Policy
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In case you're just wondering if this game is good and worth checking out, the answer is yes, this is one of the most enjoyable platformers for how short it is, and its free. If thats enough to convince you feel free to download it here. For everyone else, and for my own mind, let me try to dig into the meat of this thing.
Yo! Noid 2 presents itself as a play on the Lost Videogame Media horror trope, this particular case being an old PS1 game. The plot going on here is a tad bit more esoteric than one might originally expect. The game opens with a kitchty abandoned carton pizza mascot who enters and smashes a pizza to bits, the title screen is repeated by an emotionless choir of voices saying his name. Then after fiddling with the start button the game begins with a voiceless FOV scene introducing the smiling bastard, explaining that Yo! Noid lost his yo yo and has to retrieve it. Then, you are dropped into a 3D recreation of the first level in the which is a remake of the first game. A harbor with billboards cascading off into the distance planted in the water and a homogeneity of town houses lining a shoreline long away from you. Thus you platform over lost Domino's cargo and retrieve your yoyo, to then be dropped into the world proper.
Your real task in Yo! Noid 2 is obscured throughout the early point of the game by the sudden introductory level, to such an extent you have to be paying a bit of attention past the blase puns of the protagonist to recognize the divine horror waiting inside.
You are dropped into a vacuum called Noid Void, this is the main hub of the game. As you look around, you'll see sharp brambled blue roads, strange shapeless monuments, and a shattering of glass littering the sky. Several pizza toppings passively inform you of the wasteland the shattered Noid Void has become. They note that the pizza has been 'taken away', a divine sanctuary for the lost topping. Then you search around and find entrances to each of the 3 levels and retrieve the pie back and unravel the mystery of the core of the world.
Right, perhaps it's useful to provide some context to the circumstances. Yo! Noid is an unpopular TV commercial mascot circulating all throughout the 90s, with the idea supposedly being that he represents the tribulations of getting a pizza delivered in 30 minutes or less. There's a decent video on the background of this fucker. I'll do my best to summarize the most relevant bits here, he was abandoned due to a confluence of this type of advertising not being so effective anymore, a hostage situation led by somebody of the same name thinking Noid was made to 'make fun' of him, and most telling of all a series of litigations against Domino's for the reckless driving issues caused by their 30 minutes or free guarantee policy. The mascot and the policy was both quietly shelved as a result. He had 2 tie in games, 1 where hes a jerk, and 1 extremely hard game (the one Yo! Noid 2 riffs off of). He was a product of catchy child TV advertising and theres a few comparison points to other commercials of the era.
We will come back to the implications of this history in a bit, but let me start with the most shallow praise: In many ways, riffing off an abandoned corporate mascot and their sparse 90s commercials and tie-in games, is an incredibly smart concept for a small game. The game was made for a small indie game jam in 1 month, hosted by some website called Waypoint, with the gimmick being that 'Your game title should be a title from Waypoint Radio'. According to an interview the developers had the main inspiration point being that these old retro marketing games, like Pepsiman and Yo! Noid were ahead of their time in terms of realizing that most people do want to actually interact with the brands they see on TV. Therefore, 'hes dabbing because hes SO ahead of his time!' 1 The game revels in this sort of comedic irony born out of both unstable self importance and our often anachronistic relationship with the presumed disposable artifacts of the past.
The main melancholia that comes across throughout the memetic nature of the game then, is an overwhelming sense of abandonment. This is colored even further knowing the game jam itself floundered, actively not calling attention to itself (only getting 4 entries) and according to the interview, they don't even think the people even played it: 'I dont think even to this day the people who run the website have even played our game, they mention it but i dont think theyve ever played it'. The reason to bring this up is this is where the core of the social commentary bites. At one point in one of the earliest stages of the game, you find an 'abandoned miner' at the core of the planet who laments that people probably dont even know he's down there. This is a setup for a joke, he can just leave via the grappling hook, but the fact of the matter is almost all of the characters you talk to are in a state of pure distress about their feelings of abandonment. One rather obvious point to be made about this in a literal sense is that they are the 'unused' toppings on pizza. This is a difficult point to fairly leverage, but when you beat each of the stages, you get large pepperoni pizzas toppling the center, with more characters coming along to reify the pizzas as a sort of religious moment. But the rub is, you don't meet any pepperoni, or in fact any meat characters at all. You meet mushrooms, olives, pineapples, the 'ignored' toppings. You meet a dipping sauce, but the art style rendering the top of it is not from the dominos of our time its from the dominos of the 90s. There's a curious hauntology at work here, as mentioned, the Noid Void hubworld is a bizarre esher like looney toon hellworld, but some guy with a mad trapped imagination, made it up for literally 1 commercial. I'm reminded of the utterly chaotic and ambitious blueprints for pepsi branding, it was shelved before even making it.
We like to assume these dumb mascot and old commercials are 'not art', they are disposable and not worth our memory. And yet at the same time the authors of the game remember this bastard and probably a lot of other commercials from the 90s, even despite some of our best efforts, the garbage art of yore can stick with us and play in our minds. This ability to dismiss consciously as critics and then be nonetheless by these corporate tunes and slogans is one of the main things this game likes to mess with you on.
Today, dominos pizza cardboard coverings are absolutely littered in text and blurbs franticly justifying its own existence as a sales pitch in fevered psychosis, but the cardboard boxes of old just had a domino on them, here's a comparison. This is made even more blatantly funny when you realize that getting all the collectibles on a level make the old box types literally make them golden, the least considered part of pizza is the trash, which is turned to gold. You get no other reward for your troubles, that's it. It's fun to do if you want to, but this lack of reward feels taunting in a way that's glib but not entirely at your expense, if anything it feels like an inside joke based on how trash is treated.
On top of that there's a curious subtheme of labor insecurity hidden in there as well. The examples are endless: the warehouse has a tomato bragging about being from old money, another tomato shirks their job, or the implications of the mining accident, or even the constant dominos cargo boxes littered everywhere. In a roundabout way, they are bringing attention to the slowdown of the world, those workers and their art of the past quietly disposed of, something these corporations urge you not to think about how this was able to happen in the first place. Therefore, people don't want to clean up, they don't want to keep going. This humor and melancholy tension runs the course of the game, with admittedly the humor cropping higher up so not to bum the whole thing out, yet it gives a strange parodic undertone so rare within the medium, the parody leads to a quiet satire biting through, and makes for one of the most impressive final bosses I've ever experienced, which I feel is more worth experiencing than speaking about here.
The other irony embodied by the compulsive puns and general ennui towards the suffering of the inhabitants by our protagonist is as a reflection of a sort of cultural question: Have we moved away from this? The puns all have a strong and discerning wit to them, but this attitude has been around for pretty much half the game protagonists we can count nowadays and several comic book movies (Guardian of the Galaxy comes to mind, or pretty much anything James Gunn has been a part of). You can trade out the smiling face of a middle aged man in a red rabbit suit with a hip young nostalgia gazing youth, but the expectations come off equally hollow, no matter who pilots. Everyone around the protagonist is a joke to riff off of.
With the intellectual bit of it aside, what is there to enjoy in terms of the gameplay? Put simply, the most satisfying and tight precision platforming in almost any 3D game ever. To keep it simple, using a grappling mechanic solves a huge number of issues precision platforming games in a 3D space have difficulty with, that being the inability to know when you should time a jump when coming off a ledge. This is because in 2D space, ideally the camera lets you see how close to a ledge you are, whereas cameras in 3D space are obviously placed behind you by default, and turning the camera to see from the side is not usually too useful in these games since you tend not to be able to zoom out. In this case the issue is dealt with kindly by making it so you don't have to worry as much about being right at the edge for the grappling sections, along with a friction to the wall run that gives you plenty of time to try and time your jumps. On top of all that, the death system really makes it fun and noncommittal, if you mess up a jump it will literally spawn you as close to the last place you fell from where its safe to do so, there's no death system, the only punishment for dying is having to listen to Yo! Noid's horrific twisted scream, before being respawned again nearby anyway. This lienancy helps make the suprisingly high difficulty as non tedious up until the dungeon (which the Pineapple informs you to try last). As for the dab itself, its analog dabbing and you can do it at any time. What's important to understand about this besides just being a dated meme, is that it serves an invisible purpose for those of the figdety nature. You see in a lot of games, people like me often have the impulse of just jumping out of boredom, but this is a way to have a button be pressed without messing up your run, the catharsis of having a button you can press that does nothing functionally is hard to describe to people who dont have this tick. Yet after experiencing it in this game I cant help but wonder why they dont have a fidget noise making button in all games like this.
Beyond that, the audio visual design is stellar. There's so many small effects that I could sit here all day listing them off. The music is all amazing casio piano midi's which sell a funky experience and keep you from losing your cool. The dungeon song in particular has stuck with me for years, but whats even more impressive is that it transitions the music layers based on how high you are, when you start in the area you only hear drums, and you only hear the whole song near the middle of the area if I recall correctly. The sound effects of running are quiet enough not to get on your nerves, theres a small friction and squeak of the shoe and your off running the other direction. The textures for most of the stuff you run and jump on is satisfying, with some spectacle thrown in for good measure to keep things interesting, like a rocket. Each of the 3 levels is also completely distinct, one is a doom-fueled dungeon key puzzler (one of the best designed dungeons ever made, but feel free to look stuff up if you get stuck here). One is an exploratory spectacle harkening back to Mario Galaxy with the may sub worlds you orbit travel and explore, and one is a slow linear platformer through an old warehouse. The real art is that it feeds you just enough of the world before stopping. Had this game gone any longer than its short 2-5 hour experience, I can see myself becoming incredibly exhausted and impatient with it. Instead the short time frame was just enough to tell the short story it wanted to without overstaying its welcome. That said, I hope the developers build a game like this with a slightly less annoying protagonist, because they have the foundation for a exceptional long form 3D platformer here.
-----------------------------------------------------------
In case you're just wondering if this game is good and worth checking out, the answer is yes, this is one of the most enjoyable platformers for how short it is, and its free. If thats enough to convince you feel free to download it here. For everyone else, and for my own mind, let me try to dig into the meat of this thing.
Yo! Noid 2 presents itself as a play on the Lost Videogame Media horror trope, this particular case being an old PS1 game. The plot going on here is a tad bit more esoteric than one might originally expect. The game opens with a kitchty abandoned carton pizza mascot who enters and smashes a pizza to bits, the title screen is repeated by an emotionless choir of voices saying his name. Then after fiddling with the start button the game begins with a voiceless FOV scene introducing the smiling bastard, explaining that Yo! Noid lost his yo yo and has to retrieve it. Then, you are dropped into a 3D recreation of the first level in the which is a remake of the first game. A harbor with billboards cascading off into the distance planted in the water and a homogeneity of town houses lining a shoreline long away from you. Thus you platform over lost Domino's cargo and retrieve your yoyo, to then be dropped into the world proper.
Your real task in Yo! Noid 2 is obscured throughout the early point of the game by the sudden introductory level, to such an extent you have to be paying a bit of attention past the blase puns of the protagonist to recognize the divine horror waiting inside.
You are dropped into a vacuum called Noid Void, this is the main hub of the game. As you look around, you'll see sharp brambled blue roads, strange shapeless monuments, and a shattering of glass littering the sky. Several pizza toppings passively inform you of the wasteland the shattered Noid Void has become. They note that the pizza has been 'taken away', a divine sanctuary for the lost topping. Then you search around and find entrances to each of the 3 levels and retrieve the pie back and unravel the mystery of the core of the world.
Right, perhaps it's useful to provide some context to the circumstances. Yo! Noid is an unpopular TV commercial mascot circulating all throughout the 90s, with the idea supposedly being that he represents the tribulations of getting a pizza delivered in 30 minutes or less. There's a decent video on the background of this fucker. I'll do my best to summarize the most relevant bits here, he was abandoned due to a confluence of this type of advertising not being so effective anymore, a hostage situation led by somebody of the same name thinking Noid was made to 'make fun' of him, and most telling of all a series of litigations against Domino's for the reckless driving issues caused by their 30 minutes or free guarantee policy. The mascot and the policy was both quietly shelved as a result. He had 2 tie in games, 1 where hes a jerk, and 1 extremely hard game (the one Yo! Noid 2 riffs off of). He was a product of catchy child TV advertising and theres a few comparison points to other commercials of the era.
We will come back to the implications of this history in a bit, but let me start with the most shallow praise: In many ways, riffing off an abandoned corporate mascot and their sparse 90s commercials and tie-in games, is an incredibly smart concept for a small game. The game was made for a small indie game jam in 1 month, hosted by some website called Waypoint, with the gimmick being that 'Your game title should be a title from Waypoint Radio'. According to an interview the developers had the main inspiration point being that these old retro marketing games, like Pepsiman and Yo! Noid were ahead of their time in terms of realizing that most people do want to actually interact with the brands they see on TV. Therefore, 'hes dabbing because hes SO ahead of his time!' 1 The game revels in this sort of comedic irony born out of both unstable self importance and our often anachronistic relationship with the presumed disposable artifacts of the past.
The main melancholia that comes across throughout the memetic nature of the game then, is an overwhelming sense of abandonment. This is colored even further knowing the game jam itself floundered, actively not calling attention to itself (only getting 4 entries) and according to the interview, they don't even think the people even played it: 'I dont think even to this day the people who run the website have even played our game, they mention it but i dont think theyve ever played it'. The reason to bring this up is this is where the core of the social commentary bites. At one point in one of the earliest stages of the game, you find an 'abandoned miner' at the core of the planet who laments that people probably dont even know he's down there. This is a setup for a joke, he can just leave via the grappling hook, but the fact of the matter is almost all of the characters you talk to are in a state of pure distress about their feelings of abandonment. One rather obvious point to be made about this in a literal sense is that they are the 'unused' toppings on pizza. This is a difficult point to fairly leverage, but when you beat each of the stages, you get large pepperoni pizzas toppling the center, with more characters coming along to reify the pizzas as a sort of religious moment. But the rub is, you don't meet any pepperoni, or in fact any meat characters at all. You meet mushrooms, olives, pineapples, the 'ignored' toppings. You meet a dipping sauce, but the art style rendering the top of it is not from the dominos of our time its from the dominos of the 90s. There's a curious hauntology at work here, as mentioned, the Noid Void hubworld is a bizarre esher like looney toon hellworld, but some guy with a mad trapped imagination, made it up for literally 1 commercial. I'm reminded of the utterly chaotic and ambitious blueprints for pepsi branding, it was shelved before even making it.
We like to assume these dumb mascot and old commercials are 'not art', they are disposable and not worth our memory. And yet at the same time the authors of the game remember this bastard and probably a lot of other commercials from the 90s, even despite some of our best efforts, the garbage art of yore can stick with us and play in our minds. This ability to dismiss consciously as critics and then be nonetheless by these corporate tunes and slogans is one of the main things this game likes to mess with you on.
Today, dominos pizza cardboard coverings are absolutely littered in text and blurbs franticly justifying its own existence as a sales pitch in fevered psychosis, but the cardboard boxes of old just had a domino on them, here's a comparison. This is made even more blatantly funny when you realize that getting all the collectibles on a level make the old box types literally make them golden, the least considered part of pizza is the trash, which is turned to gold. You get no other reward for your troubles, that's it. It's fun to do if you want to, but this lack of reward feels taunting in a way that's glib but not entirely at your expense, if anything it feels like an inside joke based on how trash is treated.
On top of that there's a curious subtheme of labor insecurity hidden in there as well. The examples are endless: the warehouse has a tomato bragging about being from old money, another tomato shirks their job, or the implications of the mining accident, or even the constant dominos cargo boxes littered everywhere. In a roundabout way, they are bringing attention to the slowdown of the world, those workers and their art of the past quietly disposed of, something these corporations urge you not to think about how this was able to happen in the first place. Therefore, people don't want to clean up, they don't want to keep going. This humor and melancholy tension runs the course of the game, with admittedly the humor cropping higher up so not to bum the whole thing out, yet it gives a strange parodic undertone so rare within the medium, the parody leads to a quiet satire biting through, and makes for one of the most impressive final bosses I've ever experienced, which I feel is more worth experiencing than speaking about here.
The other irony embodied by the compulsive puns and general ennui towards the suffering of the inhabitants by our protagonist is as a reflection of a sort of cultural question: Have we moved away from this? The puns all have a strong and discerning wit to them, but this attitude has been around for pretty much half the game protagonists we can count nowadays and several comic book movies (Guardian of the Galaxy comes to mind, or pretty much anything James Gunn has been a part of). You can trade out the smiling face of a middle aged man in a red rabbit suit with a hip young nostalgia gazing youth, but the expectations come off equally hollow, no matter who pilots. Everyone around the protagonist is a joke to riff off of.
With the intellectual bit of it aside, what is there to enjoy in terms of the gameplay? Put simply, the most satisfying and tight precision platforming in almost any 3D game ever. To keep it simple, using a grappling mechanic solves a huge number of issues precision platforming games in a 3D space have difficulty with, that being the inability to know when you should time a jump when coming off a ledge. This is because in 2D space, ideally the camera lets you see how close to a ledge you are, whereas cameras in 3D space are obviously placed behind you by default, and turning the camera to see from the side is not usually too useful in these games since you tend not to be able to zoom out. In this case the issue is dealt with kindly by making it so you don't have to worry as much about being right at the edge for the grappling sections, along with a friction to the wall run that gives you plenty of time to try and time your jumps. On top of all that, the death system really makes it fun and noncommittal, if you mess up a jump it will literally spawn you as close to the last place you fell from where its safe to do so, there's no death system, the only punishment for dying is having to listen to Yo! Noid's horrific twisted scream, before being respawned again nearby anyway. This lienancy helps make the suprisingly high difficulty as non tedious up until the dungeon (which the Pineapple informs you to try last). As for the dab itself, its analog dabbing and you can do it at any time. What's important to understand about this besides just being a dated meme, is that it serves an invisible purpose for those of the figdety nature. You see in a lot of games, people like me often have the impulse of just jumping out of boredom, but this is a way to have a button be pressed without messing up your run, the catharsis of having a button you can press that does nothing functionally is hard to describe to people who dont have this tick. Yet after experiencing it in this game I cant help but wonder why they dont have a fidget noise making button in all games like this.
Beyond that, the audio visual design is stellar. There's so many small effects that I could sit here all day listing them off. The music is all amazing casio piano midi's which sell a funky experience and keep you from losing your cool. The dungeon song in particular has stuck with me for years, but whats even more impressive is that it transitions the music layers based on how high you are, when you start in the area you only hear drums, and you only hear the whole song near the middle of the area if I recall correctly. The sound effects of running are quiet enough not to get on your nerves, theres a small friction and squeak of the shoe and your off running the other direction. The textures for most of the stuff you run and jump on is satisfying, with some spectacle thrown in for good measure to keep things interesting, like a rocket. Each of the 3 levels is also completely distinct, one is a doom-fueled dungeon key puzzler (one of the best designed dungeons ever made, but feel free to look stuff up if you get stuck here). One is an exploratory spectacle harkening back to Mario Galaxy with the may sub worlds you orbit travel and explore, and one is a slow linear platformer through an old warehouse. The real art is that it feeds you just enough of the world before stopping. Had this game gone any longer than its short 2-5 hour experience, I can see myself becoming incredibly exhausted and impatient with it. Instead the short time frame was just enough to tell the short story it wanted to without overstaying its welcome. That said, I hope the developers build a game like this with a slightly less annoying protagonist, because they have the foundation for a exceptional long form 3D platformer here.
2 Comments
*fast food mascots are really behind us now
Erato_Heti
10 months ago