Finally, if you want to be totally brodacious, please consider contributing to Sprites and Dice's Patreon. What's your favorite god-awful game? Hit us up in the comments section or follow me on Twitter and let us know what game makes you simultaneously love and hate everything about it. Just in time for their 25 year anniversary, the original beat em up bros Billy and Jimmy Lee are back to save their shared love interest, Marian, this time from the evil Skullmageddon. Have fun with this time-capsule of the game! Be happy, it'll remind you how far we've come since then. This isn't going to win any awards, but it doesn't have to: it's just a good way to spend a few minutes to liven up your day, just like the old arcade games used to. It's silly, cringe-inducing, cheesy enough to make a fondue pot jealous, and one of my favorite games ever. Double Dragon Neon has become my go-to game when I have a friend over and need to kill a little time. Or spending again, and again, with different people and on various difficulties. The entire game is a bit over an hour long, and it's an hour that I did not regret spending. Their one-liners include such gems as "Hurry up, Buttlord!" and, upon crash-landing back on Earth after a space level, "Yeah, man! Terra-firmative!"īut, if you think that Billy and Jimmy have top-notch writing, just wait until you meet their nemesis: The game feels authentic, while also a bit more playable than just going back to the first game.Īssuming that you are playing in bro-op mode (and if you aren't then you're not playing it right), the Lees spice up the adventure with near-constant witty banter. The cassettes do help though, letting you change up things to get a new special attack, or change around the statistics of your characters enough to give you some control over your progress in the game that wasn't there in the original. Of course, that means that some enemies are going to have unblockable attacks that are frustrating as hell to deal with, but again, this game isn't so much trying to re-invent the genre, as just relive an experience. Combat is fun and fast, with many players finding what works for them and sticking with it. This game is very much an ode to the 80's and 90's beat-em-up arcade games, and that's not always a bad thing.
The Lees beat down legions of identical bad guys - spiced up with the occasional android or gigantic tank, of course - heal themselves using soda and high-fives, and collect cassette tapes to power up their abilities. What follows is a delightfully bad and hilariously self-aware jaunt through neon-lit streets, a rocket-powered space dojo, an experimental genetic laboratory, and a haunted graveyard, to name a few.