GI Joe

Review by Loc

It's an interesting choice for the inaugural game review. Clearly, it was not the most popular. The game play was limited. And the majority of you probably never played it. But, the GI Joe video game for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) was one of those unappreciated, under-valued gems that fans can reminisce happily about as they yearn to recapture their youth, ie, me.

For those unfamiliar, GI Joe was your basic side-scroller, action game. You chose from a roster of 6 different Joes to combat the evil forces of Cobra, that ruthless terrorist organization bent on ruling the world. The levels were longish and formulaic: get through X-1 by punching, kicking, shooting the baddies, go throgh X-2 by planting explosives in strategic locations in the Cobra base, finish with X-3 by fighting a big bad boss. Just writing about the big bad boss brings back so many great 8-bit memories.

So why showcase GI Joe and what made it "under valued?" Really, it all lies in the excellence of execution. If you were a GI Joe fan, you were a fan of the characters. Snake Eyes, Duke, Rock n' Roll, all the classics. But, you never got an arcade game for them for some reason. You had a pretty sweet cartoon, but even that ended pretty early on. So some of the newer versions never saw much outside of their toy counterparts.

And maybe that's why this simple game is so cool to the GI Joe fans. Here, you get to run around as Snake Eyes and General Hawk. You get to see guys who were never in the cartoon, like Raptor and Road Pig. You even got to drive around in the smaller vehicles, like the Buzz Boar or the mini-Fang helicopter. And you fought against vehicles like the Cobra Bugg or Destro's Dominator. I mean, this should have been in the cartoons, but the series ended. And now you get to see them in action in the video game, plus you get to interact with them unlike the cartoon! How cool was that!

Beyond the cool character and vehicles, GI Joe also offered a cool game play functionality in the power-up system. For each level, you controlled 3 different Joes. One "captain" was chosen for the mission, and you chose the other 2 Joes to fill out the team. So, throughout the level, you could toggle between characters, maybe when one was close to dying, maybe when you were trying to power-up specific guys. The cool part was the power-ups were saved throughout the game. So if you had Snake Eyes at the maximum Ninja Majic level, his friggin energy blasts covered the screen Contra-style! Same with Rock 'n Roll, you finished powering up that guy, his machine guns spared no Cobra fools!

And plus 1 for early 90s "realism". I believe if you let one of the Joes die, they were done for the game. You just killed Duke, chump! Hahaha, not sure about that though. That's strictly going off my faulty memory.

Some bad things? Character selection jumps to mind. While GI Joe was the best damn toy line in the world, things started to slow down in the late 80s and early 90s. Thats when you got characters like Captain Grid-Iron, yes, the football inspired Joe who had football shaped grenades and a facemask on his helmet. Sigh, so stupid. And yet, they stuck this guy in the game as one of the Joes you could use. Ugh. Others like Metalhead and Overlord made you shudder, but most probably won't even know who these guys are.

And that's part of the magic or downfall of this game. As a diehard Joe fan, you could relish in the intracacies and appreciate the uniqueness of this game. As a non-diehard, you probably wondered who the hell everyone was and had no connection to the game at all.

But the gameplay was surprisingly enjoyable. In the last level you even get to take the reins of General Hawk, who at the time, sported a jetpack. Thus, in the game, you were flying all around as the leader of GI Joe, talk about your thrills!

Out of 10 La's in Cobra-la-la-la-la-la, GI Joe for the NES salutes with 7.