Joe & Mac

Joe & Mac, NES

After taking baby steps back through gaming history, its time to jump in head first and go back to the Stone Age.  

Well, I guess the NES would technically be more like the Bronze Age or something like that.  Of course, it did have its share of games based on cave men, including the subject of our post today.

It should be noted that this is a port of an arcade game.  That was pretty common at the time and even the best ports fail to live up to the arcade experience.  I will only be discussing the NES game because, well, that’s the version I played.  

I should also note this is a Data East game. The now defunct gaming company made some pretty good arcade games in the 80s and 90s, but its console offerings were usually pretty terrible.  We are talking like LJN level.  I can think of at least one that I plan on reviewing at some point.  Anyway, this meant my expectations were low going in.  

I feel like Joe & Mac was pretty popular when I was a kid, but after the SNES era, the IP fell victim to a giant gaming meteor.  I remember getting the game as a kid for my birthday or Christmas or something, losing interest quickly and forgetting about it until my son found it all these years later and insisted I fire it up (because little boys loved dinosaurs in the 90s and they love them in the 10’s too).

Joe & Mac stars, well, Joe and Mac, two cave men who are out to rescue the abducted women of their village.  Along the way, they must face other cave men, dinosaurs and well, that’s pretty much it.  Not a whole lot of plot or atmosphere to go on, but that’s to be expected for the time.  Some of the stages have pretty cool scrolling effects with the background, but others are just dull and gray.  The dinosaurs with the shifty eyes in the second stage and the plesiosaur boss at the end of the fourth look great and Its a shame more detail wasn’t put into other parts of the game.

Instead of all that, we get to talk about hit detection, jumping controls and damage ratios...all of which are terrible in this game.  The Jumping is loose and you don’t really have too much control once you leave your feet.  There is a regular jump and a super jump, but because of enemy positioning, the regular jump is essentially useless.  The hit detection is very biased, your hit box is huge and just going near enemies will result in a hit.  And good luck actually killing anything, because it seems like every enemy takes at least 3 hits and all of the weapons fire slowly.  

There is little to no enemy variety, with running caveman, mini t-Rex, pterodactyl and ghost pterodactyl making up the entire roll call.  The game even recycles bosses, and there are only five (short) levels with two stages each.  Fighting enemies makes little sense and its easier to just avoid them.  The only weapon that seems to do any more damage than normal is the wheel, and that sucks because it rolls on the ground and most of the enemies are in the air.  The bosses at least provide some challenge though, which is nice.

I think the biggest issue is that there is no rhyme or reason to how the enemies behave.  The pterodactyls have a few distinct patterns, but you can’t really tell which they are going to go into beforehand, you have to react to it.  A game based on reflexs as opposed to pattern recognition would be fine if the enemies didn’t take forever to die, but at three plus hits, it makes combat massively unfair.  Even when it comes to the bosses, the patterns are either too easy or too hard to recognize.  The aforementioned plesiosaur is the only one that hits the mark.

All in all, the game is too unbalanced, too rushed and too short to really have been worth a play in 1993, let alone today.  It isn’t abysmal, but there just isn’t anything here to make it worthwhile, especially as it clocked in at under an hour to complete.  Its hard to imagine anyone ever payed $50 for stuff like this.  All said and done, not an absolute stinker to avoid, but really nothing of value here.

4/10

Play this if:

You absolutely must play every Data East game ever

You really just don’t have any other way to kill 45 to an hour

You knew what a plesiosaur was without having to look it up

Avoid if:

You would rather spend your time on an actually good game

You don’t want ghost pterodactyls to haunt your dreams