"Are you a bad enough dude to... wait, wrong game.."

Ah, Dudes with Attitudes... The classic game that was one of the many gems found on the Maxivision 15-in-1 cart Volume 1. Well, maybe it wasn't classic. Or a gem. Or very good. But, it was still a game. If you've ever played any of those American Video Entertainment games (found in bulk on the Maxi 15) you'd know they have a penchant for the weird games. This fits right in. You're a face, bouncing around the screen trying to avoid such dangerous hazards like water, gum, and snakes, while trying to clear out all the gems in the stage. There are ways to avoid getting killed by the gum and other equally perilous obstacles, though. I'll get to that later.

There are two main modes to the game; there's a 1/2 player mode where you go through the stages and eventually win, and there's an edit mode where you can create your own stages for you or your friends to play. The edit mode isn't really too special though. I mean, you can use anything in the game to set up your stage, but you can only save four and they erase upon turning off the system. Anyway, time for a closer look at the specifics.

Story - 2/10 (Excerpt taken from the instruction manual)
These Dudes are on the move: Dude, Happy, Patch, Bozo and lets not forget Babe and Foxy. They are somewhere in the Caribbean exploring lush lost islands and finding a King's ransom in lost treasure. Bounce with them through a radical adventure. If you hang around long enough you'll meet slithering SERPENT SENTRIES and the dreaded GUMSPLATS. (End excerpt)

NO! NO! Not the GUMSPLATS! Anything but that! I'll never look at Juicyfruit the same way again. I'm scarred for life.

Anyway... the manual goes on to describe the characters, how Patch is the oldest at 18, and Bozo is dumb, etc. The only differences are aesthetic. But yeah, overall the story is pretty bland and the characters really have no special qualities, so it only gets a 2 for story.

Graphics - 5/10
It's kinda colorful, but colors don't really do much unless there are some nice backgrounds or sprites to fully utilize them. There's nothing overly bad about them, they're just not that special. I don't really have much to say about them.

Sounds/Music - 0/10
This is where the game really took a turn for the worse... It really sounds like a bunch of first graders are randomly pounding on xylophones or something. There's no in-stage music, but there's a little death jingle, which is actually pretty cool. Other than that, mute it.

Gameplay - 4/10, Challenge - 2/10
The gameplay consists of you bouncing around collecting gems. There are gems of different colors, and you must turn into that corresponding color before you can collect the gem. There are paint buckets throughout the stage that let you change colors. An added bonus is that if you're the same color as one of the enemies (like the dreaded GUMSPLATS) you can eat them. Well, you just make them disappear, but the manual does mention eating GUMSPLATS. Some enemies, like, uh... water, will kill you no matter what color you are. You can get a boat though, so that you can safely traverse the evil H2O.

While you're bouncing around, you may uncover hidden things, invisible walls, moving blocks, things buried in sand, etc. There's even BOOZE that reverses your controls. Under normal circumstances, the direction that you bounce is predetermined. Once the stage starts, you're automatically moving either left/right or up/down. You continuously move and bounce in those directions. Using the D-pad, you can move around, but only a certain way. For example, if you're bouncing up and down, you can move him left and right, and vice versa. If you are bouncing up and down, and you hit up or down, the game shoots an agonizingly annoying sound at you.

You get infinite tries at a stage, and frequent failures will prompt the game to start throwing hints at you to try and help you beat it. There are 32 stages, which you can really breeze through. Honestly, I think you can beat the game in shorter time than I wrote this review. Only a couple of them present much of a challenge, like Goal no Gaol and Impasse, but for the most part it's pretty mild.

Overall - 4/10
It's really not that horrible of a game. It's something different at least. I just wish they would've made Dudes with Attitudes 2, like the manual said they were going to do... If you like puzzle type games, and you can find this somewhere cheap, then get it. I'm sure some of you out there will enjoy it more than I did.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 02/03/05