NES Games No One Played: Letter Y

ONLY TWO MORE WEEKS TO GO!

I’ve got a pretty extensive NES collection and have for years been writing about the best games for the system while also trying to collect every title. As such, I feel like I’ve spent tons of time playing all the great games while the lesser known titles usually come in the mail and go straight onto the shelf. I wanted to make more of an effort to explore the entire library of the NES, not just the classics, and so I’m trying out some buddies I either popped in and immediately out or never played in the first place. There were only four official NES games released in North America that begin with the Letter Y and since they’re all relatively obscure, I figured “hey, why not just review them all?”

• Letter A can be found here
• Letter B can be found here
• Letter C can be found here
• Letter D can be found here
• Letter E can be found here
• Letter F can be found here
• Letter G can be found here
• Letter H can be found here
• Letter I can be found here
• Letter J can be found here
• Letter K can be found here
• Letter L can be found here
• Letter M can be found here
• Letter N can be found here
• Letter O can be found here
• Letter P can be found here
• Letter Q can be found here
• Letter R can be found here
• Letter S can be found here
• Letter T can be found here
• Letter U can be found here
• Letter V can be found here
• Letter W can be found here
• Letter X can be found here

YO! NOID | 1990

Simply by having the word “Yo” in it’s name, Yo! Noid effortlessly wins the best title award of any NES game. I don’t know how familiar people out there are with the Noid, but he was Domino’s corporate anti-mascot in the 1980s and 90’s akin to other thief / spoilers like McDonald’s Hamburglar or the Lucky Charm’s leprechaun. The Noid’s goal was to fuck up the delivery of Domino’s pizza by delaying drivers, chilling pizzas so they weren’t delivered hot, and other inane schemes that of course never worked because the Domino’s pizza box is obviously a fucking terminator.

You may be asking “even if this was a big deal at the time, how did a game like this get made?” Well discounting precedents like MC Kids, there was actually an earlier Noid pc game “Avoid the Noid”. Oh, and Yo! Noid is actually a re-skin of “Masked Ninja Hanamaru” for the Famicom, they just changed all the ninja/feudal elements to be more generically American, which I guess makes about as much sense as swapping out the Arabian themed Doki Doki Panic for the Mario characters. Seems strange that you’d play as the villain of the Domino’s universe, but I guess as there’s no hero in the commercials who else would you be? The graphics and music are pretty middle level Capcom which is to say 90% better than every other NES game; however, I’d compare its look, sounds, and gameplay more to a title like Adventures in the Magic Kingdom than say Mega Man. It’s pretty well done, if fairly bland, 8-bit platforming.

Of course Yo! Noid is notoriously difficult. After being lured in by the super easy dock level at the beginning, the danger ramps up immediately in the second stage where you have to navigate leaping between the tops of buildings where all the surfaces are made of slippery ice. If that weren’t challenging enough, everything can kill you in one hit. ONE HIT. You get three lives, three continues, anddddd that’s it. Further compounding the difficulty, Yo! Noid is a huge game with 14 levels so, I don’t know, you probably need to get to Ninja Gaiden levels of mastery to make it all the way to the end. I possess neither the skills nor the patience to give it that much of my time, but maybe you’ve got the goods kid!

Between levels is this bizarre rock-paper-scissorsesque “pizza eating contest” that’s really a card game where you and a purple Noid choose numbers and whoever has the best number eats the difference in pizzas. If you lose this match (or in my case not make any decision which will get a “you snooze you lose” reaction from the enemy) you have to start the whole level over again. This is especially cruel since the whole mini game takes several minutes to complete and is about as thrilling as looking at the back of your hand and then turning it over to stare at your palm. Not only is it a really bizarre and obnoxious filler between stages, but the Noid’s whole thing is that he fucking hates pizza, hence his many attempts to ruin it for everyone. Or maybe he just hates Domino’s and those are Little Caesar’s bites that him and Purple Haze are chomping on. Either way, I’m confused, annoyed, and bored as hell. Sounds like a perfect time to order a pizza!

Similar Games: MC Kids

YOSHI | 1992

YOSHI’S COOKIE | 1993

Ol’ Yoshi seems like he’s been around as long as Super Mario himself. Oddly enough, Yoshi didn’t debut until Super Mario World for the Super Nintendo in 1991. Even though he never appeared in the original NES Mario Bros trilogy, he was later shoehorned into the educational titles Mario is Missing and Mario’s Time Machine (which are honestly a lot more fun than people give them credit). On top of that, he also got two puzzle games that came along toward the end of the NES’s lifespan: the eponymously titled Yoshi and Yoshi’s Cookie. There’s honestly not a ton to say about either of them, so I’m gonna discuss both in brief detail.

In Yoshi, you control Mario who’s at the bottom of the screen with his hands out, palms up, as if to say “did I do that?!” The usual assortment of Mario enemies float down as blocks (boo ghosts, goombas, squids etc.) Instead of controlling the movement of the blocks, you control the four platforms above Mario, so as the enemy icons descend you just switch around which section they land on. There’s also these half shell icons that appear and if you drop a top shell onto a bottom it’ll clear all the bad guys in between and…oh hey there’s Yoshi, he births out of the completed egg! Yay!

Yoshi’s Cookie again stars Mario, this time in an adorable chef’s outfit that’ll cost you $4.99 in the newest Smash Bros. Like every puzzle game, the basic premise is that you need to match up cookies that look the same to clear them off the screen. Like in Yoshi, you only control the objects once they’ve landed, but here you can move and swap them around in four directions instead of just two. The format here is unique in that it’s a square playing area and instead of items dropping only from above, they drop from multiple directions at once. f you match up the cookie’s as they come, it’s super easy but you’ll get less points. The real strategy is to wait til you’ve built up a few and then link a bunch at once for more points. I feel like it’s trying to teach a lesson about pleasure delaying in a covert attempt to sway children away from sweets. Worked on me!

Of the two, Yoshi’s Cookie is waaaay more fun. The “switching plates” style of Yoshi is very un-intuitive and I’m really not a fan of Tetris style games where you can only connect items vertically and not horizontally (looking at you Dr. Mario!) Yoshi’s Cookie gets real wild real quick and combos will just start avalanching down without you even trying. The 2-player is even crazier as the cookies respawn instantly and your actions have different negative effects on your opponent. One thing I do not understand though are the bizarre terms above your screen “blind” and “slave”. Is this a BDSM thing for furries? Is the cookie what you give your submissive Yoshi when they’ve sufficiently supplicated themselves? INquiring minds need to know!

My biggest confusion about both games is why Yoshi? I mean clearly these games were made as simple puzzle games without him in mind and Nintendo slapped his likeness on there after the success of Super Mario World, but even knowing that why not make him the character controlling the puzzles? Mario is on the screen at all times with Yoshi only making the briefest of cameos (it took me several minutes of playing Cookie before I saw his head appear as a bonus style item). I mean if you were a kid and you saw these games in the store with Yoshi plastered all over the artwork wouldn’t you assume that you played as the dinosaur? Wouldn’t you be bummed? The pain is still real y’all!

Similar Games: Dr. Mario, Wario’s Woods

THE YOUNG INDIANA JONES CHRONICLES | 1993

Not gonna lie, it’s been a lonnnnngggg time since I last saw an episode of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles so I don’t really have a ton of nostalgic context to add here other than I remember the show being pretty decent. Would I or anyone have guessed that an NES game based on this relatively obscure TV show would come out as late as 1993? Well if not for my obsessive quest to catch em’ all and collect the whole library, I don’t think I would’ve ever known this bad boy existed.

The NES saw the release of four games based on Indiana Jones, the obnoxious Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, the identically titled but totally different games that were Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (one made by Taito and another by UbiSoft), and lastly The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles. There was no Raiders of the Lost Ark, but if those other games are any indication, we probably dodged a bullet there.

Starting off, you’ll see on the title screen that the dreaded “Music On/Off” option is present, usually a prime indicator of a horrific and repetitive soundtrack anddddd….yep it totally is. It’s one of those short loops that isn’t that offensive on it’s own, but since every time you enter a room it starts at the beginning again you’ll start to get real sick of hearing the truncated repetition of those opening five seconds. The graphics here are strangely hard to pin down. On the one hand the sprites and landscapes are pretty decent and remind me a bit of the excellent Monster in My Pocket, but on the other hand the colors are really bland, like only three can exist on the screen at a time. It’s very similar to the UbiSoft Last Crusade which looks like it was an early Gameboy Color title or something, almost monochromatic. It’s just strange for a game released this late in the system’s lifespan to look this dreary. Little Samson for instance came out around this time and uses 8 million more colors.

The game itself I’m surprised to say…is pretty fun! Seriously, if you’ve played those other Indy games there’s no way you’d believe me that this is good but I promise you it’s at least better than the other three titles combined. One thing I love for instance is the life meter. You start with a whip and a hat, but you can add other weapons and items. As you get hit you lose these items until you’re down to just 1-hit and the use of your fists. It’s subtle, but this kind of weapon downgrading happens all the time in the Indiana Jones movies and I feel like this is a tiny nod to that. The controls are smooth, the cutscenes and story are great, and most of all the gameplay is actually enjoyable! It’s kinda like a cross between Shatterhand and Castlevania. Your character moves quickly which makes the pace more speedy, and unlike so so many NES games the hit detection is accurate and the jump mechanics are responsive. It is for sure an 8-bit action platformer so it’s not easy by any means, but unlike almost all the other games I’ve reviewed the last 24 weeks, I would actually play this game again. AGAIN! IT’S A MIRACLE!

Similar Games: Shatterhand, Monster in My Pocket, Castlevania

OTHER LETTER Y GAMES (CLASSICS)

Ummmm….

OTHER LETTER Y GAMES WORTH TRYING

Well…..

OTHER LETTER Y GAMES WORTH AVOIDING

Geez I was hoping there’d at least be a homebrew or an unlicensed game or something