Joe & Mac (NES) Playthrough
234A playthrough of Data East's 1992 platformer for the NES, Joe & Mac.
Joe & Mac, originally a 1991 arcade game called Caveman Ninja, is a hop'n'bop platformer starring a couple of Neanderthal buddies who are out to save their kidnapped cave babes.
Thanks to the coin-op's popularity, the game saw releases across several platforms in the early 90s, including this unlikely 8-bit NES adaptation by Elite that appeared in stores during the 1992 holiday season. The original was quite a looker in its time, and the already released SNES, DOS, and Amiga versions all did an impressive job of recreating its look and feel on consumer-level hardware.
The NES clearly couldn't compete in the same league, but that's not to say that Elite didn't try. Elite was renowned for their talent and ingenuity, and Joe & Mac is an exceptional show of their skill. The sprites are nicely detailed and animated, the bosses are huge, and the backgrounds feature more layers of parallax scrolling than most 16-bit games did - the first and third levels' backdrops are split six ways!
But the problem with Joe & Mac for the NES is that it tries to do the impossible. The broad strokes are there, but the attempts to faithfully mimic the original drag all of the game's shortcomings into the spotlight. The often monochromatic color palette choices, the uneven quality of the background art, and the flat and featureless level designs all make it feel like a compromised imitation of a 16-bit game instead of a game that was built with the NES hardware in mind.
The gameplay is similarly lacking. The moves are the same as in the other versions - you can somersault jump, charge your weapon, and jump while shooting upward - but the laggy response time and being limited to just two buttons makes it frustrating and cumbersome to play, and the problem only gets worse as the swarms of infinitely respawning enemies grow thicker and thicker.
It's also worth noting that many stages have been outright cut, and others have been dramatically pared back. The branching paths and multiple endings are all MIA, and the roided up difficulty comes across as a weak attempt to disguise how short the game is.
That last boss is pretty awesome, though. Weird, but awesome.
Joe & Mac isn't a total bust - it can be fun in very short doses - but the obnoxious challenge, mushy controls, and ugly graphics end up costing the NES game everything that made the original so appealing.
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