How I, a lifelong Double Dragon fan, managed to go without hearing of said game’s development until just now, is entirely beyond me.
In case you’re unfortunate enough to be unaware, Abobo is a boss character, and eventual standard enemy featured in Technos’ Double Dragon games.
Oddly enough, the creators of Abobo’s Big Adventure saw fit to design him with a pimp-ass mustache, a detail I personally always interpreted from the original sprite as a massive scowl.
Mustache, or scowl? The world may never know...
Oh well, given that Abobo’s race has never officially been declared, even by his original creators, details such as this are neither nitpick-able nor debatable.
According to Birdy from Street Fighter Alpha, Black people turn Caucasian when they're sick. Yeah, Japan's fuckin' stupid...
That is, unless you’re a canon/continuity obsessed douche rocket.
Coming in bald, mullet-ed, and even green variants, Abobo served as one of the most consistently challenging enemies in the series, despite serving as the very first boss in the franchise.
Doesn't take a genius to know which one's more powerful.
As detailed here, he could indeed be a son of a bitch.
That being said, despite having lost countless lives to the ‘Bo-ster over the years, the thought of him getting his own absurd 8-bit action game puts a smile on my face.
That said game includes not only an absurd amount of NES fanservice, as well as some amazing original sprite work and animations; only serves to sweeten the deal.
Fuck Skyrim, I’ll be waiting in line for Abobo’s Big Adventure…
Our parent’s didn’t really have any objection to the idea of us playing video games, but after I was born, they insisted that a majority of the games they bought us have “two-player simultaneous gameplay.”
I remember my brother and I liked to say that ’cause it made us feel smart.
I can attest that my experiences with both games are largely responsible for my lifelong passion for side-scrollers.
As a child I largely preferred playing Ninja Turtles over Double Dragon, not because I thought it was a better game, but because I didn’t suck at it.
… And because you got to be one of the Ninja Turtles in it.
C'mon now, are you telling me you'd pick the guy with the pompadour over a Ninja FUCKING Turtle?
You see, even though my brother kept most of the instruction booklets for our video games, I almost never took the time to read them.
As far I could tell though, my brother did, ’cause throughout all of my childhood he seemed to know every game we owned like the back of his hand.
Well, maybe not as well as Batman knows his, but still...
The differences in the complexity of the gameplay and controls between the two games was typically what made me lean towards Ninja Turtles over Double Dragon, that and the overall difficulty.
The depth of Ninja Turtles II’s gameplay consisted of standard attacks, jumping, jump kicking, and the so-key-to-the-game-you-would-be-crazy-to-play-the-game-without-it-SPECIAL ATTACK.
See diagram below:
Double Dragon on the other hand, utilized an intuitive (or counter-intuitive, depending on how you feel about it) control scheme that permanently mapped the two NES face buttons to specific directional attacks, B for left, A for right.
On top of that, both buttons had to be pressed SIMULTANEOUSLY (love that word) to perform a jump, during which one could perform a jump kick with the additional press of either face button, or a spin kick by pressing both buttons at the height of the jump.
You know that last thing, about the spin kick? Yeah, nobody told me about that.
Whenever I’d play Double Dragon with my brother, or any other game for that matter, I would find myself whining to him:
“How do I play!? What’s this button do!? How did you DOOOOOO thaaaaat…?”
Of course, being as he was the older brother, he wouldn’t tell me… or he’d smack me upside the head and not tell me.
On the off chance we were playing a head-to-head, two-player versus game though, he’d school me with whatever move I wanted to know how to do.
Pretty much every match between my brother and I.
Needless to say, in a two-player co-op game like Double Dragon, I was more of a liability than a help to my brother’s progress, especially if we were playing “Game B” AKA “Let’s-forget-about-saving-the-world-and-beat-the-shit-out-of-each-other, ON ACCIDENT” mode.
I could only occasionally pull off the spin kick through mindless button mashing, and almost never pulled off the SUPER UPPERCUT or instant kill SUPER KNEE, (press both face buttons while recovering from a jump landing) but even so, the game was good fun, provided I had my brother there to do the fighting for me.
I remember shrieking in terror whenever we ran across any of the Abobo’s with hair.
Doesn't take a genius to know which one's more powerful.
Yeah, getting cornered and thrown into a fucking hole by a big asshole named Abobo EVERY FUCKING DAY will do that to you.
EVERY. FUCKING. DAY.
I remember late in level 4 there was a sequence where you are trapped in a one way corridor with spikes on the ceiling.
Jumping is obviously a bad idea here, which is unfortunate, seeing as nearly every useful attack in the game can only be executed after standing up or landing a jump.
In most cases this resulted in massive amounts of fail, typically generated by the long-haired Abobo that decides to show up at the last minute.
That is, unless you were a smart person and stood in the one safe spot in the entire corridor and let your enemies walk face-first into your attacks.
Guess which one I was, I dare you.
All in all, my relationship with Double Dragon II as a child was kind of love-hate, very similar to my relationship to Star Fox.
I wasn’t very good at the game, and only rarely reached the later stages, but had fun with it and kept playing it anyway.
To be honest, I believe I beat Double Dragon II only once, with the help of my brother, of course.
The last stage consisted of standard NES cheapness, including instant death spike traps and “clones” of pretty much every boss you faced in the game up to this point
Even these twin ninja fucks.
At the end of the stage you face off with a pair of purplish-black “shadow clones” of the two player characters, Billy and Jimmy Lee.
They were a pain in the ass, but no more so than your average Abobo. Although I don’t think they could measure up to an Abobo with hair…
Defeating the “shadow clones” normally results in a premature ending to the game, but because my brother always insisted we play on SUPREME WARRIOR mode, AKA hard mode, we were treated to a showdown with the real final boss.
And let me tell you, that last battle was fucking epic.
The whole thing begins in some sort of underground tunnel, where the only person standing before you is a woman that’s supposed to be Billy’s lady friend, Marian.
Kind of a big deal seeing as she was riddled with bullets at the beginning of the game.
Machine Gun Willy used M-16 on wild Marian! It's not very effective...
As soon as you step forward to embrace/punch Marian, the screen goes black, the girl disappears, and out of nowhere some crazy, cape wearing, green-haired fuck appears on a platform in the background!
Look at 'im... Standin' up there... bein' all cool n'shit... Ass.
The background fades up from black to reveal some sort of galactic/astral landscape where the Troll Doll dude apparently has god-like powers, ’cause believe me, he fights like a cheap bitch.
His move set basically consists punches, gravity defying mule kicks, spin punches, and back flips, lots and lots of back flips…
Oh yeah, and most of the time he’s invisible.
Just like this. Except without the red bullshit.
You’d think that as a kid I’d be pretty annoyed by this pig fucker and his broken ass fighting wouldn’t you?
Well, that would be the case, if I hadn’t drained all of my continues during the fight with the “shadow-clones.”
Behold: The extent of my Double Dragon skills circa 1990.
That’s right, the only time I got to see the last boss, and I didn’t even survive to fight him.
But that’s okay, I didn’t mind, so long as I got to stick around and watch.
Knowing me, I probably annoyed the shit out of my him by talking too much and generally being a pain-in-the-ass little brother, but regardless, I was happy just to be sitting in front of the TV with my brother.
Now that's just about the most adorable thing I've ever seen.
My brother fought long and hard, and by that I mean he stood in place and constantly performed the spin kick attack, causing the boss, invisible or not, to repeatedly walk into his attacks.
Okay maybe “epic” wasn’t the best word to describe the final battle, but as a kid, when your older brother is seconds away from beating the game, a game you’ve never seen the ending to; and the music suddenly changes to this*:
Yeah, you get pretty excited.
Ultimately it was these kind of moments that kept me coming back to Double Dragon, as well as most co-op in general.
Back then, video games were not something I devoted any time to outside of playing alongside my brother or my friends.
Somewhere down the road though, I think my attitude towards gaming changed from viewing it as a privilege, a precious experience granted to me by my friends and family, to that of disposable, time killing entertainment.
Don’t get me wrong, I still enjoy video games, just on a more superficial level.
However, I used to look forward to playing games.
Nowadays I am only able to, and only do play games when I have some sort of gap to fill in my schedule.
I’m never expecting to, or even really want to be playing games, I just kind of fall back on it when I don’t have enough time to watch a movie, or it’s too cold to go for a walk.
Every now and again though, I’ll have a friend over and we’ll sit down in front of the TV for a quick game.
We don’t play all day like we used to, but it’s still every bit as fun as it was when I was a kid.
Games are fun, but they’re always even better with a friend.
Or a brother.
*Sidenote:Â This music track is called “Roar of the Double Dragons” and it is used, with good reason, as the final battle theme in most Double Dragon games.
Azn Badger's Blog 