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Staff review by
Jason Venter 
April 18, 2005
Back in the days of old, women didn’t fight with men for the best jobs and their own staplers. They didn’t go out shopping a whole lot, either. Instead, they sat around the grass huts and waited to be kidnapped by marauding bands of cavemen. It’s during this era that Joe & Mac takes place. True to form, the bodacious babes that surround the eponymous heroes get themselves snatched away by bearded Neanderthals, and so it is that you must run and jump through a series of grueling stages in order to rescue them.It’s not exactly the most original of plots, I’ll agree. But then, it’s not exactly the most original of games. And in the end, when all is said and done, you just won’t care. You’ll play Joe & Mac and you’ll have fun doing so. You’ll think to yourself “Wow, who needs originality?” Then you’ll play it again and ask yourself a new question: “What the heck was I thinking?”
You see, Joe & Mac is the kind of game that’s a lot of fun until you hold it up to a microscope. Then you start seeing the flaws. Said blemishes aren’t immediately apparent for one very good reason: the game looks pretty sweet.
Just imagine running through a prehistoric stage. Grassy ledges abound. Pterodactyls swoop down from the sky and you clobber them, then leap over a running caveman complete with leopard-skin duds that would make even Fred Flintstone jealous. Advancing to the right, you find that in order to proceed you must climb atop a slumbering Tyrannosaurus Rex, who then awakens long enough to try and tear you away from a ledge at the stage’s conclusion.
All of this looks very nice. There are steaming volcano peaks in the distance, pale blue skies and even puffy clouds. The artists rendered everything vibrantly, and there’s a good amount of detail. Later stages play host to icy columns, baby blue water that looks so inviting you’ll be tempted to take a swim, and even blistering pools of magma. You’ll fight prehistoric foliage, mammoths, spiky armadillos and more. The whole time, everything looks fantastic. The thing is, the gameplay doesn’t match.
Let’s go back to that very first stage I mentioned, the one where you climb over the sleeping dinosaur. As it opens, you’ll get to crack open an egg and find a special weapon. This is cool at first, and it almost feels Contra-like (particularly if you’re playing through with a friend, who gets to dance about on the screen at the same time you do). Then you find that each of the weapons tends to suck. It doesn’t matter if you’re throwing a bunch of bony clubs or even boomerangs or stone wheels; you just can’t have many in motion at one time. Because of this, you have to carefully time your shots and you also have to watch that you don’t accidentally grab a weapon that’s even worse than the one you already possess. Until you’ve memorized which eggs hold which power-ups, it’s all too easy to crack open a shell in the heat of the moment and find yourself with the lousy stone clubs instead of the boomerangs or fire. The resulting need to move with caution means that the ‘mindless fun’ factor is removed.
So is the ‘gee, this game controls great’ factor. Besides the fact that Joe and Mac toss weapons as if their arms are made of string cheese, there’s the matter of narrow platforms. Most of these are saved for the end of the game, in the last level or two. It’s easy to spend a few lives just trying to make it across a chasm, thanks to the tendency your chosen caveman has to pass through ledges because of faulty hit detection. Even when you don’t have to worry about instant death from such matters, you have to remember that you move slowly and compensate for it. Is a dinosaur rushing you? Better hope you planned ahead and jumped in time! While this isn’t a game-crippling flaw until right at the very end--giving you lots of early stages to play through again and again--it is frustrating.
And while we’re on the subject of those early stages, I should mention that they all start to feel just the slightest bit redundant. The general flow of the game works like so: run through a short stage throwing wheels or fire or whatever like it’s going out of style, die a life or two, then make it to the boss and exploit simplistic attack patterns so that you can repeat it all again in the next level. The only true deviation here comes in the form of special eggs that are hard to reach and crack open. If you manage to, you’ll be taken to a bonus stage, where you can grab extra weapons, lives or keys to unlock special bonus areas on the world map. Of course, this doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things. It’s just an attempt on the part of the developers to add depth.
And here we are, to the heart of the matter already. Joe & Mac really was a good game. It had nice visuals and it was great fun to play if you managed to scrounge up a friend. The problems only arose when you almost reached the end, then gave it another shot. A good game should hold up to repeated plays. And frankly, the only way you’ll want to play Joe & Mac over other games you may have in your collection now is if you’ve simply forgotten how little you liked it. Then you play, and all your memories of sluggish controls and redundant levels come to rain on your parade. Don’t forget again. Always remember the rain.
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