"A Pre-Historic Beat-Down"

Joe and Mac was created back in 1993, and lives on as one of the original Gameboy’s forgotten adventure games. A simple man's Turok, Joe and Mac combines great beat-em up style, with some sub-par implementation ideas involving saving, but overall, a great game.

Graphics: The game uses the original Gameboy’s limitations, and pushes them to the limit, creating a very nice, lush, and interesting looking game. It's quite fluid, and the animations are suberb. The characters all have facial animations (not like raising an eyebrow, but really big noticeable ones), and there's a few different enemy characters. Overall, the game looks great, especially considering that it was made in 1993. 8 out of 10.

Sound: The game contains some good jungle-ish music. You might get the one song stuck in your head. There's a few grunts and dinosaur noises here, but nothing great. 7 out of 10.

Gameplay: Think of it as a simple man's prehistoric Final Fight. It's a 2D game, there's no up and down, but you can fight multiple enemies at the same time. Most of the time, you're throwing tomahawks, rocks, wheels, boomerangs, and a few other myriad weapons. The levels progress fairly basically, always concluding with a final boss. Most of these are quite interestingly done. Not to spoil anything, but the bosses are mainly supercharged large versions of the regular enemies, handled in good ways. Overall, it's a lot of fun to play. 8/10

Controls: Much of the gameplay requires jumping, and throwing accurately, and the controls handle this more than admirably. It's quite simple, the game itself tells you that A is jump and B is throw, nothing hard here. Sometimes, it's frustrating when you fall in a lava pit, and fly in the air, unable to control your own sickening descent back into the same pit, but if you're good, it's not a problem. 9 out of 10.

Glitches: A couple of issues in the gameplay is the utter lack of saving anything. The high scores reset, and you can't save your progress. In fact, I have no idea how many levels there are, I've only gone through about ten, and I can't find information. That being said, it's a nice challenge, so that's good.

Overall: Besides saving, and the simplistic gameplay, it's allot of fun. If you see this at a garage sale someday, pick it up, it's worth your time and money. Overall: 8 out of ten.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 05/20/02, Updated 05/20/02