Joe & Mac 2: Lost in the Tropics

Joe & Mac was one of several SNES games I picked up at the second hand store for a pittance. I liked it, admittedly mostly because of the cave babes, but it was also a solid platformer with cute dinosaur graphics.

Johnny Turbo Arcade Classics has released Joe & Mac and Joe & Mac Returns arcade ports for Switch, and when I saw Joe & Mac 2: Lost in the Tropics on Nintendo Switch Online I assumed it was the SNES version of Joe & Mac Returns. It isn’t! It’s a distinct sequel with a few added adventure game elements. I later learned the PAL version of this game was called Joe & Mac 3: Lost in the Tropics. (Congo’s Caper was technically the second game in the Data East series).

Joe and Mac 2 is a cave man-themed platformer/heteronormative household sim. So, if you’re into that read on, if not you can do an image search for “joe mac cave babes” to enjoy cute pixel cave babes in various states of mild bondage.

The story is a bad guy stole the chief’s crown and you are supposed to collect 7 gems for reasons. There is a central village with a shop as well as various characters who offer useful game services (password, warp, etc). In addition to the usual weapon pickups you can ride a dino buddy and gain their special powers. You also have the option to upgrade your hut. Each time you upgrade it new furniture is added. There are also a few arbitrary mini games, like mine cart ride sequences a la Donkey Kong.

JM2LT is… not a great game, honestly. I’m not sure why it was included in the Switch Online collection, but I’m glad it’s there because it fetches a premium on the secondhand market now.

The devs attempted to add more complex adventure game elements, but it’s not well-tuned. There are dinosaur buddies you can ride, and the flying one breaks the levels its in as you can simply fly over everything. There are areas were enemy attacks are too frequent, or they spawn too quickly, which feels cheap. There are also what I consider design inconsistencies. For example, in the first level there are spikey snail enemies you can destroy. In the Jungle level, spikey snails are impassable barriers that cannot be killed, which feels a bit like a rule change. Additionally, the game doesn’t do a good job of explaining how secondary weapons work, it was only while reading online that I realized eating sometimes grants a temporary secondary projectile, so eating meat gives you a chance to shoot bone projectiles for a while. I was never sure why my character sometimes had projectiles. Granted, this is an era when one would read through the instruction manual for such info.

In the first Joe and Mac you immediately start saving the cave babes. This is awesome, because they are cute and they give you a kiss, and that was definitely the highlight of the game for me. In Joe and Mac 2 there are no cave babes in evidence, but there are flowers in the shop so I put two and two together and figured, okay, sure. I’ll woo a cave babe, it will be even better. So I began to focus on upgrading my hut. It’s slow going at 50 wheels per upgrade, but I add rugs, a picture of Congo (which only makes sense if you know the game’s history so the random picture of some other caveman was probably lost on the majority of players), some weird stone Ikea furniture, etc. Having done that, I set about buying flowers (30 wheels). Each time you buy flowers you can pick one of three cave babes who are behind a screen, and if she likes the flowers she will live with you.

The RNG on this is pretty harsh and apparently the hut upgrades have no impact on it. If you continue to give her flowers, you have an equally random chance to produce children. My only real beef with this odd nuclear family mini-game is the RNG makes it difficult for no real reason. I would be willing to accept the game as a caveman family simulator that just happens to be a platformer if it were more fun overall, but the levels are generally tendious and farming for wheels is no fun. The added adventure elements just end up being weird and extraneous. This one was odd enough to write about, but not really something I’d recommend.

So when I did an image search for “joe mac cave babes”, per my own advice, I discovered Joe & Mac Returns has quite the bounty of cave babes. And robots? Clearly I played the wrong game.