Joe & Mac Returns

[DANGERMAN]

I'm not expecting a lot of replies to this, but I played through this yesterday and it's really good. 

 

Joe & Mac Returns is an old arcade game, it came to my attention from a video about great games that stayed in the arcade. It's now had a port to Switch, where it was on sale, its possible it's on psn or Xbox too. 

 

Gameplay wise it plays like the original Bubble Bobble. Levels are a single screen, you jump between platforms hitting enemies with your club then putting them in a sack. Next time you attack you'll throw them at other enemies. If you managed to stun and collect multiple enemies at the same time you'll throw a larger sack that will bounce around. 

 

The level ends once you've beaten the enemies, and there's usually women to save. Every world has a boss, you beat these by bagging enemies and throwing them at the boss, you club does nothing to them directly 

 

There's 2 problems with what is otherwise a great little game. First the controls. A attacks and B jumbs. That's fine, except, as we all agree, Nintendo have their buttons the wrong way around, so what should be the attack button is jump. If you could reassign them this wouldn't be a problem but you can't and I never quite got the button layout drilled in to my head 

 

The other problem is it is a bit letchy. The rescuing girls is whatever, it's a product of its time, it's the cut scenes that are the problem. In between worlds you'll get little vignettes of Joe and Mac trying to sneak a peak at the pretty girls, they're cave men so it fits the theme. But there's a couple of times the women are bagged up and dragged away with there underwear being thrown back on screen. Best not to think about too much I guess, and ignore the laugh track that plays, but it really, really seems out of place now 

 

Aside from that I really enjoyed this, it was on sale so only a couple of quid 

 

[DANGERMAN]

I think this is really cheap on Switch this week. I recommend it