Although AVE often pulled into the cheapo Hong Kong game company bin to fish out some quick releases, it's also a company known for a couple of fun little puzzle games like Dudes With Attitude. It's a fact that these nonlicensed third party producers had to reverse-engineer the NES themselves to figure out how it works, leading to these sorts of games that are nothing at all fancy code-wise but enough fun to keep you entertained and not feeling all that ripped off after all.

I'm sure Dudes With Attitude has a goofy-yet-dumb storyline in the manual, but I will refrain from opening said manual (because I don't have one) and simply tell you how the game works: You have a happy face which bounces back and forth, left and right on the screen; you can control its upward and downward movement but if you try to move it horizontally the game makes this "BONK BUUNK BONK BUUNK" sound until you stop. The object is to clear the screen of "jewels" - however, in order to remove a jewel from the screen, your happy face has to be the same color as the jewel. You can change colors with the help of little color-spots on the screen. There's also things like evil flowery enemies that hurt you if you bonk into them when not the same color as them, extra bonuses, hidden color-changers you need to find to complete this or that level, and so on.

The game starts out very easy, but soon pitfalls into the near-impossible (which is ok since you've got a password system). Some of the levels are very cutely designed, with you having to navigate a near-maze of jewels, and then tearing down that same maze at the end when you turn the same color as the walls. There's also a lot of very bincy-bouncy music (I suppose the Crick brothers weren't able to figure out how to do Nintendo bass). Still, it's a lot of fun and you'll probably end up seeing it to the end if you're not careful.

Secret treasure? No, just the map screen

Boink, boink, boink, boink...

Pix: |tsr

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