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

Published on Wed, Jun 12th 2024 Gaming Rectangular HD

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:

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NES footage captured from Analogue Nt Mini. Video upscaled to 4K with RetroTink 4X and 720p with xRGB Mini Framemeister.