As a brief reprieve from the normal articles I shoot out, I figured I’d take a moment and talk to you all about something that bugs every gamer – Bad Endings.

Now I don’t mean bad endings as in “You didn’t complete a mission objective – bad end” sorta bad endings, but ones that are just highly disappointing and brief or offer little closure.

This may become a weekly thing, I’m not too sure, but today we cover four from the days of my childhood.

#4 – Bad Dudes :

Internet memes aside, really what the hell, a solid beat’em up on the NES where President Ronnie takes the Bad Dudes out for Hamburger after they beat up a legion of ninjas who kidnapped him. I mean really think about that. That’s it? I’d feel kinda pissed off if I was them. Also, what the hell did the ninjas kidnap the president for? Was this part of a larger global plot? What were their demands? Also – why the hell weren’t these guys part of the President’s elite personal security to begin with if they’re such Bad Dudes?

Screw you man, saving your ass is only worth a Burger?

#3 – Kid niki: Radical Ninja :

Marginally ahead of Bad Dudes is Kid Niki, another game published by Data east (who apparently have a fetish for using terms like BAD and RADICAL and AWESOME in their game titles.) In kid Niki it’s a little platformer a la Mystical Ninja. If you haven’t played it, don’t It’s relatively bad, the controls are clunky and the ending is down right horrible. After smacking around a boss who is not hard as much as he is time consuming (wait for him to finish attacks that make him untouchable, hit him, get your sword back, repeat) he falls off the castle roof and you jump down to pose on top of his fallen body. You are then praised by a quick narrative about your AWESOME NINJA SKILLS and told that you are one RAD DUDE then a giant flying THE END wooshes onto the screen.

Dear god it’s an attack of the Michael Jacksons!

WOAH hold the hell on there a second, I’m the RADDEST NINJA WITH AWESOME SKILLS of all time, and I’m still KID?? Seriously? How degrading! Why not “Mystical Ninja Niki” or “Supreme Master Niki” Sorry that this kid just whooped the hell out of a million ninjas attacking our castle while nobody else could and defeated a supreme mystical martial arts master – maybe I should go back to playing with my toys.                               Ingrates

#2 – Adventure of Lolo :

BEFORE YOU SEND ME HATE MAIL – I am by no means saying this is a bad game. In fact it’s probably in my top 100 favorite games of all time. Man those puzzles were freakin hard and the game was charming in all it’s various features. The little monsters creeped me out, the puzzles were challenging but made sense, and once you got a feel for it all it was really freakin fun. But seriously – he just kicks in the door and blasts his lady’s keeper with a bubble and that’s all it took? I mean seriously. I expected some sort of epic confrontation, instead – PEW PEW yay the day is saved. I mean for Pete’s sake the random baddies were harder than that.

I mean really, the look of despair in his eyes does not belay how lame that bad guy is.

And # 1 – Legacy of the Wizard :

Like seriously, what an epic game. Tons of items to get that change your stats, different characters/classes to chose from, a HUGE sprawling game world that you can get literally lost in for hours without remember how the hell to get back to your house to save. One of the earliest password/save systems that I can think of so you didn’t have to waste hours of work. What a sweet game.

Then you kill the dragon, teleport back to the surface, meet up with the family and wave goodbye.

Thats it.

I am glad to see they are grateful for us controlling their pathetic lives. God knows what they’d do without us.

I’m sorry, why did we just slay a dragon? What now? Apparently that dragon’s been hanging out there for ages, are all the monsters gonna disappear now? Will the entire under-city that was the maze crumble and the world fall apart? Seriously, what now?

Also, what’s with that huge ass castle off to the left of the entrance to the maze? Who lives there? why are there not knights helping you kick monster ass and take names? SERIOUSLY LETS GO EXPLORE THAT CASTLE OR SOMETHING. No, lets just wave goodbye. Solid.

Well that’s about it for this edition of Highly Disappointing Endings – I suppose next time I’ll move to a different system, maybe that can be the theme. Each week I’ll review the bad endings of a particular console.

What about you guys, do you feel the same way I do about these? Got a particular NES game that you thought had a horrible ending that I should have talked about instead? Lemmie know.

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