Side Scrolling Sadism from Baraduke to your arcade!

Pac-Land – Dragon Buster – Metro-Cross – Baraduke – Sky Kid

Baraduke - 1985 - Personal high score: 14650

Do I like Baraduke? Um, errr, hmm. It’s tricky to say as I think the core gameplay is quite excellent and has a ton of potential, yet it has a lot of typical of this era of arcade games cruelty designed to squeeze more coins out of players that I feel lets it down a lot as a complete package. Playing as Kissy, your objective is to fly through the game’s 48 levels with your jetpack, rescue as many of these cute Cacodemon-esque aliens called Paccets as possible while shooting your way through hordes of Octys, blue aliens that continuously spawn more enemies to fight you and fill up the screen. The jetpack has unlimited fuel and gives you an excellent level of mobility for dodging fire with, as long as you don’t let yourself get backed into a corner. Considering your surroundings and the level design is extremely important, the jetpack allows you to approach plenty of skirmishes from multiple different angles and circle around projectiles and enemies provided that you have the space to do so. The amount of projectiles on screen at once often borders on bullet hell at times, and much like a bullet hell, managing to maneuver through it all and control the stream of attacks fired at you with precise and subtle movements. Your gun also has a significant recoil to it, knocking you back with each fire, something else that also needs to be considered. The recoil feels a bit janky and jittery but I don’t dislike it at all, it adds an extra layer of things to think about and can sometimes even help by having you inch back while firing at an enemy moving towards you, helping you get an extra few shots in by backpedaling with the recoil of your gun. It’s a satisfying, fun, intense and very enjoyable core.

My main issues come with the unforgiving difficulty being paired with some relentlessly cruel randomisation. Rescuing Paccets increases your max health, whenever you rescue a Paccet they get added to one of the spaces on a roulette wheel that you spin at the end of every level. If the roulette lands on a Paccet space, your max HP increases by one bar. This in itself would be acceptable, just keep collecting Paccets until you get your health upgrade you’ve been working for, only the roulette wheel also has Octys on it which lower your max HP permanently if the roulette wheel lands on it. To make things even crueler, the amount of Octys on the wheel increases as your max HP gets higher, making it harder and harder to maintain those shields you worked very hard to get through rescuing Paccets. It feels bad having to lose all of that entirely down to a dice roll, especially as your max health already decreases by one bar whenever you lose a life and respawn. Then there’s also the fact that Paccets themselves are a random drop from Octys, which are a finite enemy. There’s no guarantee that any of the Octys in a level will even have Paccets, and on top of that, sometimes they even drop enemy spawns upon death instead of Paccets, potentially resulting in more life lost. How much health you get at any time is almost entirely down to the whims of the RNG. My max health is decreased far more often by the roulette wheel than by dying in actual gameplay, and then my lowered max HP gives me less of a chance against even more intense hordes and less of a chance of being able to safely rescue enough Paccets to get it back. If they simply got rid of the roulette wheel minigame altogether and just made it so your HP increases when you collect three or so Paccets, I have no doubt that the game would feel miles more fair, but as it is it feels like you simply have to just get good enough to beat every stage with a maximum of 2 hit points since there’s no guaranteeing you’ll be granted any more. To add to the cruelty, Kissy also has no invincibility frames upon taking damage. If you have two HP and get hit by two projectiles at once, that’s an instant death, so there’s a chance you won’t even get two hits before death

I can’t lie when I say I do find the game fairly compelling and it keeps pulling me back. Thankfully there is a continue option, allowing you to carry on from the last floor, although even this is not accessible unless the board’s dip switches are set to allow it. I’d honestly like to see a Baraduke remake or revival, I’d be down for something like this that brings in more of a collect-a-thon element with the Paccets and permanent stat upgrades in a semi RPG style. Baraduke as it is is definitely fun, but there’s always a sense that the game is pulling you back from having too much fun with the RNG elements being so out for your blood. Believe me, this game would already be brutal even without the RNG.