Bad Dudes Vs. DragonNinja Longplay (Arcade) [60 FPS]

Developed and published by Data East in 1988.

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Another classic 80's coin-op beat 'em up that gracing the arcades during my youth, Bad Dudes Vs. DragonNinja doesn't exactly roll off the tongue.

President Ronnie (a parody of former US President Ronald Reagan) has been kidnapped by the ninjas and it's your task, as one of the aforementioned "Bad Dudes", to rescue him.

This game alternates between standard horizontal scrolling levels where progress is determined by the player and "on rails" levels where the screen moves at a continuous pace and the player has to keep up.

Most of the levels are divided into upper and lower play areas which can be jumped between at will. This provides a level of tactical play if the player wishes to avoid certain enemies, or simply fancies mixing things up.

Huge numbers of enemies appear on both levels and can also jump between them, so the player can't always avoid them. There are a number of attack moves that the "Bad Dude" can perform including punches, kicks and the signature power-punch. Most regular enemies take a single hit to kill although the fire ninja requires two.

Red ninja drop power-up items or weapons when defeated, of which the nunchaku are the most useful due to the extra range they provide. In fact, collecting these makes the game considerably easier for however long you manage to hold on to them; dying will result in loss of any weapons that you were carrying.

At the end of each stage is a boss character that must be defeated in order to progress to the next stage. These typically involve memorising an attack pattern and striking when their guard is down; some are easy to beat whereas others, such as the short ninja with the big claws on stage two, can be quite annoying.

As was typical for games of this type, all of the bosses return on the final stage in glorious rainbow of palette swaps for one final fight; the green Karnov is possibly an homage to the green Abobo from Double Dragon.

Having played this through to completion, I have to say that it's quite a bland and uninteresting game when compared to other games in the genre from the same time period; I still prefer Double Dragon considerably to this. The fact that simply touching an enemy results in loss of health is annoying, especially as there are so many enemies on screen that it's easy to eat through your two lives quite quickly.

The game was ported to a huge number of home computer systems, including the Commodore 64 and Amiga machines and is still considered a classic 1980's beat 'em up even though it's not my personal favourite.
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