Yo! Noid (1990)

Now, this is an interesting post for me. If you ask me: 'have you ever played this game in your life?', for sure I'd answer you back: 'no, I haven't ...until now'.

So why bother writing about a game you've never played would be a good question. And here is a short explanation.

If you've ever read one of my earlier posts you would already know that my first video-game console was a Mega Drive, but I used to play NES games in my friends' houses. So NES was a very known game console to me, I even played a lot of it before play my Mega Drive. And even after I buy a far superior console powerhouse as the Mega Drive, in my thoughts, NES always had the coolest titles. I mean, it always got games based on movies, cartoons or colorful characters. Of course, Mega Drive had its share of cool titles too, but at that time, NES got everything (later in the 16-bit era it changed, but in the middle/end of the 8-bit era, this was the case). So for a kid like me, this was a big deal.

Well, in the early '90s, here in Brazil started to pop up the first video-game magazines, and when I found this out I started buying every magazine available, it doesn't matter if the issue was weekly or monthly, I would buy it. Here I want to disclose some important memory that more than 20 years late I still keep it in my heart. I used to buy those magazines or in a newsagent shop near my house, where I and a friend of mine sometimes went just to kill some time, or on Sundays morning when my dad went to buy the newspaper. I always hooped in the car together with him, and there while he was having some small talk with the newsagent I picked one magazine and asked my dad to buy it for me. And this was the way I discovered about Yo! Noid, in a video-game magazine that I bought in a moment in time. I did a small research and I think I found that magazine in particular, I'll post the two pages below, just for sake of curiosity and of course it's in Brazilian Portuguese.

When I caught my eyes on this crazy character with long bunny ears and human's face, I don't know why I got totally hooked and thought it was REALLY cool, "this must be an awesome fun game" I thought. Later I found it in the local video-games rental stores, and the art cover was even cooler. But, I didn't have a NES sooo...I couldn't play it.

The american cover of the game. Terrible awesome.

Years and years later we got the emulators running everywhere, but again, don't ask me why I never took the time to play it. But NOW things have changed, I decided to pick it up and finally play it. After all this time, in 2019, I would play that strange game from my childhood.

And I did it. But first let me tell you what this is about, this Japanese game was localized in the United States to promote Noid, the mascot of Domino's Pizza, an American fast-food chain. Well, the plot, of course, is really simple and bizarre at the same time, a green Noid called Mr. Green is messing around New York City and the mayor decides to call another Noid (you, the red one) to stop this massive madness caused by Mr. Green.

I must say from the start that the game is hard in my opinion. It's one hit kill and has that well-known difficulty from the NES era, so be prepared for lots and lots of deaths in this platform game. Sometimes the game is even unfair in my opinion, however, with a lot of training and patience you got used to this and you can have some fun.

The game has a wide variety of enemies in each level (you can check some of them below). By the way, we have a bunch of very colorful levels for an NES game, the gameplay is not bad, you platform thought levels using a yo-yo to kill your enemies.

Strange enough we don't have bosses at the end of the levels, instead of bosses, after two levels you complete, you face another Noid in a pizza eating contest game played though cards. Yes, it is STRANGE. Anyway, you got to finish eating a specific number of pizzas before your enemy, playing a card game. Actually, for me, these parts of the game were REALLY boring. Oh, and the last boss, Mr. Green, you have to defeat him playing this card game.

The famous and only Pizza Eating Contest of Noids.

The levels are shown in a little map. You can't navigate through levels as you can in Super Mario Bros 3, the computer moves the Noid automatically after you finish each level. You can see that you have the typical environments such as circus, factory, sewer and so on but this time you don't have a desert and an under the water level, and this is rare in the platforms games in the early 90's.

In the end, it was a nice ride, to finally play this game. It took more than expected but I did it. I'll post some more pictures below and if you ask me "should I play this game?" the answer is "maybe". This game is not for all, it can be a very frustrating game for the nowadays standards, gameplay wise. But maybe if you're like me, one of those dinosaurs from the '90s, give it a shot, maybe you'll enjoy it.

Cheers.