Vidjama Gmaes Work

It’s been a short minute since I promised I’d get the ball rolling on Evercade carts and I have a pretty compelling reason why. I’ve been trying to work up a decent setup ever since my HDMI splitter randomly fried earlier this year ruining the splitter, multiple HDMI cables, the power block, an El Gato, a monitor, and almost my laptop and the Steam Deck. Once I got that up and running I’ve been working on how I want to do Steam Deck reviews and as you can tell both of those ideas haven’t really gone anywhere.

So I’m returning to the Evercade reviews with a few changes on my changes in structure and procedure. Why? I watched the first Atari redo and came out of it thinking wow, I’m an asshole. I actually got rid of the approve rating because 2022 Connor was concerned over annoying the kind of dweebs who think Atari 2600 titles are still the peak of gaming quality in 2023.

By doing these videos without telling people I think some of them might not be worth buying, I run the risk of looking like a pathetic shill [unrelated photo of John Riggs], a grifting conartist [unrelated photo of metaljesusrocks] or the kind of person who will give anything a good review just for some free tchotchkes [unrelated photo of John Hancock].

I’m bringing back my rating system and expanding it to include my thoughts for both the Evercade and Evercade Vs. because I think it’s worth talking about both and it’d be kinda pointless to do this video series if I was too afraid to give my verdict. This is after all a discussion of my thoughts on the value of the carts. The nerds who have nostalgia for these specific games don’t need my approval to buy it anyway. So I’m doing a thumbs up, thumbs down rating this time.

Let’s talk a bit about Data East. A Japanese developer/publisher who stuck around until 2003 when they finally and deservedly went bankrupt, Data East has never been a top tier gaming company. In fact I’d say they’re barely mid-tier. A lot of their titles can be summarized as “[insert popular game] but worse,” and you can go down a whole rabbit hole of why the company failed as a business. Everything from paying way too much for licenses to their pinball machines mostly being low quality plywood and metal scraps that broke down constantly and were built with the cheapest of materials, and uh their games sucked a lot.

There are ten games on the Data East Collection, so let’s dive in.

#1: Bad Dudes

Re-reviewing Bad Dudes is really a task on the original Data East cart in 2023, because when I wrote my original review in 2020 we didn’t really know about the arcade version coming out. I think Evercade hinted at or talked about arcade releases at the time, but nothing was set in stone until the following year. You just didn’t know if the Evercade would do well enough to sustain more releases and thankfully it has. Hence me going from being 10 carts behind to like sixty nine in the span of three years.

Bad Dudes on the NES is like your fourth choice on the McDonald’s menu because the top three were unavailable and you didn’t want to eat at McDonald’s today anyway. There are a ton of ports of Bad Dudes, and all of them are saddled with their own uniquely crippling quality downgrades. Whether it be low framerate, terrible hit detection, low enemy count, lack of scrolling, tiny sprites, no sound, bad sound, horrible graphics, nonfunctional controls, you name it one of the ports has it. The NES is the third best port behind the gold standard which is the Amiga 500 and the bronze standard which is the Atari ST. NES is the hay standard and everything below that is various colors of shit.

Bad Dudes on the NES is playable, and that’s really all I can say to its benefit. The controls are stiff, your characters look like they’re holding in a big dump when they walk, the enemy count is both lower and somehow more annoying to deal with. Enemies other than the blue ninjas take two hits to kill now, but the bosses are programmed so shoddily that you can cheese most of them. Hit detection is awful and many enemies just run right through your punches and kicks. There is a lot of flickering as well. When I say it’s the third best port, don’t misunderstand that to mean it’s still good.

But there is a good reason you never hear anyone talk about the Apple II or the ZX Spectrum version or any of those. They make the NES version look like a masterpiece by comparison.

And I’m aware that I’m heavily biased because as a teenager I actually had a Bad Dudes arcade cabinet in my basement. I played it enough that I was able to get through the whole thing on under a dollar in quarters. Now that the Evercade has the Data East arcade collection, what little value this game had on the system is meaningless.

Given the game doesn’t have simultaneous multiplayer anyway, I’m going to give this a thumbs down on both Evercade and the Vs.

#2: Burger Time

Burger Time is a perfectly acceptable NES port of an arcade game that is also on the Data East arcade collection. Much like Bad Dudes, Burger Time has had a big downgrade in graphics to fit on an NES cart. Unlike Bad Dudes, the gameplay is basic enough that it’s pretty much all here in its original form.

You play as your typical Burger King employee, stomping on food with your unwashed boots and using those ingredients to squash pests, and then serving the compiled burgers to customers who will develop Giardia. The gameplay takes the form of running around and stomping on food in order to make really massive burgers. You can also spray them with pepper to make a quick getaway.

It’s a title with a very simple gameplay loop and one that either hooks you or it doesn’t. It’s an arcade game, it’s from an era where your goal was really about getting that high score. It either sticks or it doesn’t. With me? I could take it or leave it.

Given there’s nothing inherently wrong with it, I’m going to give it one thumb up on both Evercade handheld and the Vs.

#3: Burnin’ Rubber

Another arcade-ass arcade game. Burnin’ Rubber is a game with a very simple premise. You bump and you jump. In fact that’s what the original title of the game was. Much like Burger Time, this is an arcade game simple enough that porting it over to consoles meant losing very little in terms of content outside of graphics and audio. Even the Atari 2600 port did a pretty good job of recreating the arcade experience.

Is it good? I think so. Difficult as all get out. It’s definitely one of those addictive games that keeps you coming back to see if you can get your score just a little higher this time. It gets frustratingly difficult once you hit level 3, but I’m pretty sure I’m just playing it wrong. Otherwise I don’t have much to say about it.

Thumbs up on both Evercade handheld and Vs.

#4: Fighter’s History

Fighter’s History is like the Wish.com version of Street Fighter II. We have Street Fighter II at home, says mom. Fighter’s History is not a bad game per se, it just does everything moderately worse than Street Fighter 2. Which if you own the Evercade Exp, you already own Street Fighter II. And as someone who has never been big on fighting games, I don’t have much input to say about this other than that I somewhat enjoyed my time playing it. It plays a little clunky on the Evercade controller, but otherwise I didn’t hate it.

Maybe if I had a friend I could play multiplayer. The art really sucks on the character sprites.

I’m still going to give this a thumbs down.

#5: Joe & Mac 2: Lost in the Tropics

If there’s one game I have personal nostalgic joy for on this list outside of Bad Dudes it’s Joe & Mac 2. A side-scrolling platformer that has good graphics, good sound, charming animations, and interesting set pieces. Yes it has some annoying gimmicks but at the end of the day I can look past them. At least until the final level in which case screw this game and the developers, they can wholly eat my [redacted].

I really do love these games. Something about the prospect of beating the roast chicken out of a rat or a pterodactyl and living a life that consists mostly of eating, smashing things with a big club, and dying repeatedly speaks to me on a spiritual level. Maybe it’s because for a platformer of its era, Joe & Mac 2 is actually really generous when it comes to handing out healing items and that makes the more obnoxious sections of the game a little more tolerable.

There’s some strange filler in the game, encouraging the player to farm wheels. You can remodel your house and get a wife to get the better ending. I never got that far because the final level is a boss rush and is absolute dog shit. Otherwise it’s a fun game.

Thumbs up.

#6: Karate Champ

Karate Champ is to the Data East collection what Sword Quest was to the Atari cart. Really? This is what you pick? I know Data East doesn’t have a lot of bangers but they had to have something in their collection better than Karate Champ. This is why Data East never got a collection #2 for home console games.

You play as a karate guy in a karate match against another karate guy. Your goal is to get the first hit until you get enough points to win. That’s it. The game is plagued by horrible controls and technical issues, not to mention the kind of pacing that would put a golf fan to death. Simply put the game never does what you want, when you want it, and seems to just act on its own accord. I actually feel bad for the poor designers who had to translate a game built on two joysticks to a d-pad and two buttons.

There’s just no outcome where this would have been good and it’s a real testament to Data East’s overall quality that of all the games they picked for the ten on this list, Karate Champ was one of them.

Two thumbs down.

#7: Magical Drop 2

As a puzzle game I don’t have much to say about Magical Drop 2 other than that it’s a Data East game, so it’s basically a less fun Puzzle Bobble. Because I don’t have much to say about it, I’m going to play some uninterrupted video of Magical Drop 2 while I microwave my coffee. Enjoy.

Two thumbs down.

#8: Midnight Resistance

Yet another “we have blank at home.” In this case Midnight Resistance is “we have Contra at home.” Only we had Contra at home, it was called Contra. Well except Contra was on the Nintendo systems and Midnight Resistance was on the Genesis. On second thought, belay that first thought. Midnight Resistance isn’t really much of a dollar store version of Contra. Sure there’s some similarities, but it’s not on the usual level of Data East copyright infringement.

Midnight Resistance is a solid game despite being infuriatingly difficult. I like that the weapons are by default a single click to shoot so you can focus your fingies on jumping and using the other button to hold your aim. It’s really friggin hard, and I would be lying if I said I was able to get far in the game. But it is fun.

I don’t have much to say on this one. One thumb up on both consoles.

#9: Side Pocket

The only positive side of Side Pocket I can say is that thanks to save states I can make it look like I’m semi-competent at pool and didn’t take over a hundred tries to get this footage. Otherwise video game pool is like picking boogers. It’ll pass the time sure, but is it really that exciting unless you get a big one? Probably not. I’d rather play a fishing game.

It’s functional though. I’m still going to say thumbs down because this is what they could get for the cart.

#10: Two Crude Dudes

I have a lot to say about Two Crude Dudes. Mostly about how it sucks. Bad Dudes on the NES is by no means an excellent game, but given it also takes less time to beat this than it does to cook a delicious frozen Digiorno pizza, I’ve beaten the Evercade version of Bad Dudes more times than I can count. That’s more than a bakers dozen by the way which I’m pretty sure is seven.

Two Crude Dudes is a game with a lot of personality and is also a parody of its own genre. You have two crude dudes traveling through the bombed out wreckage of New York City post-nuclear bomb to beat the crap out of a lot of bad guys. You can pick up pretty much anything in the environment including your enemies including your coop partner and use them as projecticles. It’s a game that had a lot of promise.

Unfortunately the execution is terrible. Hit detection much like in Bad Dudes is questionable at best, obviously broken at worst. Your character is way too big and way too slow for the levels you’re supposed to travel through, and the game commits the sin of giving enemies invincibility frames. This is especially bad when bosses just walk into you while unhittable, and of course this is from the days when enemies could cheaply damage you by just touching.

Also there are way too many enemies after the first couple of levels that can latch on and stunlock you, forcing you to shake them off so they can do it again less than a second later. A lot of Two Crude Dudes difficulty comes from it being a shameless arcade port complete with all the nasty quarter-eating artificial difficulty you’d expect.

Funny enough Two Crude Dudes isn’t even that crude. For two guys who look a lot like proto Duke Nukems, I know nothing about their love of boobs or butts.

Two thumbs down.

Conclusion:

There are ten games on the Data East collection. I can only recommend half of them and even then those recommendations are shaky. For Bad Dudes and Burger Time you have better versions available for Evercade on the Data East arcade collection. There’s not really a difference between the Evercade and Vs in terms of reviews.

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