Joe & Mac (NES) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
620A playthrough of Data East's 1992 platformer for the NES, Joe & Mac.
Joe & Mac, originally a 1991 arcade game called Caveman Ninja, was a classy, good-looking platformer featuring (as you've might've guessed) cavemen. They hop-and-bopped, they chucked fire and stone weapons, and they deftly avoided being eaten by all manner of dinosaurs as they fought to save their cave babes from the Neanderthals. They also got a lot of recognition in the process - the fans loved it.
Thanks to the coin-op's popularity, the game saw ports and adaptations (of hugely varying quality) on several platforms in the early 90s, including this unlikely 8-bit NES version by Elite that appeared during the 1992 holiday season.
I say unlikely because the original game was something of a graphical showpiece. The already released SNES, Dos and Amiga versions all looked pretty close to the arcade game, and this went a long way in making the home versions feel like " the real thing."
The NES, however, could not hope to compete with the more advanced platforms as Joe & Mac clearly demonstrates. It certainly tries - the heavy parallax effects and the huge boss sprites are all super impressive for the hardware - but the tiny character sprites, the general lack of color diminish most of the appeal. It does great things with the hardware, but the weird skin colors, the enemies that blend far too well with the backdrops, and that oddly monochromatic look (that so many late era ports to the NES suffered from) make Joe & Mac on the NES thoroughly unattractive. The music does fare a bit better with its prominent use of sampled percussion, but it too pales in comparison to the source material. The entire presentation does its damndest to mimic the look of the 16-bit games, and that's probably its single biggest issue.
The gameplay feels the same way. 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 the lack of dedicated buttons for any of these actions make it feel pretty cumbersome to play. It's entirely too easy to do the wrong move at the wrong time, and when this happens, death is often the frustrating result. It would've been much more fun if the game had been simplified a bit, but alas.
It's also worth noting that many of the stages have been outright cut, while others have been dramatically pared back to accommodate the hardware. The branching paths and multiple endings are all missing in action, and the difficulty level has been ramped up significantly, seemingly in ak attempt to disguise just how short the game is.
That last boss is pretty awesome, though. Weird, but awesome.
Overall, Joe & Mac isn't a total bust. It can be fun in very short doses, but the obnoxious challenge, mushy controls, and the ugly graphics will most likely leave you reaching for the SNES version instead.
*This is a brand new playthrough to replace my original 240p upload from a several years back.
And sorry for the repost! I screwed up the encoding on the original upload, but it's now all fixed.
_
No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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