EFTWR
Entertaining For
The
Wrong
Reasons
G.I. JOE (C64)
If you don't know what G.I. Joe is, your mom has probably
been pregnant with you your whole life. This game is an awful way for you
to kill time pitting your favourite G.I. Joe ninja versue the Cobra ninja
that the computer player or friend (hah) gets stuck with.
I'll give it this much; As a fighting game for a system
this old, it's quite good and possibly even fun.
You play in various battlefields that could be the middle
of the desert, on an abandoned street corner in a big city, or inside Timothy
Dalton's bathroom. But I might have imagined that part.
Your player has a weapon depending on the character. Blowtorch
carries a flamethrower, (well, a fireball gun anyway) Snake Eyes carries
a laser gun, (whatever) and Zap uses . . . well, who cares what Zap uses.
Frankly I think Zap looks like a sleazy porn star. A sleazy porn star that
runs his own porn company, stars in his own movies, and is the only character
in any of his stories. You know what I'm implying.
Anyway, each deadly battle arena, where Joes and Cobras
fight for the freedom of the world, there is always some sort of lazy half-assed
support from their friends. So let's say Snowjob and Destro are firing
away at each other in the desert. (I picked Snowjob so Destro could kill
him. We both know who the cooler one is.)
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A G.I. Joe jet (or whatever the hell it is. It hovers.) will
fly casually by and fire at Destro once. If it misses, which it almost
always does, it doesn't even bother with a second shot. It then flies away.
That's when a Cobra helicopter flies over and drops a bomb on Snowjob.
It's definitely not missing. I'm walking right into it. Then it flies away
and lather, rinse, repeat, must kill president, and we're back to the jet
again.
If you're fighting n the city, on the other hand, there's
a robot gone berserk. It will go after one of the two combatants. In this
case, I think we'll make it Torpedo and the Baroness.
The robot seems bent on destroying Torpedo at first (maybe)
but shooting it somehow changes its programming. Seriously. If the Baroness
shoots it, it turns around and attacks her. If she shoots it again as it
gets closer, it turns around and goes after Torpedo again. Weird.
Now all of this so far is pretty cool for an old game
like this, isn't it? Well, yeah, it is. But there are a couple of problems.
First is when you pick your battlefield. Before each fight,
a map of the world is presented with various blips meaning something that
you're probably too human to understand. A little legend at the bottom
of the screen would have been nice, Epyx. Maybe the time you spent coming
up with the robot AI could have been spent on a couple of minutes of sitting
down and thinking about the game setup.
For those who don't know, Epyx did Impossible Mission.
("Destroy him, my robots!") Not to be confused with Mission: Impossible,
of course. The programmers are probably too cut off from the outside world
to know that such a similarity existed. Probably a coincidence then. Probably.
I'm not sure if the blips are supposed to be the battlefields
you have to choose from. I always just assumed they were but I think you
can just move the little cursor anywhere on the world map and you can start
up a battle.
Now, when you pick it, there's a fifty percent chance
of it becoming a one-on-one battle as earlier discussed, or a mind-crappingly
abhorrent mini-game where your mission is to drive a vehicle (four to pick
from) around a really huge area looking for cobra vehicles and buildings
to destroy. I think a very close comparrison would be if you were to read
a Where's Waldo book where the pages are the size of a full-sized poster
and you're extremely near-sighted and have to put your eye right against
the page and slowly move it around until you find him. Seriously, that's
what it's like. If you have a friend to play with, he can either sit there
and wait for you to get yourself killed (or actually beat the thing which
will take maybe an hour) or he can use his joystick to help you. This doesn't
make much sense as a moment ago your friend was Cobra and now he's your
gunner, but I guess it makes more sense than the ending of Planet of the
Apes. (The remake)
You know what else sucks? It takes five minutes just to
load one of the damned battlefields. Duke holds up a giant 5 1/4 diskette,
clenching it tightly like you think he's going to destroy it, while pointing
a commanding yet encouraging finger at you, the gamer, and ordering you
as a loyal G.I. Joe agent to "TURN THE DISK OVER" So you take out the disk,
turn it upside down, put it back into the drive, press the fire button
and his speech balloon changes to "YO, JOE!" at which point exciting G.I.
Joe music plays. It changes scenes to an armoured personnel carrier rolling
out of HQ and slowly driving along the road. I used to think it was like
some sort of progress indicator, but after it goes completely off-screen
another one comes out and the whole animation loops. This is a very slow
animation. The thing crawls along the screen at the pace of a turtle carrying
twelve sumo wrestlers while wearing socks. And it loops at least six times.
All the while, you're getting sick of that damn Yo Joe music that has repeated
at least four times.
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Then you get to either one type of battle or the other, and
you fight a really short but fun deathmatch, or a really long boring tank
game, and then you get another "TURN THE DISK OVER" message just to load
up the world map and character select again. Guess what happens after that?
You go through that whole process again. I'm going to start collecting
boots now and maybe by the time I'm fifty I'll have enough boots that I
can pound the crap out of the entire Epyx team and be finished about the
time that the last boot is starting to wear out. Of course by then, they
might all be dead but at least I can defile their corpses properly.
GRAPHICS
Crappy. Especially considering this is Epyx. Do you know
how much effort they put into the nice smooth animation of the gymnastics
character in Summer Games? Of course they borrowed it in many of their
other games, but it's still good. Commodore doesn't have much graphics
capabilities to work with, but you can work wonders with the animation
even if the graphics are giant pixels and only 3 colours. How did they
do so badly in this game?
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Okay, so the jet looks good. And the portraits look at least
half-way decent. But the duel to the death sprites may as well be stick
figures and the bird's-eye ones are barely recognizable. The cobra tanks
look like black boxes that shoot black lines. When you shoot them, there's
no explosion animation. It's just suddenly a pile of debris.
This is the equivelent of punching someone in the face, but
instead of them falling over, they just suddenly seem to be lying on the
floor. I can count the number of times this has happened to me on one zero.
If you close your eyes while playing this game, the change
to your gaming experience can only be positive.
SOUND
Heh heh. Okay, the sounds are kind of cheesy in places.
Like when your tank runs over a rock, it sounds like you're mixing concrete
in a slow-moving blender. Or maybe a perpetually farting bulldog that's
been eating only mud for weeks. It's still a lot of fun to listen to though.
Other than that, the sounds are well done. Machine guns, explosions, helicopter
blades, and the hovering sound of the blue jet. You might wonder to yourself
"What in the hemp-chewing barley biscuit oatmeal bran muffins of hell is
that beeping noise?" Actually, a game I rather like called Archon does
the same thing. When you shoot, it makes a little beep noise to tell you
when you're ready to shoot again, as there's a reloading process or some
such.
There, that should make everything clear. Nice choice
of words, by the way. Bran muffins of hell. Heh. I like it.
As for the music, it's not really bad, but you'll hate
it in no time. It's short and very very repetitive. Here's the Yo,
Joe theme:
MP3 (365 kb)
SID (3 kb - Requires SIDAMP
or SIDPLUG and contains all in-game music)
SO, WHAT MAKES IT ENTERTAINING?
In a silent room, try to solemnly control your tank and
without laughing, close your eyes when you drive a tank over rocks. Hard,
isn't it? That's because you have a soul. If you don't find it funny, you're
probably; 1. Trying not to laugh if only to disprove of me personally.
2: Demonspawn and it is my oath as vampire killer to drive this garlic-soaked
wooden ninja sword into your heart, then cut off your head and drop it
into the mystic sea of . . . not-vampires. Damn condensed thesaurus.
By the way, I'll bet you thought I'd leave you guessing
as to what the rocks sound like. Here it is.
You're welcome.
What else? I think I always smile when I think of this
one time my brother invited his friend over who seemed to have so much
trouble playing G.I. Joe that for a moment he thought his character was
frozen. "I can't move!" he shouted, while furiously twisting the joystick.
Of course, as he said this, his little Joe agent did about ten three-sixties,
while flailing his arms like a lunatic. Sometimes it's fun watching video
game characters have a panic-attack. In some games it's the only redeeming
quality.
And also, you can use this game to get even with all the
characters from the T.V. show that you hate. Damn you, Zartan! You eat
bombs now!
If you leave your character entirely alone, they stand
there peacefully with their arms at their sides which makes it all the
funnier when they have a bomb land on their head and explode.
. 
I did mention the killer robot, right? Yeah, he's a riot.
Here's another way to have fun. Come up with a name for the robot, like
Chad. Play with a friend and narrate your actions and thoughts like a super
hero. "You Cobra fiend! The laser from your Cobra-blaster has reprogrammed
Chad to attack me!"
For further fun, here is the C-64 G.I. Joe Drinking Game.
Take one drink:
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When the main G.I. Joe Theme starts playing.
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If you get to the character select screen, and you realize
it's going to be a vehicle level.
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If you hear the sound of the tank running over rocks.
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If, in the one-on-one battle, you get hit by your opponent's
friends (or the robot).
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If you accidentally reprogram the robot to attack you.
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Every time another personnel carrier begins driving.
Take two drinks:
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If you get to the character select screen but the character
you wanted to use is captured by the enemy.
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If you accidentally pick the wrong character.
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If you intentionally lose the vehicle game.
Take three drinks:
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If someone in the room demands that you turn off the annoying
music.
Obligatory Doctored Screenshot
The moral to this story:
Don't make the player suffer to get to the one cool part
in the game.
| GRAPHICS |
2 |
/ |
10 |
|
| SOUND |
8 |
/ |
10 |
|
| GAMEPLAY |
3 |
/ |
10 |
|
| "I CAN'T MOVE!" |
9 |
/ |
10 |
|
| OVERALL |
5 |
/ |
10 |
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Add-on to moral of the story: Just make the cool part a game in itself.
