Yo! Noid (NES Review)

Yo! Noid
aka Kamen no Ninja Hanamaru
Developed by Now Production
Published by Capcom (US) Namco (JP)
Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System
First Released March 16, 1990 (JP) November 22, 1990 (US)
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

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I miss real pizza. I can’t eat it anymore thanks to a Celiac diagnosis. I hadn’t really liked Pizza Hut since I was a little kid, but I’d seriously consider chewing off my own pinky toe if I thought it’d let me eat Pizza Hut again. Never really liked Domino’s, though, and I completely missed the Noid’s time frame. By the time my memories started forming, it had already been phased out as their mascot. It became one of those Simpsons’ gags that grown-ups had to explain to me. I’d seen a few gaming magazines of my era make fun of the concept of a Noid video game. It is absurd. It also makes no sense to have the Noid as a hero. The whole point of The Noid is it was supposed to mess with their guaranteed 30 minute-or-less delivery. The character is antagonistic towards the consumption of Domino’s Pizza. It would be like making the Allstate Mayhem character the protagonist of a game today where it stops catastrophes from happening. I don’t think you understand what the character represents, dummies. Even worse is having your mascot in a game where things are constantly going tits-up. Like this section in the first f’n level.

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The first level has rising and lowering platforms throughout it. It’s a bold choice for an opening stage. But, when those platforms are safe to step on doesn’t logically match the graphics. Clearly visible, non-hydrated platforms are still instakills unless you let them get a lot more clearance than anyone’s rational common sense would dictate. If you can see the thing you’re walking on, why would water that doesn’t even come up to your ankles be fatal? It’s pretty remarkable how quickly Yo! Noid completely squanders having a non-conventional introduction, and an ominous sign of things to come. Collision is an issue throughout Yo! Noid, but in fairness, it works both ways. You have a yo-yo for a weapon, and coming close enough to enemies works towards damaging them. Of course, most enemies take TONS of hits to actually slay. This will become especially annoying once you start the second level, which is your typical NES slippery ice level. Excuse me, please. I need to go scream.

I might as well mention the Famicom original here. It’s mostly the same game with the same layout, only the graphics and enemies look different. Also, instead of throwing a yo-yo at enemies, you sic what looks like a pigeon on them. As much as I love using a yo-yo, throwing a live animal at baddies is so much more spiteful that I prefer it.

Do you know what’s especially insane about Yo! Noid? Once you get past the first two levels, it almost becomes a good game. It’s like all their will to experiment was used up in the first three stages. In the third level, you ride around on a skateboard, and the game becomes a sort of fast paced hop-and-bop game where you jump on enemies. BUT, just jumping on top of them won’t work, and often will leave you dead. You have to sort of hit them at an angle with the underside of the board, but it’s really fickle about it. I found aiming with the back wheels worked best. It’s a one-hit death game, so you don’t want combat to ever feel inconsistent, but in the skateboarding and flying stages, you don’t get your yo-yo/pigeon. Every time Yo! Noid felt like it was close to becoming a good game, something would always draw it backwards into mediocrity.

I’ll say this about the US version: it’s so bonkers with the character designs that I figured they must be hold-overs from the Japanese version. But, in fact, that wasn’t the case. Like, in the ice level, a guy throws a curling stone at you. That’s NOT in the Japanese version.

There’s a couple levels where you fly through the sky, and one where you stomp around on a pogo stick that’s apparently called a “pizza crusher” according to the box art. But the problem is, the level layouts are never really clever, and too often rely on last-pixel-jumping. Those are NEVER fun, and I struggle to imagine what goes through a developer’s head with them. Do they think it’s more exciting? Because it ain’t. It’s just cheap, and if your collision detection is even a little problematic, it turns the platforming into random guesswork. While Yo! Noid has decent enough graphics and genuinely charming sprite work, it’s the levels that ruin the experience. It’s the strangest thing, because the game gets all the original, memorable aspects out of the way right off the bat and the rest of the game is as generic as it gets. The only other really memorable set-piece is a couple flying stages where you die one second into the level if you don’t start mashing the jump button. Because of course they’d design it that way.

The green boxes that spit-up enemies are lethal to the touch, even when they’re not shooting baddies out. They also take roughly twenty trillion hits to defeat, give or take. This is where you’ll want to have a screen-clearing super item, which is what that meter next to the score is for. Hey, SCORE IS FOR! That rhymes!

And then there’s what I thought were fun mini-games, but actually, they’re supposed to be the game’s boss fights. You have to challenge other Noids to pizza eating contests every other level. You and the boss each have a series of cards that have various amounts of pizza on them. The boss ALWAYS goes first and picks at random. You then get to select any card you want. If it’s the same amount, nothing happens. If one is higher than the other, the person with the highest amount eats the leftover amount of pizzas. So, if the boss picks a 1 and I pick a 3, I eat two pizzas. Each of you has a set amount of pizzas they need to eat to win, with you needing much less than the boss does at first, but with every new contest you encounter, the amount goes up, and so do the numbers on the boss’s cards.

The boss usually has several high-value cards, while you have more 1s and 2s.

Now, there’s a catch. Scattered throughout the levels are items you use in these duels that can double or even triple the amount of pizzas you play on them, along with hot sauce that subtracts 5 points from the boss’s total AFTER they’ve scored a round victory, OR a pepper shaker that simply blocks the card from working before they score. The problem is the valuable items that double/triple your totals or negate the Boss Noid’s cards are often hidden in completely abstract areas on the map. Like this:

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So what WOULD be a good idea instead turns the entire experience into the player hopping around, throwing their weapon non-stop while they look for the items that could be literally anywhere, with no rhyme or reason to their locations. And you’ll NEED those items too, because at the end of the game, the bosses have cards that have values as high as 6 while you’re stuck with the highest value being 4.

Your numbers are 1 – 4. So yea, you’ll want as many items as you can find.

And by the way, that there? That’s the last boss. I didn’t even realize that until I won the battle and got the game’s ending. I admit, I enjoyed the card game encounters, but not in the same way I enjoy a typical boss fight. I really thought these were fun mini-games, not the crux of the entire experience. I never lost any of the duels, either. The closest I came was finding myself in a situation where it was impossible for me to eat all the pizzas on my meter, so all I could do was hope for a draw. On what I thought would be the final turn, I failed at that. The opponent took the lead by a single pizza and I thought the game was over. But then something happened: because the opponent Noid was out of cards, even though they were winning, I won the match. Most of the battles I was able to prevent the boss from scoring a single point, but now that I think about it: the bosses require so many pizzas to eat (they ALWAYS need a full 18 point meter, but you don’t) that you could probably easily run them out of cards with no effort no matter how lucky/unlucky they are. It was one final “meh” to cap off what is peak NES licensed mediocrity. Credit where it’s due: this IS a Domino’s game!
Verdict: NO!

I could have said “avoid the Noid!” too but it was too easy.