7. Dudes With Attitude
Instructions
Instructions
(pg 2-3)
Instructions
(pg 4)
Dudes With Attitude (which later became Trolls on Treasure Islands
with the addition of naked Ross Troll dolls) is about as technologically
advanced as early Atari 2600 software. The best part of the game is quite
actually reading the manual. "Somewhere in
the Caribbean, exploring lush lost islands and finding a king's ransom
in treasure. Many tantalizing but deadly creatures roam these forgotten
islands. But if you hang around long enough, you'll find emeralds, sapphires,
and gold." The
manual tries to intellectualize this numbingly simple game by insisting
each color in the game represents an emotion that the "dude"
adapts to psychologically for deciphering portions of the levels' mazes.
To me, however, the game involves nothing more than a moving head banging
up against multi-colored blocks to collect hearts, jewels, and coins.
I would suppose that it is a more celebral experience than banging your
own head against a brick building, but the judge is still out on that
assumption and so you'll understand I cannot in good faith allow yourself
to jump to that sort of conclusion just yet.
These are the promised "lush lost islands." Time to fire the travel agent, dudes.
For reasons untold to you, the characters you choose from are all dismembered rolling heads. Now, once again, no offense to my Atari reader fans, but if this were an Atari video game that had to compensate on sprite graphics to achieve a main gameplay element, the bouncing heads I would be able to understand. But in 1990? On the NES? Michael Crick, with all the due respect you deserve as churning out a product as a one-man game programmer, your dudes are gumballs!
And how much attitude has a gumball? How would one make such characters personable? By naming and placing teeny stereotype labels on the disfigured bowling balls, apparently.
Patch, the leader of the posse, is cool, sly, and sometimes sinister. Sinister, because of the eye patch, no doubt. Crick, you prick!
Dude is way cool. Whatever he touches seems to slide into place like clockwork. Whatever he touches--clockwork, okay.
Although Babe is a bit of an airhead, Foxy has an IQ higher that a coconut tree. Yes, that a coconut tree. I think the author of the manual has a lower IQ than Foxy and Babe. Pretending the setence was written correctly, the remark would still fail.
Happy is smart, energetic, and prankster. Energetic as much as a chopped off head not flying off a flight of stairs can possibly be.
Bozo is not too bright, but his unbelievable good luck more than makes up for his stupidity. That is so like how it is in real life. The one with damage to the brain has all the good luck.
Like Tiles of Fate, Dudes includes the option to create your own levels to play. Sadly missing is six large jars of water to keep the heads from wrinkling up from heat and exhaustion. Poor Bozo.
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