This is a cracked version of the original DOS game, which in and of itself is generally fine and is standard practice, even among GOG's "own" DOS releases. However, this particular version uses a crack from a known abandonware release that also features a trainer (cheat) by default that cannot be disabled, so there is absolutely no way to lose the game as the "strokes left" counter does not count down. I genuinely miss the days of GOG's quality control. Piko Interactive's DOSBox releases often have inexcusable quality control oversights, even if quality control is in play.
To the game itself: Bad Dudes (otherwise known variously as Bad Dudes vs. Dragon Ninja or simply Dragon Ninja, depending on where and which platform you played it on) is a competent platform beat-em-up that was originally released to arcades in 1988. It was later ported to various platforms, but what you're getting here is the US arcade release. It's moderately fun, and a prime example of 80s excess: ninjas, muscle men, and cans of coke as power-ups. This release is simply a lazy emulated release of the original game, which wouldn't be too bad in its own right if it didn't manage to botch something so simple. The game is only playable with an overblown CRT filter featuring scanlines of an intensity that would never have been witnessed on a functioning arcade machine in the 1980s, or with a pig-ugly bilinear filter that smears the image. There is no option to play it with 1:1 pixel scaling or without the filter. There are also no dipswitch option settings for difficulty, no custom challenges, and the game can't even manage to save your hígh score. The price is rather extreme for what you're getting here: at €5.69, I'd have at least expected the NES version to have been included as an extra, and possibly also the various other home conversions as curiosities.
Baldur's Gate is considered a classic of the genre, and having played it for 20 hours over a decade after it came out, it is tremendously difficult to see why the game received this accolade. While the dialogue itself is top notch, the underlying story, while relatively well-written, it is still extremely clichéd and predictable. The environments themselves are extremely varied and detailed, but the 8-bit-esque nature of them makes them look horribly ugly these days. They don't have the technical appeal of a modern game, nor do they have the artistic flair of pixel art. The same applies to the characters, who look like they came out of a rushed 1990s FMV intro (although, somewhat ironically, the FMV intro for BG is top quality). One of the game's two biggest failings, however, are its extreme dependence on grinding - spending hours scouring the area for lower level characters to kill and level up your team is an extremely repetitive and ultimately frustrating exercise, one that has caused me repeatedly over the years to abandon the game out of sheer boredom. The other major flaw is the game's rather heavy reliance on trial and error. A perfect example of this is the way the game tries to guide you at the start to two new characters for your team, but makes it impossible to enter the area they are in without the assistance of more experienced characters. Another classic example is a character that is placed right in front of you to join early on in the game, requiring you to perform a quest, but does not give you the opportunity to level up in the way that you need for this quest, instead causing the character to break off from your team and attack you. Now to me, this is just bad design. I enjoy games that provide with a challenge, but the way BG provides that "challenge" by forcing the player to save every five minutes and test out every opportunity, punishing the player with more or less certain death for choosing the wrong one, becomes very dull, very quickly. There is very little room for strategy, and the game effectively becomes nothing more than an interactive movie, whereby you are left cautiously probing every alternative until you pick the right one. I've since been playing for around 20 hours and only have level 3 characters - most of this time has been spent saving, loading, saving, loading, and there is absolutely no feeling of achievement or excitement for having managed anything, because you feel like you have cheated your way through it. Much better examples of the genre are Arcanum and BG2, which tend to provide a much more balanced experience.
