Joe & Mac

Joe & Mac is a platforming game made in 1991 for a few different platforms, but the one I played most and the one I'll be reviewing is the SNES version.

To give you a taste of my personal history with this game I need to take you way back. All the way back to 1991. It was my fifth birthday and I got a SNES. Now the reason I want to go all the way back to this time is that despite knowing a little bit about games up to this point, I had played NES games at cousins and friends houses. I had never heard of the Super Nintendo nor did I know anyone who had it. What is even weirder to me about this in hindsight is I got this present from my grandma, the same one who I said collected Betty Boop memorabilia in my Persona 5 mental breakdown, I mean review. So some facts about my grandma. When she was born her father was rich and he died early on in her childhood. My grandma was one of 7 children and her father's side of the family thought it was perfectly acceptable to take all the money from her father's fortune and leave his wife and children penniless. So my grandma went from riches to rags over night. It's not really a big surprise to me given these circumstances that she and four of her siblings became involved with drugs and crime given their bizarre upbringing and that her own mother decided to turn to alcohol to drown out the depression of her life after the death of her husband. During the 60's and 70's My grandma was a biker. My grandma was also a pioneer in cultural appropriation, as she was also somehow a Chola for most of her youth. Look that up if you don't know what it is.
What that meant about her on a practical level was eyeliner, no eyelash and us having to listen to a lot of Rosie & the Originals growing up. Chale homes.
Part of this is explained by the fact that her first husband who was not my grandfather, was a Mexican man. The reason they divorced and the reason she met my mom's father was throughout all this time and most of my mother's childhood she was a raging alcoholic and heroin addict. I'm sure other drugs were in the mix too, but those were the most prominent. I never met my actual grandfather as he was stabbed 53 times during a prison riot for allegedly snitching on one of those biker gangs my grandma knew. I don't even know what the guy looks like because I have never seen a picture of him and my mother only knew him for a few years in her early childhood. By the time I was a child she had overdosed years before, managed to survive and cleaned up. Hearing "I'm x-years clean and sober" was so often a phrase from her that we still joke about it to this day. At this time she met a man named Doug, who was an old fashioned convict. That kind where the years spent in jail baked his skin to an oily sheen and he walked with that hunch people develop in prison to try and protect their necks from shank attacks. Doug's voice which was nebulously "southern" as I remember it was heavily damaged from years of smoking that led to skin and throat cancer. So for the last fifteen or so years of his life, he looked and sounded like one of those people you see in a documentary in school about the dangers of using tobacco. You know with the hole in your throat and everything. At this point in his life, he was also trying to go on the straight and narrow. Despite his past, he was a nice old dude. In fact in a sea of shitty relatives, he and my Grandma were some of the only people I could rely on and that actually gave a shit. They never married and despite him not really being so I basically considered him my grandfather until they both died. I'm mentioning all this to say that her previous life didn't leave a whole lot of money for retirement and my grandparents while going straight in most ways, still had a penchant for stealing.
You see what I'm getting at here folks... In hindsight, I have speculated that my SNES which would have been prohibitively expensive for them at the time was in fact stolen. It's not really so much a speculation either as a lot of the gifts, we were given over the years from them were most likely stolen items and I know they admitted as much to one of my cousins. So I got what was most likely a stolen SNES for my fifth birthday. I went back this far to give context on why this particular game is a little bit special to me, had my grandmother not stolen an SNES I probably wouldn't have ever owned a console in my childhood as my parents were basically teens when they had me and could barely afford rent, so something like a console was completely out of the question, we didn't even have a colored TV until I was five and I'm not fifty years old I'm 33, black and white televisions were already old when I was young. So having the newest console at the time was kind of a miracle for me. It was also kind of a burden in the sense that like my parents I knew nothing about the SNES and I wasn't even old enough to read the back of the box and find out more. I remember this being really early in the consoles life span or at least feeling excruciatingly early as most kids I knew were still content with an NES. Despite it already having been out a year, I didn't see it's games on store shelves or in rental stores for yet another year and that might have been more justifiable if I had lived in the small town I have lived in since age six to now, but I lived in Chino Hills at the time. I'm sure some did have them, but I just don't remember seeing any of the games in stores. Because of the general lack of information I had about the console. I remember we tried renting an NES game and I remember being drawn to the box for Fester's Quest. Well it didn't work obviously and thank the fucking heavens, because that game is terrible. The drought went on for so long that I was almost destined to remember the second game I played for the system which as it turns out just so happens to be Joe & Mac. I remember walking into Blockbuster one faithful day and finally seeing four SNES games on the shelf this obviously being one of them and the one I picked. All this build up should emphasize the crazy fucking excitement I had over this game., I loved this game so much I would basically talk about it to anyone who would listen which was basically no one at the time. I remember my parents wanted me and a guy who was their roommate at the time to make a message for the answering machine and I somehow thought this was a good time to mention Joe & Mac on that answering machine. So unsuspecting callers had to hear me yell, "DATA BEIST" and "PLAY JOE AND MAC" amongst the roommate trying to give actual contact information and instructions.
I rented and played this game so much throughout childhood that it is hard to calculate exactly how many times, but I'm sure it was well past the point of redundancy where buying it would have been less expensive, but I wouldn't actually own this title until the end of the nineties when a Funcoland opened up a town away from my current location. You know a part of history that I think the young kids today won't be able to relate to at all and to people who only started collecting games after about 2005-ish or so. In the nineties, if you collected and bought older games even at established video games stores like Funcoland, EB and Borders Electronics people in front of the counter and behind looked at you like you were a fucking freak. It was not the acceptable adjunct to the larger hobby of "gaming" that it is today. I honestly remember more than a few times being asked by people who sold me the games why I would want to own an "obsolete piece of technology?" I know at a local record store that had a small used game section, that through a woman who used to work there and later became a friend of the family that at the time they thought of me as a weirdo for wanting to buy old games from them. They thought something akin to the "autism" meme about game collectors at the store and I guess I came off weirder than most. I don't even like to talk about autism in that demeaning meme sense, but I really can't think of a close corollary.
So anyway, I remember seeing Joe and Mac used for about ten dollars on one of my first visits there and I immediately bought it. A lot of titles don't live up to your childhood nostalgia that is obvious, but aside from a few control and accuracy-related issues that I'll get to, this game holds up remarkably well as a platformer of its time. I definitely think it's a classic of that genre and while I thought I was alone in thinking that, but I wasn't.
Now in the past, I would have considered this game to be underrated. However, a lot of famous reviewers have given this game a mention or a full-on review. One of which is the now-infamous race "realist" Jontron. Regardless of what he shit out of his mouth about race and IQ the man clearly knew his early nineties platformers. Because of their similarities this game also saw a consciousness-raising bump through the ascension of Shovel Knight a game that has a map layout close enough to this one that I would say it borders on plagiarism, but I think that is a compliment to the Shovel Knight creators because they knew which games to steal from and which to ignore and copying this games map layout one of the best things about it was certainly a good idea. The point is this game still gets a lot of accolades and reevaluations despite it being a midtier title of its time.

The game is about the titular Joe and Mac two cavemen going on a platforming adventure to save the "Cave Babes." Yeah, one way that this game has aged like a fine wine that got dropped into a vat of rotten milk is that at the end of each level you save a cave girl who promptly kisses you. Women as a literal reward for your good deeds. Now you might think of a story trope like this as being barbaric and backward thinking and you would be right, it's so backward and barbaric that it is literally "cave" people doing it. Look, it was a different time back then, people just had different ways. You can't judge prehistoric man, by modern standards. We should be happy that the game didn't go full Deathstalker on these poor women. They should do like the River City: Ransom games are about to do and have a new Joe & Mac game staring the cave girls as protagonists.
Joe & Mac can't just jump on shit like Mario and Sonic to kill enemies they need to do this somersault move or they have four different weapons they can use in order to attack, they just need to be obtained once per a continue in order to use them. The weapons are the bones, boomerangs, fire and stone wheels. The main thing you need to know about these weapons is that the wheel is better than everything and the other three aren't anywhere near as good. The bones have a shitty arc to their trajectory and the boomerangs just seem really weak in comparison to the other weapons. I said this game had some accuracy issues and a lot of it has to do with these two weapons and enemies especially bosses having a really long "recovery" period after being hit. I think a game should show some sign of damage and these recovery animations are nice but half of a battle with some of these bosses is seeing them frozen in pain from constant hits, only they aren't being hurt constantly because again this animation takes to fucking long. I also think each boss hit point should have taken more hits before a loss.
Health items are random hunks of meat. The game has bonus areas to get more lives and health items in the form of a small purple pterodactyl picking you up and taking you to that next area. These bonus areas also sometimes have keys which can unlock checkpoints and further bonus shit on the map. The map is like a concise and enhanced version of Mario 3's and I remember thinking that as a child. The map reflects around the level icon what the level will actually be like when playing it. As I said before it's exactly like Shovel Knight's map.
Each level ends with a boss fight and most of the bosses aside from two are some variations of dinosaur or prehistoric creature. The two that aren't are the last boss which is this devil creature and the second levels boss which is gigantic Venus flytrap creature sure to cause Rick Moranis some panic. Whenever I think of the game I always think of that plant boss for some reason.
The levels are well designed and show a lot of variety in terms of their look and how you play them. There are levels where you ascend and descend, go through water, have to use enemies as a platform and there are a lot of environmental backdrops in this relatively short game. This game is pretty short for a platformer of this era and the levels also end way too quickly. I would say it's shortness is my biggest criticism of the game, which they tried to fix in the sequel to mixed results. In hindsight, the game is also very easy and with two players, you can easily see how dinosaurs went extinct because I have an easier time fighting them in this game than I do fighting a raccoon outside.
The music that is in the game is good and it fits the prehistoric setting the game is trying to convey. I think all of the music is excellent, but if I had to have a criticism with this it's that there isn't enough variety to the tunes. A lot of the tunes are repeated throughout the levels or at least that is what I thought in hindsight because the tunes are so similar I mistakenly thought that some were repeated and I had to reassure myself through several playthroughs and viewings of other people playing it that they weren't. My favorite track in this game is the one in the fourth level before the dolphin fight. I also like the boss theme and the little tune that plays when you save the cave babes. None of the music in this game is an obvious miss, despite its sameishness it keeps a high audio quality throughout the title.
The sound effects, on the other hand, can be a little bit grating, the dude's voices are this odd high pitched sound and without fail whenever I play this game it starts to get on my nerves a little quicker with each playthrough. The dino enemies and the other cavemen you fight have much less grating sound effects.
For a game that came out this early in the fourth generation of consoles, I would expect it to look a lot more rudimentary than it is, but they did a really good job on the game's graphics. The two brothers are well animated and show a lot of character and style in their design. Let it be known that the cave babes also look nice and that the third one with short green hair is the one who I'm going to say is the "canon" marriage for Joe. The enemies are all also a nice cartoony style. The backdrops of the game are nice looking, they aren't as good looking as some of the more famous platforming games of the generation, but I still think each level is good enough that I remember and can discern them even this many years later. The boss designs can look a little bit odd and they do repeat some of them a bit too much. You have to face an iteration of the T-Rex three times and the pterodactyl twice. One thing I didn't like design-wise that I guess I'll lump here with the graphics is that the last boss is just a generic-looking devil creature that doesn't really fit the prehistoric theme of the game that well. I might be pulling what I'm about to say completely out of my ass and I tried to look this up for the review, but whatever, take what I'm about to say with a grain of salt. I think the last boss was a devil creature because that devil was Data East mascot for a while and/or he was in one of their more famous games in Japan. I think I remember reading that somewhere but like I said I could be totally wrong about this. One thing this game kind of fucks up pacing wise is you fighting the T-Rex in the first level. You think they would save the most famous dinosaur as the last boss and not blow their prehistoric wad this early. I don't really like the sequel to this game Joe and Mac 2: Lost in the Tropics that much but I can say in its favor that it fixed both of the issues I just talked about, the main boss is an evil caveman-like the dudes here and the T-Rex is one of the last bosses you face rather than the first.

This review like the game was shorter than I wanted it to be. I have an excuse though, I'm going on vacation, let's just hope I don't end up "Lost in The Tropics." I don't want to be doing no "Congo Capers." By the way, I'm one day clean and sober. I kept myself straight just for this review because I keep it professional like that. Now I have a Michelada ready and I'm about to score more lines than Tetris. My grandma relapsed into drug abuse before she died, so I'm only following the family tradition. Like Grandma the game has some flaws and blemishes, but I look back on both fondly. It has a personal importance to me and it's hard to separate myself from that, but I still think that if you like 2D platformers from this era you'll enjoy this game.