G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero (NES)
All right, we did it. And it only took us until the
final stage to understand how the leveling system works. Yo Joe!!
About the game:
This wound up being a nostalgic one to start off with, because although I'd never played it before, it brought back the exact feelings I used to have while playing NES games at age five: engrossed yet sometimes resentful.
It has all the knockback and aggressive respawn rates you'd expect, plus the "war of attrition" style of boss fight I came to associate with the console itself. It's interesting to me that somewhere in my childhood I absorbed the notion that bosses in platformers should/must be completable without taking damage; of course I know it's not true, but even to this day when I'm meant to take hits by design, my subconscious automatically assumes that I'm doing something wrong.
Why can't I figure this out? Why can't I avoid that?? I'm always looking for the pattern I can't see, the pattern I believe
must be there.
Sometimes my only way out of this is through intervention. Ack had to rescue me from this spiral once, after I ran to him on the playground and rambled semi-coherently about Roadpig. I was spending too much time trying to find a pattern in falling boulders when the answer was simply to absorb the hits, direct my knockback (which always knocks you backwards from the direction your sprite is
facing, not from where the hit comes from), and continue to fire.
Here's what's really cool about this game, though. In addition to swapping your characters TMNT-style, the soldiers 1) have nuanced stats and 2) get stronger as they defeat more enemies. Once I figured out the leveling bit I got really excited about replaying this. Future runs will absolutely rule now that I know what I'm doing and won't lose my soldiers on every level. I was essentially playing through the game in peashooter mode. This is what happens when you don't have the manual to read.
Things I absolutely loved: punching a jet out of the sky (I hadn't realized ammo was limited at first and ran out during a boss fight); the little stage introductions (parachuting into the desert!); Snake Eyes (why is this guy so cool??). The mix of exploratory levels against action is really great too, and some bosses just ruled (that Destro chase!!).
About G.I. Joe:
The other really fun thing about playing this game was my complete lack of familiarity with G.I. Joe. I seriously didn't know anything about the franchise. At all. I'd seen commercials for the toys growing up, but they made the Joe universe seem... kind of serious? So please imagine my delight when I saw there was a quarterback solider with a grenade launcher.
It was a lot of fun talking to my partner about this, too. He didn't grow up with the toys or show either, but he recognized some of the characters. "Of
course Snake Eyes is in this," he said. "
Everyone loves Snake Eyes." Yep. Guilty.
It seems to me that if the Ninja Turtles hadn't completely dominated my childhood scene there would have been a lot for me to like here. G.I. Joe has that 80s/90s kind of cool to it -- outlandish, silly coolness. The sort of cool that made me want to play Contra Hard Corps as a kid after seeing Brad Fang.
I was also inspired to go back and watch a bunch of the Homestar Runner Cheat Commandos episodes, which hit on a different level now.
Here's your game back, Ack. Thanks for letting me borrow it.
