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""Are you bad enough dude to beat up self-propelling midgets?""

John Lydon smashed some fan in the head with a microphone stand once, but ask him to extend that viciousness to fighting crime and he’ll probably tell you to **** off. It’s no surprise that the same Sex Pistols front man goes by the stage name “Johnny Rotten;” it’s so punk rock. But imagine a world where our punk rockers had other things to concern themselves with: instead of struggling with the paradox of becoming a successful group without “selling out,” these bohemians focus their energy on cleaning up our streets. Our bad streets.

With Brawling.

The search to this day for such a hero has yielded only one rocker: Duke Davis. He stands out in a crowd—not from fame or power, but because of the fact that he’s dressed in banana yellow short-shorts and has the ugliest face ever committed to 8-bit. It’s a good thing that he went into the music industry: the civilized world, even the one presented in this fictitious case, is resolved to listen to Duke rather than look at him directly. At any rate, beggars can’t be choosers. It’s better that this pasty white, day-glo bike short-wearing freak is brawling out there on there on the streets (the bad ones) rather than nobody at all.

Duke’s journey begins in his makeshift dojo, where you’re free to practice the entire three moves that Duke can use on his quest. Each stage warrants a different strategy, a different M.O. of brawling, so your moves change from each stage. One stage might give you a trip, another might give you the dreaded “Stooge punch.”Sure, Duke might only be able to keep track of three moves at a time; perhaps he doesn’t want to wear any of them out, or maybe he’s just very guarded about revealing the secrets of “bull rush” to a part of town where it would be uncalled for. Duke’s dojo also shows us his philosophical side: we need to be pumped up for the long fight ahead.

”Never trouble trouble till trouble troubles you.”

So says Duke. It’s ironic coming from a man single-handedly taking on the city’s villains with only three moves at a time, but it’s good advice to anyone considering going around troubling trouble all willy-nilly. Is Duke a warrior or a thinker? You make the call. We’re pumped; we can only assume that trouble is troubling us, so it’s time to hit the streets—the bad streets. And most importantly, it’s time to brawl.

Immediately, you might think that the game designers confused the word “bad” with “purple.” Sure, I guess it’s “bad” from the start, what with the punching and battle-wisdom Duke’s more than ready to provide, but each level is more purple than bad. Every city street has been coated over with so much purple that you’d think they ripped it straight from candyland. And it only gets weirder in your quest to walk from left to right.

You see, Duke’s enemies are not gang members, rogue punk rockers, or vandals. No, imagine the collective confusion of both Duke and myself as we noticed that our first opponent (perhaps the sheer manifestation of trouble troubling us) was a midget with a handlebar moustache and a ball-and-chain. His attacks included throwing said weapon and occasionally whirling his chain like a helicopter blade to fly around. Once the confusion wore off, I socked him in the head until he fell over. Duke: 1. Midgets: 0. Stranger foes attacked all through level one: lanky purple-people with bats, small dogs, and eventually a gorilla. Some town…

”Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly cuts right to the bone.”

And while Duke’s arsenal may seem somewhat normal at first, it gets increasingly more homoerotic. Level one’s ear twist raised my eyebrow: perhaps twisting some person’s ear wouldn’t be the most “rocking” way of beating the hell out of someone, and it certainly isn’t brawling. It got even more disturbing. In level two, I decided to “trip” a midget, resulting in Duke bending over a downed midget and feeling him up like mad. I shouldn’t go into the “bull rush,” where Duke crouches and dashes, face at groin level. I especially shouldn’t mention the “arm twist,” where Duke grabs his opponent and dances like a fairy. Oops.

Your attacks continue to get as disturbing as your advice: “a mouse with but only one hole is quickly taken.” Fortunately, there are other things to take your mind off of the definition of “hole” and “taken” in Duke’s cryptic innuendo, like new enemies. After a while, your opponents start resembling a reasonable facsimile of a group of bad guys that could cause a problem: they’re armed! Fat men with guns attempt to shoot you when they aren’t close enough to bash you with their giant gut, and Nazis with pistols kick you with a mighty goose-step. In fact, the insidious leader behind making your street all “bad” (and such) is a man with a bazooka and a combat knife! Such evildoers in the city practically beg to be molested by your unusual arsenal.

For as weird as it sounds, Duke’s tirade against midgets can be as playable as it is fruity. Though a simple side-scroller, every enemy has a certain aversion to a certain move. Basketball players can’t stand being kneed in the groin, and midgets can’t stand to be frantically rubbed all over. When Duke’s moves change, so does the strategy for beating previous opponents. Certain no-goodnicks like skateboarders have a pattern to analyze before you can monkey-beat them ‘till they drop. Your attack plan will have to be adjusted for if you’re bull rushing as opposed to stooge punching.

And that takes a lot away from most everything else. The game’s garish color combinations assault the eyes with every level, the gameplay doesn’t require any depth outside of knowing enemy patterns and which moves are effective, and the game starts to wear out its welcome when you’ve been defeated by a cheap one-two hit of a midget and a nazi-kick. Still, there’s a lot to laugh at with the details, and ultimately that’s the selling point here whether it’s intentional or not.

I’d like to end with some words from the man himself, Duke Davis:

“They said to him, ‘It can’t be done,’ but he went right to it. He took that thing that couldn’t be done… and he tried.”

It’s a solid effort.

OVERALL: 5 / 10
“Fabulous!” Unfortunately, not entirely fabulous where it should be.

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*Bad Dudes vs. Duke Davis. More bad, less bike shorts.


Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 06/01/02, Updated 06/01/02