Joe & Mac 2: Lost in the Tropics (Super NES, 1994)

There are many Joe & Mac ports for a variety of systems, but here we've got the only one worth playing (besides the first on SNES, of course). This is the main one I wanted as a kid, and is a bit more advanced/complicated than the first one (while being just as short). It's also really difficult, which is weird considering how easy the first one was.

Join me for the final installment of the hotly-demanded Joe & Mac "trilogy", starring Joe Dawson and Duncan Macleod (Highlander: Returning Soon!)

Considering this is the one I wanted, now that I've played both, I vastly prefer the first over this. It's still better than Congo's Caper. Why did you subject the world to Congo's Caper, TODD?? (Elder Scrolls: Returning Soon!)

Outside of North America, this game was called Joe & Mac 3. You know the drill by now. Yeah, it's weird. I don't know whether to consider it the 2nd or 3rd game in my own canon, because Congo's Caper was so...not like the other two. I'm just going to go by the North American numbering and leave Congo's Caper off in its own universe.

The colorful, kid-friendly title screen gives us little indication of the Battletoadsian nightmare that is about to unfold (no, seriously, this game is hard).

The villain is this Blanka-like nefarious caveman who sneaks around like Repo Man.

He steals the village's most precious things and disappears into the night.

So what did he steal? All of our highly-fertile cave-women? All of our food? Either of those things would be devastating to the village and pretty much spell the end of our culture.

...no, he stole the village chief's hat. Who gives a f****?

With that terrible premise in mind, our heroes swing into action. The gameplay is pretty much exactly like the first game, with the same enemies and weapons. No "gold mode" you can turn into by collecting gems like Congo's Caper, and no gems for that matter, as they'd given up on trying to be Sonic at this point and had gone back to trying to be Super Adventure Island.

The levels are a bit more complicated, and now go in more directions than just left to right. Lot more verticality too.

In this one you can power up the club to give it spikes. Collecting extra weapon powerups after that causes your weapon to shoot fireballs, which is super useful. The downside is that you inexplicably lose all your weapon powerups between levels, so if a level is just a boss fight, you're stuck with the basic club for that one.

Someone besides the T-Rex gets a chance to shine, as a stegosaurus is the first boss. Big, detailed sprites for the bosses, very impressive.

As a kid, I was a Triceratops Guy, though of course I sometimes gave top billing to the Hulk Hogan of the dinosaurs, T-Rex, like all the other kids did. However, vying it out for my distant-third favorite dinosaur was the Stegosaurus, battling the Brontosaurus. The Brontosaurus is this big, lovable goof who eats plants and doesn't bother anyone, while the Stegosaurus is styling and profiling with the back-plates.

Back at the village, there are a few NPCs to talk to. What's with that dude in the double-hut? Is he okay?

This password woman appears to be the only actual female character in the village.

Her life must be terrible, having all these cross-eyed dudes trying to mate with her. Terrible...or awesome, given that she is quite literally the most important thing in this entire civilization. There is only one of her to go around, so the men get to compete and battle it out to determine which lucky guy will get to sire her kids. Woe to her if she ever desires woman-flesh, however, because there isn't anyone else.

I'm not sure how long this civilization is going to last. If the situation were flipped and there were one guy and a bunch of women, that would be no problem and would biologically be completely doable. However, one woman and a bunch of men is a civilization with almost no growth potential and super-high likelihood of strife and conflict.

It begs the question of why nature didn't just make way more women than men. Biologically speaking, there should be two or three women for every one man, and everyone should be having threesomes and foursomes all the time. That's right, I said it, biologically everyone should be in a throuple.

Why are there so many unnecessary extra men competing over women and resources? Why did the numbers get skewed against us, TODD?

At the shop, you can buy flowers to romance a cave-lady.

...can I give them to that password woman?

We learn that the bad guy's name is Gork, and I have to collect seven macguffins to get to his lair. Lest you think this game might not be super short, they give you one immediately. ...so why not just have it be six macguffins then? In any case, most of the bosses give you a stone for defeating them.

Neat overworld here that is way above the first game in visual quality. SNES games advanced SO MUCH between 1991 and 1994 graphically.

At this point you can choose to take on the various levels in basically any order, which is cool. It doesn't have that many levels, but each one is fairly substantial in size this time.

There are dinosaur mounts you can acquire and ride around on, giving you an extra hit Yoshi-style and some extra powers. Usually gliding (in this case) or projectile-spitting.

We get some sick, Ridley-like mode 7 graphics as the next boss swoops in from the background.

Pterodactyl is kind of an underrated dinosaur. It's probably #5 on my Top Dinosaurs list.

Putting a spike pit in the middle of this boss room seems like the sort of thing I would have done when I was designing video game levels on paper in 4th grade.

My quest for the Infinity Stones is well on its way. When Joe gets them all, he'll snap his fingers and the dinosaurs will go extinct. So THAT'S how it happened.

Next level is a snow level, always a good time. What are those weird pipes in the background, though?

This level uses a woefully-underutilized platform game trope from the 90's, where you have to hang onto ropes to avoid screenwide insta-death avalanches. Done right, this can be an exciting game mechanic. Super Ghouls and Ghosts did it particularly well in level 2.

Some levels have a key you have to find to unlock the exit, and usually the key involves some backtracking.

Joe falls through the ice! The sprites in this game are very expressive.

Wait a minute, what's that behind the wall? Is that...

...a Triceratops boss! My God! My #1 favorite dinosaur (most of the time).

The dinosaur mounts...look pretty angry to be ridden. They glare at you and grit their teeth the entire time. It's actually pretty unsettling. Why couldn't they be happy friendly mounts like most games in this era?

A bunch of Neanderthal are in hot pursuit as our hero flees through a locked door. While in the first game these guys were easy to dispatch, in this one they're strong and it's often appealing to just avoid fighting them entirely.

Yeah, these mounts are really angry, especially considering how thrilled Joe seems to be. I wouldn't be surprised if they decided to kill and eat him after this is over.

Indestructible shelled creatures make their debut here, and they're a real problem. You can't get rid of them, so you end up having to run past them, and often their cadence doesn't even allow you to get through without taking a hit. Is this Gremlins 2 for Game Boy? That was the king of game design actively fighting the player.

Similar to this being the last game I wanted to play on Switch Online, Gremlins 2 was the last game I wanted to play from the Game Boy Player's Guide. While they were both letdowns after I waited 35 years to play them, this one is a perfectly decent game. Gremlins 2 on the other hand is an almost un-completable mess and probably in the bottom five worst games I've ever finished.

Next boss is a water dinosaur that uses spit-waves that are extremely tough to dodge. This is a good example of how difficult this game can be at times. The key to winning is positioning, and figuring out good positioning is the only way to get past fights like this.

We had a snow level, so of course the game also needs to have a fire level. This one has a brutal section with a lava wave following you through the level. It's instant-death...obviously. Great sprite-work as we can see how terrified Joe is.

I get enough weapon upgrades to turn the spiked club into a stone axe. This is the most damaging melee attack, and looks awesome. Good luck bringing it into boss fights, though, since the game strips you of powerups before most of the later bosses.

Once the lava chase ends, I get a particularly menacing T-Rex boss. Was wondering when he'd show up. I unleash projectile waves from the fully-powered axe from a safe distance, and this gets me the 2nd-to-last Infinity Stone.

Next level is the village you started in, only now this bastardly Blanka-looking caveman has set the place on fire. Beating him up gets you the final Infinity Stone. Only problem is, this fight is waaaay harder than everything else in the game up to now. Guy is fast and hits hard, and you actually have to learn the fight...if you have enough lives. Games with limited lives/continues probably shouldn't be forcing you to learn lategame fights but ya.

This is one of those situations where the game has an open world, so everything is about the same difficulty-wise up until now. It's difficult to balance games like this on any sort of difficulty curve. You've got the intro level, then 90% of the game is basically at "level 2" difficulty, and then you get the final level(s) jumping to final level(s) difficulty. Super Mario Land 2 is another game that does this.

Getting the last Rainbow Stone causes this rainbow bridge to form, leading to the final area. Yuji Horii should sue!

Much like the previous game, this one reaches its conclusion in a boneyard. The Crocomire skull makes its return, too.

The Bone Zone has you fighting all the major bosses again in a boss rush. What sucks is that it resets your weapons at the beginning of the level (as usual) and doesn't have any upgrades. So you're doing the whole level with the basic club, making it like 10x harder.

Welcome to Die?

The boss jumps up and down in the air crotch-chopping like X-Pac!

So basically this is the exact same fight as the one I had in the village. Difference is, defeat him in this form, and he goes into full Roid Rage mode:

"I'm feeling Roid-Rageous!"

He then unleashes Top Spin!

This fight is complete ASS. Your character is so slow that you need to react a very specific way to every attack he does, and if you misjudge or just have bad luck on a feint, you're getting hit. Oh yeah, and losing means you have to fight the first form again, which is already hard enough of a fight. Get used to doing that over and over.

Yet another game where the final boss is a total asshole, after a relatively easygoing rest of the game. Was there some sort of rule in this era that final bosses had to be ultra balls-out hard?

After NUMEROUS tries at the final boss, I finally take him down. That fight was almost impossible, quite frankly. The rest of the game was a pretty normal run, but they made DAMN sure most players wouldn't actually beat the game. That's one way to extend the playtime of what is basically an hour-long game. Make people have to play it over and over again to try and take down a final boss that is a complete nightmare.

So, final thoughts on this? Is it worth playing? Well, it's okay, and people who liked it as a kid will probably like revisiting it on the Switch. However, the first one was a lot more fun. And Super Adventure Island, the game they're emulating, is a much better bet than either of them. So overall, this series seems pretty skippable.