As the Fwoosh is well aware, our favorite American soldier G.I. Joe is celebrating his 50th birthday this year, and damned if I don’t feel like we should celebrate.
Now, Hasbro has decided to do some celebrating on their end, and don’t get me wrong, that’s swell. But today let’s revisit something outside the usual Joe figures — let’s take a look at Taxan’s G.I. Joe game for the Nintendo Entertainment System.
Like the Batman games I chronicled earlier this year, G.I. Joe on the NES wasn’t the first video game to feature the team. Commodore and Mac both had a couple of titles under the banner. But, like Batman, if you’re looking for most folks’ first Joe game, you found it on Nintendo. Released in 1991 by Taxan, a small developer, G.I. Joe is a pretty standard for the genre run-and-gun side-scroller. It features some familiar names, along with some less familiar ones. Let’s take a look at your crew options:
I mean sure, you got Duke running the show, you got Snake Eyes, Gen. Hawk… Rock n’ Roll’s there, though — woo! Blizzard makes sense for the Arctic level, sure, but Captain Grid-Iron? sheesh.
Anyway, the premise is that Duke takes a couple team members and works his way through various terrain while taking down Cobra’s bases across the globe. Each level has you working through your usual Contra-style gauntlets, facing a boss, and then it’s across the map to the next, and each level has a different Joe who takes the lead — Blizzard takes the Arctic, obviously; Snake Eyes takes NYC; and so on.
But Contra it ain’t. Sure, it’s got the toughness factor, and those damn regenerating enemies, but it lacks those greased-lightning controls. The power-ups are okay, and there are a couple of times you can jack an enemy vehicle and go to work, but it can’t help but feel a little soft compared to the other run-and-guns available by this time in the NES lifespan.
The character-swapping option is kinda cool, though, reminding me a little of Konami’s first TMNT game, and they do have different attributes and stats, though they don’t play a whole lot different when you’re getting your ass kicked.
I mentioned this game was hard. It’s hard as dinosaur crap. There is a password system, and that definitely helps, since, you know, Internet. But I can hardly imagine the grind it would’ve taken as kids to get those passwords. Each level offers up different flavors of the same hard-luck playing, and you’re left memorizing patterns and then cursing like Shipwreck every time you accidentally backtrack and let one of those bastards re-spawn.
So, yeah, it ain’t Contra. But it ain’t half-bad. Seeing familiar faces like Destro, Baroness, lots of Vipers, and some appropriate vehicles do help this game fight some of that generic side-scroller feel. And the soundtrack is pretty good, getting downright Capcom-sounding here and there. This is one of those that any die-hard Joe fan has to own just for the bragging rights, but it isn’t a bad addition to any run-and-gunner’s library. Just do yourself a favor and grab those passcodes first.
