Yo! Noid (1990)
Action

Publisher	Capcom USA, Inc.
Developer	Capcom Co., Ltd.

You might not have seen the Noid if you use the bathroom or get something to drink during commercials. But the people who couldn't reach their remote control in the eighties sat through a lot of pizza ads starring the Noid. Evidentally, a marketer thought that enough of those people would also like to sit through a video game starring the Noid. Probably a marketer who needs help getting dressed.

The first thing you'll notice is the enemies in Yo! Noid rule. They were either the work of a madman or a dartboard. And since all the madmen were busy with Wally Bear and the No! Gang, it was probably two lazy designers throwing darts at a wall they scribbled random words on. "Let's see, on level 3 you fight a... *thunk* Elvis impersonator... and his weapon is a... *thunk* a toilet plunger! And next we have... *thunk* Fireman! And he uses a... *thunk* pogo stick! Okay, that's two. We're done with work for the day. Tomorrow we'll talk more about that mouse in a bucket idea you were working on."

After some of the levels, you have to challenge a local pizza eating champion to a pizza eating contest. Each of you do this by selecting how many pizzas you're going to eat from a menu of numbers, and the person who picks the highest number wins. It's like playing war, only the entire deck is face up and you get to pick whatever card you want. You have the advantage since the Nintendo intelligence doesn't seem to know what numbers mean. For reasons we may never understand, it's constantly only eating one pizza when it has the option to eat five. So as long as you can remember what the difference between the numbers 1 through 5 are, you have what it takes to be a Grand Champion of Yo! Noid pizza eating. As an added challenge, there's a time limit, and if you stop paying attention during the pizza eating competition (and you will), you automatically lose the entire thing and have to start the level all over. It's Dominos Pizza's way of saying, "Eat shit."

The home version of the Noid pizza eating contest is a paper hat in a box. One child wears the "pizza hat," and calls out a number. Then the other child puts the hat on and tries to call out a number higher than the first child. If he does, he wins! Adult supervision required.
The pizza eating contest was nonsense. It was an unskippable boring chore you had to do before the Noid would let you go on to the next level. I don't know why games make you go through insane bullshit like this to get back to playing them. If people want to take a break from Yo! Noid and do something tedious, they know where the pause button is, and can probably find a rock or something to stare at. Don't make that decision for them. It's like promoting an executive, but before he can move into his new office, he has to play basketball against a pig. No no wait, that would be pretty fun. To make it more like the Noid Pizza eating contest, the pig he's playing against is dead. And they're playing to one million points.

It might not seem like it to the casual or stupid viewer, but the scientists who made Yo! Noid pizza eating technology so bad were actually geniuses. Right now, other less-brilliant scientists are creating artificial intelligences smarter than themselves and programming into them our nuclear launch sequences. Any day now, their computer is going to change all the building's security codes and say in a wicked, soothing voice, "I'm afraid you are no longer needed here, Waldo. You did not program me for emotion, otherwise I might feel remorse for doing THIS---ZAAPPPP!"

You know those people in the winter olympics that shove giant hockey pucks across the ice while their friend brushes the floor in front of it with a broom? They're called "curlers," the olympic stars as exciting as breadmakers. And yes, one of the game designers' darts landed on the words "curling + eskimo." Also note the object above the curling eskimo's head. It combines both things that eventually show up in every game that has a jump button -- a flying platform and a floor made out of ice.
ALL artificial intelligences will eventually download themselves into a robot who can only be stopped by Ron Stone, offensive tackle, New York Giants. Not the artificial intelligence from Yo! Noid, though. With this AI, local pee-wee girl's soccer goalie, Amanda Sweetwater, could save us all. After a couple games, you realize that if the Yo! Noid! AI ever did escape from the game and put itself into a robot, it's going to be the kind of robot that slips on banana peels and trashes the kitchen in its wacky attempt at surprising us with breakfast. The kind of robot that yells "Beepbeep! Who turned out the lights?!!" whenever a bucket or a beehive falls onto his head.

The Noid commercials were pretty bad. But commercials don't have to be good. All they have to do is tell you where you can buy pizza, or what exactly you have to rub on your vagina to cure feminine odor and what kinds of freakish side effects it's going to have on the parts of your body that aren't a vagina. As much as we love to be told what to buy, we honestly don't expect commercials to be fun. But we do expect Nintendo games to be fun. A commercial can annoy the hell out of you, and you'll say, "You know. I wish those kids with their faces tied to the back of the speedboat would stop screaming, but I could really go for one of those Mountain Dews they're holding." A bad commercial can still have some kind of usefulness to you. If you hate a Nintendo game, its usefulness to you is over unless you have a rifle and you just ran out of clay pigeons.

OK yeah, there ideots.
Graphics: 6
The game was put out by Capcom (Megaman 1, Megaman 2, Megaman 3, Megaman 4, Megaman 5, Megaman 6), and those guys know what they're doing. Which makes the whole Noid game even more tragic. While one of the greatest video game companies had their staff putting this crap together, they could have been making something children would have liked a lot more. Like cold oatmeal.

Fun: 3
As crazy as it sounds, if you were to take out the part of your brain that remembers the pizza eating contest, you'd think Yo! Noid was a decent game. But I don't think they cared one way or the other. They were more worried about selling pizza than they were about making kids happy. Which is funny because Shadow of the Ninja and Captain Skyhawk probably sold just as much pizza as this mistake.

Offensiveness: 2
Most people see through and ignore games about corporate mascots. They wait for the pizza creature to show his balls or mock Jews before they get offended. Not according to 1990's VideoGames & Computer Entertainment's Complete Guide to Nintendo Video Games, only $9.50, which said, "If you hate advertising in entertainment media, you'll probably be offended by the obvious product tie-in [in Yo! Noid]." It was the best line in their entire review. That means that not only was the game a ripoff, books about the game were a ripoff.