Joe & Mac (Super NES, 1991)

 

"Joe and Mac"? Is this a Highlander game? ....no, but Highlander is returning next week. Meanwhile, this terrible box art hides one of the more classic SNES action games. It's a bit of a knockoff of the Adventure Island series, with the difficulty turned way way way down, and it's a lot of fun to play. As a kid, this was one of those "Nintendo Power games" that I was intriged by thanks to that magazine and wanted to check out on a rental or something. Never got around to it because there were just too many other things to try; our cup really did runneth over in the 90's.

In any case, this is actually my first time playing this series (for more than a 5 minute tryout). This game had an NES predecessor that was basically the same game but half as long, and it had an arcade version, Genesis version, spinoffs, etc. However, the games everyone knows and remembers from this series are the two* SNES ones.

The coolest thing about this Super Adventure Island clone is that unlike that game, you can two-player this one. Which is particularly easy on Switch, and probably a fun time. Just be ready for an already-easy game to be even easier.

That is, unless you go with "2P Super Game", which is the same thing except your characters can damage each other with their attacks. I don't know, that doesn't seem very super. Maybe the game works as a competitive sprint? I don't know.

Here's the world map, which vaguely takes after Super Mario Bros 3. It's deceptive though and makes it look like there are more levels than there are. Red circles are levels, white circles are checkpoints (meaning you restart at the last one you stepped on if you game over, not that it really matters because levels stay completed, so the white spots are actually pointless), and blue circles are one-time bonus rooms where you might get a 1-Up or two (also kinda pointless).

My cynical side tells me that the white and blue circles are really only here to make the game world seem bigger, both while playing and also while looking at screenshots of the game in magazines/ads.

The second half of the world map, which takes us into treacherous volcanic territory. So this is one of the many, many games out there where Early Man co-existed with dinosaurs (and, apparently, the Cretaceous Period, i.e. 65,000,000 years ago, when everything was all volcanic). Chrono Trigger got everyone all kinds of confused.

BTW, this is the entire world map for the whole game. I thought this was just World 1! Looks like there are 11 levels altogether and that's it for the game. No wonder they wanted to make it look bigger.

Eggs are your source of power-ups, and cracking one open gives you either a weapon or a 1-Up. Right at the beginning there's an egg out of reach, just to taunt the player I guess.

Returning here with a weapon that can reach it, all it had was a Boomerang, so nothing important. Why did they even put it here?

Alright, it might seem like I'm being hard on this game, but I actually like it so far.

Speaking of the weapons, this game has four good ones, and you switch between them with Select. You always have the default club, which strikes (at a short range) no matter what even if you've got zero weapons. Once you find a weapon, you keep it until you run out of lives. The four weapons are:

Bone: Seen above, throws bone axes that fly in an arc. Literally the main weapon from Super Adventure Island.

Boomerang: Fires boomerangs that fly a much longer distance than any other weapons, while doing the least damage out of all of them. Literally the other main weapon from Super Adventure Island.

Fireball: Shoots a fireball that does way more damage than the above two. Has a short range, though, and you can only fire one at a time rather than spam 'em like the others. Probably the most effective weapon against most of the bosses.

Stone Wheel: The rarest weapon drop BY FAR and it can take a bunch of levels before you even get it. Fires a stone wheel that seems to do as much, or almost as much, damage as the Fireball, you can have two onscreen at a time, and it travels over surfaces (so over walls and whatnot) like Snake Man's weapon from Mega Man 3.

Stone Wheel seems to be generally agreed upon to be the best weapon by Joe and Mac experts and aficionados in smoke-filled discussion rooms.

As for what to use all these weapons on, your main adversaries are Neanderthals. They're everywhere and they're COMEDY GOLD.

Have to watch out when they attack in packs, because they take a few hits to down. Sometimes they'll just fall in pits and save you the trouble.

Neanderthal continues to be sold short in mainstream media. When will Neanderthal get their due as actually being highly intelligent, not to mention having killer eyebrow ridges? Probably not any time soon, unfortunately.

The single most recognizable shot from Joe and Mac is this giant sleepying tyrannosaur at the end of level 1. This looked pretty damn cool in 1991.

Of course, it wakes up and serves as the first boss. It's a damn fun fight, consisting of...

...lots of jumping and shooting!

I'm starting to notice that this game is super easy. Like Kirby's Dream Land easy. Which isn't a bad thing, maybe they were going for the huge "people who ran headfirst into the brick wall of Adventure Island on the NES and wanted a similar game they could actually progress in" market.

In any case, add this to KDL and Little Mermaid on that first tier of "first games for your kid to beat" if you want to give them some layup wins. (Rest of the "1000 games I've beaten list" coming soon...probably)

Defeat a boss and you rescue a cavegirl. They're fetching...and like two feet taller than Joe (or is this Mac? IDK)

Here's the fireball weapon in action, as I traverse the 90's action game standby, the waterfall level.

Piranha Plants! Data East, the makers of this game, weren't shy about borrowing stuff.

The next boss is a giant piranha plant, another giant boss sprite that looked great in screenshots. I toss boomerangs from a safe distance, though it works just as well to get in close and hammer away with fireballs. Still haven't lost a life.

The next rescued cavegirl is a mouth-watering redhead. Wait a minute, these bosses aren't like, holding the cavegirls hostage or anything. Hell, the T-Rex was even asleep! What's stopping the women from just, like, getting up and leaving?

Level 3 is a vertical tree ascent... just like level 3 of Super Adventure Island. How did these guys not get sued?

Well, the weird thing is, the games were in development at the same time, and Super Adventure Island actually came out slightly AFTER this one, so level 3 is just a coincidence. The weapons having so much in common with Adventure Island for the NES probably isn't a coincidence though.

Third boss is a giant pterodactyl. The bosses look really cool, are well-animated, and fun to fight. They're they main attraction of this game, and I remember them being the thing I found most interesting in the Nintendo Power coverage. If anything, the levels are just short interludes between the boss fights, and the boss fights are the main content of this game.

The next part has flying fish, which hand me my first death of the game. It'd help if you got healed between levels (the fact that you don't is kinda stunning). Die and you turn into this ghost form and can float around invulnerable for a few seconds before you pop back into existence. Which means you don't have to start a level over unless you somehow run out of lives, making an easy game even easier. Which is fine by me, I'm just cruising through it.

Bonus areas often have these keys, which can be used to unlock the gates on the overworld. Usually these block off checkpoints... which have no purpose so lol

Fourth boss: Sharks. Lots of sharks. They fly in one wave after another, and each wave takes off one tick of the boss life meter at the top. It's like playing whack-a-mole, and one of the few actual slightly-tough fights in the game due to there being three of them on screen at any given moment.

In other words, this fight is the Shadows of Yharnam of Joe and Mac.

I...I think the implication is that Joe here is "putting a Lannister" in all these fine young women. Dear God. He's going to have more descendants than Genghis Khan!

Speaking of eggs, another bonus round has our hero basically picking one and getting whatever's inside. Like Super Mario Bros 3. The goal here is probably to get the 1-Up, since the rest just contain weapons you already have.

Next boss, giant water dinosaur! And I'm realizing now that pretty much all of the large bosses are just a head on a bunch of balls. It's a shame because the first two bosses weren't like that and they're easily the two best-looking bosses in the game.

Next level is an ice cave with lots of spikes. Spikes aren't instant-death and do as much damage as any other foe.

We get another good boss model with this wooly mammoth. This fight is infamous because the mammoth gets BRUTALLY MAIMED as the fight goes on. It's really out of place in a kidz game. I take back having this be one of your kid's first games. They'll probably cry after this fight if they like mammoths. I'm not even gonna show it.

Another short level, another boss, and we're in palette swap territory now.

Next, Joe motorboats a purple-haired cavegirl. Where are they finding hair dye in 65,000,000 BC?

T-Rex rematch, but it's a head-on-balls rather than an actual T-Rex sprite like the first one. This is like the low-budget T-Rex.

Is that Ayla? Now we can add Joe to the long list of dudes that Ayla helped go through puberty.

The next boss is basically Armored Armadillo and rolls up in a ball to bounce around the screen. This and the last couple bosses are actually slightly tough fights, this one mostly because you just don't have much time to strike between invincible phases.

Second to last stage is... a dinosaur graveyard? Is that a Crocomire skull on the right? So this is where he ended up after Super Metroid.

A skeletal dragon is the next fight, and they got creative with this one.

The main thing to watch out for is the way the skeleton falls apart randomly and all the pieces crash to the ground, which often isn't even avoidable.

The very last level (11) consists of lots of platform jumping. Bear in mind that I have yet to actually run out of lives once during this entire run. They might as well have just had the game be 12 levels, because level 11 is a two-parter. Which makes it the only difficult thing in the entire duration of this game, as you need to get through basically two levels on one set of lives, and they're also the toughest two levels.

As for the second half... our hero climbs into a dinosaur's gullet, and the very last area is in here. ...well, this is pretty gross.

Even weirder is that the place is full of cavemen running around.

Our hero reaches some sort of giant ballsack, and it's guarded by the final boss: Red Arremer from Ghosts n' Goblins??

I don't know why there's a giant ballsack in the room, or what purpose it serves.

The demon is defeated, and another cavegirl is saved. That's it for this g-

-nope, the cavegirl was just the demon in disguise, and he's back for round two. Never trust chix with green hair. His second form is much more aggressive, but I continue dodging his ring attacks and throwing stone wheels up into the air for a while longer, and eventually he keels over.

Basically, I climbed inside of a dinosaur so that I could fight Satan in his gut. I...don't really know what to say. Was Satan in the gut of all the boss dinosaurs and that's why they were all so mad? Is this a statement on how food is the devil? Or gluttony? I guess that was true before money became the root of all evil. This is a bit much for a Joe and Mac writeup, so I'm outta here.

The final cavegirl is rescued! Now she can fight it out with the other ten cavegirls over Joe's seed.

...not to worry! He has enough for all eleven of them!

Final thoughts on this game? It's not bad at all. Probably a lot of fun with two players. Something someone can play with their kid. Mostly just liked how colorful it was, and in 1991 this sheer volume of colors was pretty new on a Nintendo system.

* - So while I'm only playing the two games that everyone remembers, there were actually a trilogy of Joe and Mac games on the SNES. What happened to the third? Well, it turns out that Joe and Mac 2: Lost in the Tropics..... WAS the third, and there was another game in-between. Congo's Caper, for the SNES, which I've never even heard of or seen mentioned anywhere, was called Joe and Mac 2 in Japan. Meanwhile Joe and Mac 3 became Joe and Mac 2 over here. Yeah. Congo's Caper is probably the least worth playing of the three and changes up the formula a bit too much. I've tried it and I seriously had no idea it was even supposed to be the same series.