-BAD DUDES
I was a bad dude when my brother and I beat the hell out of the ‘Bad Dudes’ arcade game at Velvet Freeze Ice Cream. I was but a small lad of nine or ten but my arcade voracity knew no limits. It only cost my father two ice cream cones and ten bucks worth of quarters for an hour of peace while his idiot sons jumped and screamed as they mercilessly beat ninja kidnappers into virtual dust. About a decade or so later, I became an even badder dude when I crushed the NES Bad Dudes on single player mode. This time I was solo in my badness; no big brother, no ice cream, and no father providing endless amounts of one dollar bills as he absently perused the business section of the New York times. No, this was a formulaic masterstroke of weapon-hoarding, boss-baiting, and trying really hard to not get scared of that huge metal guy in the forest level who smooshed you in about three hits.
All in all, Bad Dudes is pretty darned bad-ass. Ninjas, nunchakus, midjets, Karnov, green multiplying ninjas, karate chicks, soda, and fire ninjas. Difficult, but not too difficult. A good seven-level, 45-minute play-through. End boss was a little fruity though. I couldn’t tell if he was throwing gummi bears or AIDS at me from the helicopter. Or they could have been fireballs….whatever. On a different note, the opening scene has been hackled and parodied to death. But for what it’s worth, that general guy could probably get the same results out of any of my middle school students if he questioned their ‘badness’ to their faces. Hell he could get any idiot in a wife-beater to fight an army of ninjas and rescue the president. As long as they can fight with their buddy right? What? No two-player simultaneous mode? Screw this game! Let’s go play Double Dragon II.
-BARBIE
Hooray Barbie! You beat the ice cream machine and the record player by jumping around like a waif! Now you can put on a pretty dress and let Ken take you to the moonlight dance! Yay! But when you wake up the next day, little sister will be gone at camp, and bad brother will come in and find you all alone! He loves you, but in a different way then Ken or little sister. He loves you with his anger. Angry love mutilates you with sharp kitchen scissors, and then melts your idealized form with leftover fireworks by the train tracks! Oh no Barbie! Will you ever fit into your mermaid outfit again? Can you complete the underwater level with your legs burnt off? Why did you make such a shitty video game Barbie? Why? Girls who liked you as a toy can never play through your adventures because of the obnoxious gameplay and stiff controls. And the levels are hard in a very retarded kind of way. That way where you know exactly what to do, but can’t move forward because Barbie can’t jump from the dinner plate to the soda can an inch above her! Move you unflexible blond bitch! I hate you Barbie. I’m going to leave so many burnt and mutilated corpses of you on the train tracks that even the wiccan kids will feel creeped out.
