Joe & Mac: Caveman Ninja

I guess cavepeople are easy targets for game developers: they have an established image, they are inaccurately portrayed as living side-by-side with dinosaurs, and, perhaps most importantly, you don’t have to pay a license to anyone to put cavemen in your game. Like Joe and Mac. Caveman. Ninja.

Although my understanding of the Ninja Arts is limited, I saw neither Joe nor mac performing many ninja-related activities. Unless you count bonking a tyrannosaurus upside the head with a giant stone wheel, which, for the sake of this discussion, we don’t.

The story for the game goes something like this: Some rival tribe of cavemen has kidnapped all of the cavewomen from Joe and Mac’s tribe. You have to run to the right, and sometimes up, killing anything that moves to get them back. Along the way you’ll find weapons that you’d expect cavemen to have: clubs, boomerangs, fire, the afore-mentioned stone wheels, and the very rare powerup that throws a shadow version of yourself at your enemies… like a ninja. You’ll also find a variety of foodstuffs strewn about the level because although you have a health bar, just existing makes it go down (i.e. your caveman apparently metabolizes food amazingly fast and gets hungry all the time).

Boss fights at the end of the stages are your typical ‘fight a giant version of a regular enemy’. One in particular, the Giant Carnivorous Caveman-eating Plant… of Doom, is rumored to yell an expletive when it’s hit. I never really heard it until someone told me that, and it’s a bit of a stretch.

Naming oddities aside, the game’s actually kind of fun with two players, two players who can actually hurt each other with their Bonk Sticks. Just make sure that if you play it with two players that you play it with a complete stranger. That way when you ‘accidentally’ kill him off so you can bash in the skull of a giant thingus at the end of a level and get all the points, he can’t find you to bug you for the quarter you apparently now owe him because he ‘wasted it’ by getting in a game with you without asking first.

2 Responses to “Joe & Mac: Caveman Ninja”

  1. So this is where all the updating is happening!

  2. basscomm says:

    Yeah, I figured I’d see how many daily updates in a row I could pull off.

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