Bad Dudes VS Dragon Ninja

Bad Dudes VS Dragon Ninja, often shortened as Dragon Ninja, is a multi platform horizontal Beat them all.

This is an Arcade port from a famous Data East game.

Development

Publisher : Imagine Software

Spanish Publisher : Erbe Software

Programation : James HIGGINS

Graphics : Martin Mc DONALD

Music & Sound FX : Jonathan DUNN

Plot

Wikipedia says :

The game starts in New York City, where President Ronnie (based on former U.S. President Ronald Reagan) has been kidnapped by the nefarious DragonNinja.

The intro says: "Rampant ninja related crimes these days... Whitehouse is not the exception...". As soon as that occurs, a Secret Service agent (who resembles Arnold Schwarzenegger as he appears in The Terminator) asks two street-smart brawlers, named Blade and Striker: "President Ronnie has been kidnapped by the ninjas. Are you a bad enough dude to rescue Ronnie?", which this quote became an infamous meme and is often lampooned on the Internet. In the Japanese version, however, the words are completely different. After they heard that, the Bad Dudes confirmed it by pursuing the DragonNinja through the city streets, highway, sewers, transport train, forest, cave and into the secret ninja base, in order to save President Ronnie.

Of course most of those elements and cinematics were not present on the Amstrad version.

The Arcade port

This is a Mode0 game with a side scrolling. Graphics are not bad and playability is not bad, yet a few elements were a bit disapointing :

The player's sprite wasn't always that well designed.

Bosses lacked varied patterns.

Also compared to the Arcade game, the Amstrad version lacks some elements of gameplay :

no real 2-players co-op mode (perhaps the most disapointing aspect).

less fight technics such as the vertical (upside) kick or reverse (back) kick, also the "fireball-punch" is completely useless on Amstrad, and jump-kicks are less controlable.

Yet it was a quite decent game, full of fun with colourfull graphics and a sweet intro music (amongst the best and emblematic of Amstrad chiptunes).

Also it was quite a difficult game, yet not that impossible to finish.

For more informations, just have a look at the longplays.

128Ko Version

The proud owners of a 128Ko amstrad (6128 mostly) could get all levels loaded once and some extra Sampled Sounds Effects ("I'm Bad" and "Arrghh"...)

Yet the changes are quite minimal.

Guest stars

On Amstrad version, the intro page is a sweet mode1 picture largely inspired from a famous Bruce Lee picture, yet this has nothing to do with the game...

Also you have to save the president Ronnie : Ronald Reagan.

The first Boss (who cme back latter in the game) is a well known Kharnov, another Data East character who had its game also ported on amstrad CPC (Mode 1 plateformer-shoot-them-up)

Videos

Some longplays.

Courtesy from Xyphoes

Courtesy from Axelino