Description of Caveman Ninja - MAME

What do you get when you cross Prehistorik with Mario and the Spinmaster? Yeah, that’s right: the Caveman Ninja; or simply just Joe&Mac in some circles (and to be truth, I can see why would somebody prefer that over Caveman Ninja, as there are—technically—no ninjas whatsover in the game, with the title being merely a weird translation of Japanese Joe & Mac: Tatakae Genshijin, which literally means ‘caveman combat’). Now, what is it all about, you say? Whell, that’s quite straightforward: a rival clan creeped into your village at night and took all your (cave)women. Your job? Again, quite straightforward: get the chicks back. Up to two players can play simultaneously as two cavemen, green Joe (player one) and blue Mac (player two), with the characters being quite traditionally controlled by an 8-way joystick and two buttons: MAME button one for attack and MAME button two for jump. To jump higher and further, move the joystick up while pressing the jump button; to drop of a platform, move the joystick down. The attack button primarily throws your ranged weapon (there are several of them available through pick-ups in the form of dinosaur eggs, throughout the game) and secondarily—when point blank to an enemy—it allows you to use your club without spending your HPs (yes, regular attack slowly drains your HPs). The attack can also be ‘charged’ by pressing and holding the attack button. This will produce a super powerful version of your regular attack. As to the HPs, you start the game with three lives. Once they are all lost, you can buy additional lives by inserting more coins, but you can do this only a limited number of time, however, and should you lose too often, the game will eventually end with a ‘game over’ screen. Your character’s health can be restored by two ways, though: either by collecting food dropped by elliminated enemies or at the end of each level by being kissed by one of the rescued cave-women. The critics of the time praised the game for it’s visual aspect, but they found the soundtrack and the gameplay rather repetitive and unimaginative. In their view the levels were too short and the difficulty was too low, resulting in a somewhat short gameplay. In response to these accusations, Data East decided to lengthen the stages in the console ports of the game, but the arcade version—thanks to the limited update options of the arcade systems—stayed obviously untouched. I have to admit, I was a bit sceptical about this game at first, but as the time passed by it eventually found a way into my heart in the end. And to be frank, now I don’t really have the heart to bash it as hard as I originally wanted to. For you see, Data East created a giant heap of crappy games. But out of all those horrible detterent examples of bad game design, the Caveman Ninja stands out as a relatively entertaining and enjoyable game. And for that I have to just give it a thumb up.