Jeremy Parish

NES Works 138: Bad Dudes & Flying Dragon (Patreon)

Published:

2024-05-29 12:15:20

Imported:

2024-06

Tags:

bad dudes culture brain data east flying dragon hiryu no ken nes nes works

Content

You may have noticed that NES Works has increasingly engaged with world politics, real-life political figures, and public policy. Well, it's all been leading to this. For some reason, publishers decided that 1989 would be the year of Mad Magazine-level political commentary in their NES games. I kinda feel like this is the peak of this trend! It's a game where you rescue President Ronnie (or Herbert Walker in the NES edition) from Japanese terrorists. There's a lot happening in this one. And by this one I mean Bad Dudes. There's also a lot happening in the other game this episode, Flying Dragon, but not in a political sense. I just mean that it's a wild, ambitious mess of a game. Not a great mess, mind you, but it does some interesting things. I want to like it more than I do, but it's a janky Culture Brain effort and I lose patience with it once I hit the wall of the final elimination round of the first tournament. The game probably deserves better, honestly, but it needs to earn it.

Files

Secret Service, secret scrolls: Bad Dudes & Flying Dragon | NES Works 138

The president has been kidnapped by ninjas! Are you a bad enough dude to watch a YouTube video that revolves around a political figure without complaining about how video game retrospectives should never talk about political figures? Bad Dudes and Flying Dragon make an interesting study in contrasts, because both largely revolve around being Kung Fu clones. However, one is very unambitious but looks great and plays reasonably well, while the other is a mad-eyed attempt to mash together two tangentially related genres and utterly fails at the task. Ultimately, only one has the absolute dumbest narrative premise in the entire NES library, and that alone is enough to make it a classic… while the other deserves to be relegated to the dustbin of irrelevance. Production notes: Video Works is funded via Patreon (http://www.patreon.com/gamespite) — support the show and get access to every episode up to two weeks in advance of its YouTube debut! Plus, exclusive podcasts, eBooks, and more! Why watch when you can read? Check out the massive hardcover print editions of NES Works, Super NES Works, and Virtual Boy works, available now at Limited Run Games (https://limitedrungames.com/collections/books)! SG-1000 Works: Segaiden Vol. I is available NOW, and Metroidvania: The First Decade is due in 2025. NES footage captured from Analogue Nt Mini. Video upscaled to 4K with RetroTink 4X and 720p with xRGB Mini Framemeister.