Here’s your end-of-week nostalgia fix: DJ 8-Bit Mullet’s chiptune-tastic Bad Dudes: Mega Mash, which takes the soundtrack from the 1988 arcade game Bad Dudes vs. Dragon Ninja and mashes it up with a number of retro musical biscuits, including:
- White Horse by Laid Back
- Magic Man by Heart
- LL Cool J’s Phenomenon
- Michael Jackson’s Bad
- Short Dick Man by Gilette
- White Lines by Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five
- “plus a little bit of Nate Dogg, Lady Gaga, Heart, Ace of Base, Daft Punk, and samples from the movie The Wizard.”
It doesn’t matter whether or not you wasted your youth at dances, clubs, and arcades like I did — Bad Dudes: Mega Mash is pure 8-bit awesome. I’ve been beating my head against a particularly frustrating bug in an AppleTV game when I did decided to put it on the background — and I fixed it 15 minutes later. I think it made me smarter! Thanks, DJ 8-bit Mullet!
Scenes from Bad Dudes vs. Dragon Ninja
Bad Dudes is every 1980’s action B-movie reduced to its purest form and turned into a videogame. You’re an Arnie-like character trying to rescue a Ronald Reagan-like character from ninjas. I’m pretty sure I pumped a lot of quarters into this game back in the day, which presents its challenge very plainly and clearly:
With the intro out of the way, you’re unleashed on the mean streets of some random unnamed American city that’s crawling with ninjas…
…and from there, you proceed to kick ass on the freeway…
…the sewers…
…the woods…
…and in the end, the fabulously-costumed Final Boss on a helicopter!
During a particularly dull stretch of the summer of 1992, I pumped a ridiculous number of quarters into Bad Dudes vs. Dragon Ninja, dispatched the Final Boss, and finally rescued President Ronnie. This was my reward:
Hey, if the Japanese can be sold on the idea that KFC is a traditional Christmas dish in the U.S., why can’t they believe that the Stateside reward for a daring rescue is two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame-seed bun?
For those of you who can’t get enough videogame gameplay in your diet, here’s a playthrough of the arcade game: