." It had apparently been in stores for about a month or so, though I couldn't recall ever seeing it on display anywhere. "That's weird," I thought.
Though, because I'd long since come to terms with the reality that the NES simply wasn't capable of adequality replicating technologically-advanced arcade games, I didn't have any further interest in owning arcade-to-NES ports--particularly those that weren't redesigned to take advantage of the NES' strengths (Double Dragon II-style conversions, mainly). I'd been burned too many times by straight ports, very few of which could hold a candle, technologically or gameplay-wise, to their arcade counterparts.
So yeah--I had no desire to own an inferior version of Bad Dudes. "If I want my fill of Bad Dudes," I thought to myself, "I'll wait till I can get to an arcade."
But you know how the story goes when you're a kid and you enter into one of those drought periods in which no big releases are scheduled and you're tired of all of the games you own because you've played them to death: You get so desperate for something new that you abandon rationality and thus lose the ability to make sound decisions. You become a slave to impulse and consequently find reasons to justify purchasing a game in which you had little to no interest--either because you didn't care about its subject-matter or you had reason to believe that it wasn't very good.
That's what happened to me during a dead period in 1990 (a period that seemed to last for months when in reality it was probably only two to three weeks). I was so desperate for something new that I managed to convince myself that owning the NES version of Bad Dudes was a good idea.
The opportunity presented itself one random day when I was out with my father. As we were riding along, he asked me, suddenly, if I had interest in picking up any of the hot new games for my "new Atari" (which was what adults would call all of our game systems back then).
I had great interest in owning a new game, of course, but I decided not to reveal as much because I was worried about how it would look if I was too quick to respond (I didn't want it to appear as though I had no reservations about asking for a new game, especially after I'd bluntly done so many times in the previous months; I was starting to feel self-conscious about my being too eager to take advantage of his generosity). So I played it coy and pretended that I was cold on the idea--that, really, there currently no games on my radar.
"But you know what?" I told him. "I wouldn't mind browsing through a game aisle and seeing what's available. You know--just to kill some time."
I mean, I certainly wasn't interested in owning Bad Dudes or anything. No siree.
So he drove me over to that majestic Toys R Us in Caesar's Bay Bazaar ("holy land," as I thought of it). Quickly, I entered the store and marched my way down the well-traveled path--through the leftmost aisles and to the back, where the games section was located. And after engaging in an act of pure theater (perusing all of the games that were lining the wall as if I was carefully deliberating over which one I should buy), I grabbed one of the tags from the Bad Dudes slot and then hurried over to the checkout area, where my father was waiting. And moments later, I walked out of the store with yet another underserved NES game.
I'm so sorry, dad.
It fell short technically, too. Most disappointing was that it could only display four enemies at a time, which worked to rob it of the mesmerizingly heavy activity and freneticism that you experienced in the arcade original. That's what made it what it was! The whole fun of Bad Dudes was tearing your way through crowds of ninjas--not small groups of four! And yet the game could barely handle even that amount; the ninjas' sprites would flicker like crazy whenever four of them were onscreen, so much so that you could barely see any of them!
I didn't even need to wonder why the developers didn't bother to add a co-op mode. It was obvious: There was no way the game could handle it. And if that was the case, I thought, then Data East should never have tried to bring it over to the NES in this form; rather, it should have given Bad Dudes the Double Dragon home-conversion treatment and turned it into something unique--something more suited to the NES.
Yet the developers' most egregious crime was their ill-advised attempt to replicate the arcade version's "I'm bad!" voice sample. They had to know that it wouldn't work--that they would run up against cart-space limitations and have make an unfortunate comprise. But they went ahead and tried, anyway, and the only thing they wound up producing was a highly-compressed-sounding, scratchy voice sample that sounded less like the Dude's trademarked victory cry and more like something a laryngitis-sufferer might yell during childbirth.
Let's just say that "I'RHM BEARYH!" doesn't have quite the same ring to it.
"Perhaps the developers should have shown restraint here," I thought to myself as I struggled to remove the horrified look from my face. "They should have replaced this voice sample with either a simple text bubble or a specially designed victory screen."
I mean, it wouldn't have been a truly faithful version of Bad Dudes without the Dude's famous expression of triumph, no, but it would have given itself the chance to come across as less of severely-stripped-down joke of a game.
Still, I didn't think that the NES version of Bad Dudes was completely with value. No--it actually had a few redeeming qualities. The first was the soundtrack, which was surprisingly terrific; it was by far the game's most inspired aspect.
As I've expressed in previous arcade-related pieces: It was sometimes difficult to fully gauge or even hear arcade games' music because arcades tended to be incredibly noisy places. And Bad Dudes was one of the perpetual victims of their cacophonous reverberations. None of us ever heard its music. In fact, we weren't even sure that it had any!
So this was the first time I was hearing it--the first time I was hearing what was unexpectedly top-tier NES music. In particular, I loved the tune that played during Stage 2, the one in which you fought your way across the roofs of a series of truck trailers. I was caught off guard by how emotional-sounding it was--how it managed to evoke feelings of sadness and tell a thought-provoking story of hopeful struggle. This wasn't the type of music I associated with beat-'em-ups, whose soundtracks were usually populated with nothing but high-spirited rock tunes, no. Bad Dudes' was something different--something wonderfully distinct.
I've since been able to the arcade version's soundtrack, and my opinion is that it's good, yes, but not quite as good as the NES version's. Bad Dudes' music, I feel, lends itself better to NES sound hardware, whose processors have a way of imbuing tunes with high degrees of harmonic depth and emotional resonance. Such qualities tend to be absent when we're talking about tunes as produced by tinny-sounding synth instruments, which simply can't create tunes that are mellifluous and thus able to absorb the listener.
So yeah--the NES soundtrack wins this battle (not surprisingly, since it's often the case that NES soundtracks are superior to their arcade counterparts').
Another thing that surprised me was the first stage's boss theme--or, rather, a certain part of its boss theme. "This mixed-in note string..." I said to myself after hearing the tune's instantly recognizable chorus. "That's the Karnov theme's intro!"
"Wait," I said to myself in a moment of revelation, "That character is Karnov?!"
I didn't own Karnov, no, but I was pretty familiar with it (it was one of those "weird games" that I'd played a few times at my friends and cousins' houses). Yet, somehow, I failed to recognize that Bad Dudes' first boss was the hero from that very game (I guess because I never saw his NES incarnation breathe fire). Only then, after hearing the mixed-in Karnov-theme bit, did I make the connection.
I was genuinely excited to learn of Karnov's inclusion, and I thought it was so cool how he was given special treatment in the form of an exclusive variant of the game's boss theme. Though, his appearance did raise some questions. I wondered, "What is he doing here, in this game?" and "Does he belong to this world, or is this just a guest cameo? And if it's the former, then how and when did he become a bad guy?"
I didn't get my answers until years later, when I discovered the Internet. That's when I learned that, yes, the two games were indeed related--that they shared both the same developer (another fact that somehow escaped me) and the same universe! "That's wild!" I said to myself. "Who would have ever thought that Karnov was the future of Bad Dudes?!"
And so the Karnov-Bad Dudes relationship became an object of fascination for me. It was the same type of fascination I felt when I learned that Commando was not a standalone game but instead, shockingly, part of the Bionic Commando universe. I loved to wonder about how these games were connected. It was part of the fun of playing them.
Still, though, none of that was enough to convince me that I'd made a good purchasing decision. I had to face the facts: Bad Dudes was pretty bad, dude. It just didn't work on the NES. In the following days and weeks, I continued to play it, yeah, but I only did so because I was trying real hard to justify spending $50 of my father's money on a shoddy arcade port.
More so than its technical inferiority and the resulting dearth of good content, Bad Dudes' difficulty is what sunk it. The developers--for, I guess, the purpose of consolizing the game--turned up the difficulty to an extreme level and in doing so created a whole new definition of "NES-hard." I mean, this game made Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles look like Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers. No matter how many times I tried, I could never make it past the boss gauntlet with more than one or two bars of health; in each instance, I'd be so severely weakened that the final boss would kill me within seconds. Three continues were just never enough. Over the years, I slogged my way through Bad Dudes a countless number of times, and all I managed to get was a mere handful of pokes at the final boss. And I failed each time.
"I'RHM BEARYH!" is right.
Like I said earlier: Data East would have been better served to look at what Capcom, Tecmo and Technos did with their arcade-to-NES ports (Ninja Gaiden, Rygar, Bionic Commando, Strider, Double Dragon II: The Revenge, et al.) and take some inspiration. Then it could have used said inspiration to reimagine Bad Dudes and thus convert it into a platform-action game, an action-adventure game, or any of the other genre-types that eagerly embrace home-console values. The accompanying promotional campaign focusing on the game's "exciting transformation" surely would have helped to garner it great attention and thus an enthusiastic reception.
But that didn't happen, and instead all we got was a stripped-down arcade port--one that's vastly inferior to its arcade counterpart.
Call it a missed opportunity.
Oh well--at least we still have the arcade original. There's still a game to which we can turn whenever we get the itch to take control of musclebound brutes and furiously tear our way through hordes of ninjas. Its name is Bad Dudes vs. Dragon Ninja, and it offers a reliably fun gameplay experience.
In these modern times, sadly, Bad Dudes just doesn't get any respect. Because most younger gamers don't understand irony, they come to see Bad Dudes as a relic of a Neanderthal era of gaming, and thus they promptly dismiss it. It doesn't help that their perception of the medium is largely informed by the opinions of stuffy game-journalist types who tend to look down on games that celebrate the testosterone-fueled, stupid-fun style of entertainment that defined the late 80s and early 90s. Those types regard Bad Dudes as a joke and reference it only in mocking terms. "'Let's go for a burger, duuuude,'" they quote, sardonically, while rolling their eyes (to be fair, though, that particular line is pretty cringey).
But what those people won't tell you--or, rather, what those people don't know--is that Bad Dudes is a very good beat-'em-up. That's why you should ignore them and seek it out. If you're an action-game fan, you'll definitely enjoy it. There's a lot to like about it: It offers satisfying fighting action, interesting stage settings, a surprisingly emotive soundtrack, and a presentation that does splendidly to playfully lampoon the era's silliest aspects and inspire us laugh at them in a reverential way.
That we're writing, talking and joking about Bad Dudes 25 years after its release is proof that it's still relevant to the medium and to our lives. I reckon that it won't soon be forgotten, nor should it be. I mean, would we really want to live in a world without Bad Dudes? In a world in which there no more loud, self-congratulatory tank-top-wearing musclemen? No more presidents being kidnapped by ninjas? And no more cheapskate millionaires who reward superhuman acts of heroism with hamburgers?
To live in such a world wouldn't just be depressing, no.
It would be really bad, dude!
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