One of the styles of games that has kind of gone away in recent years is the sports competition game. These games provide some series of mini games or ‘events’ tied together by some theme. One of the more unusual of these was Caveman Games.
Caveman Games focused on a group of Cave-people, including the token female, Crudla, and the nerd wearing glasses, Vincent, participating in the ‘Ugh-lympics’, a series of events with a caveman theme. You get to participate in: Fire Making, Clubbing, Dino-Vaulting, Dino-Racing, Saber Tooth Tiger Outrunning, and the Mate Toss.
Most events are the ‘mash one button faster than the other person’ variety. Fire-making, for example, has you and one other person mashing the ‘rub two sticks together’ button as fast as possible while you strategically use the ‘bonk the other person over the head’ button and the ‘blow on the embers/duck/make yourself dizzy with asphyxiation’ button.
The Mate Toss is a slightly different affair, you grab your mate by the ankles, rotate your control pad as evenly and as quickly as you can, then you press and hold the ‘angle’ button until the desired angle is reached and then release it, letting your mate fly. The goal here being, of course, to throw your mate for as many ‘foots’ at possible. Toss your mate far enough and she’ll do a ridiculous little dance. Interestingly, in the NES version of the game, the female competitor tosses a female ‘mate’, likely because of limitations of the NES hardware, but in the Commodore 64 version she reportedly tosses a male. I haven’t actually ever played the C64 version, so I can’t verify that.
Clubbing is probably the most complicated event in this compilation. You and your opponent stand on a giant flat rock and smash each other about the face and shins with your clubs in addition to using devious tactics (distracting with a point and a ‘Look over there!’ expression on your face) in attempt to make them back up and eventually fall off the rock.
The other events were pretty lame, the Dino-race has you and an opponent mashing the ‘make the dino go faster’ button while strategically pressing the ‘avoid obstacles’ button, the Saber Race has you mashing the ‘make delicious caveman run faster than saber-soothed cat button’ while strategically pressing the ‘throw your opponent behind you’ button, and the Dino-vault has you mashing the ‘make the caveman run faster’ button and strategically pressing and releasing the ‘plant and release the pole vault’ button.
There’s a little bit of pseudo-caveman speak in this game. Distances are measured in ‘foots’, countdowns to event starts go, “3, 2, 1, Ugh!”, and of course the above-mentioned ‘Ugh-lympics’. For some reason I found it incredibly annoying back when I played this game the first time around, and now just find it a mild nuisance.
Caveman Games is one of those games that you can break out when you have a bunch of people around who are clamoring to play some kind of NES game if you don’t have something better around.