Oh, Yo Bro. One of the few American-exclusive TurboGrafx-16 games, Yo Bro - as its unambiguous name might suggest - depicts the adventures of a skateboarding bear in Santa Cruz. The game has a definite ToeJam and Earl flair, from its incredibly 90s presentation to its sorta open-world nature, though Yo Bro is considerably worse. Its problems are largely due to the game design, which feels like it was cobbled together from loose notes someone was taking while playing Skate or Die and imagining how much more fun it would be if instead of tricks and races you had to stand perfectly still to accurately shoot a series of stationary targets until they eventually died. And then made that dream a reality with a skateboarding bear on the TurboGrafx-16. And then liberally applied Beach Boys MIDIs all over it. (Guys, the TG-CD was already out, you could've used the real thing.)
But hey, October's all about horrors, is it not?
Who is Skateboarding? Bear is Skateboarding! How Can That Be?
Welcome to Yo Bro! Most video game sites seem to call this game "Yo' Bro", but that's clearly a comma and not an apostrophe. I'm sorry, but proper punctuation is what I consider "radical".We open stage 1 with a stock B-Movie monster and children to rescue. Holy crap, is this Zombies Ate My Neighbors? But with skateboarding?So this is the game. It kind of can't decide between being regular top-down or isometric top-down so it just kind of switches between them on the fly. The angles aren't the only things obtuse about this game though, oh my no.Collecting the kids removes them from harm and gives me points, but it doesn't seem essential for completing the stage. The compass arrow down there is instead directing me towards the enemies.Like this guy. The thing about these plants is that they appear somewhere in the level, quickly get bigger and then start releasing annoying bouncing enemies once fully grown. To kill it - and we have to kill it, as that is the bear's mission - we have to stand here and try to out-DPS its growth rate. This means no skateboard drive-bys or taking bombing dives and whizzing around for another run: the only way to reliably kill these things is to stand perfectly still and hope you don't get ganked by other nearby enemies while you slowly wear it down. It's easily the most asinine design decision one could feasibly make for a skateboarding game.When I say "hope you don't get ganked by other enemies", I'm specifically referring to Dickweed Dog over here. He skates about as badly as you do, but he's tenacious and will continue to stalk and troll you throughout the level, regardless of how often you kick his ass. As you can imagine, the task of standing perfectly still to shoot plants with a slingshot for an hour isn't any easier with him around.I have no idea what Skarf even means. I can barely remember most of my 90s surfer speak. Wasn't Skarf the mascot character in Thundercats?Finally, all the Audrey IIs are taken care of. The game does give you a generous eight health points and opportunities to replenish it, so it's not utterly without compassion. Skateboard Bear now does the solemn victory dance of his people.Man, I'd hope they were all alive. What kind of sick kiddy snuff game is this?Damn it, we just killed all the Venus Flytraps. Man, random "Africanized Killer Bee" scares take me back though. This game's making me feel old, and it's not just because of all the outdated lingo I've mercifully forgotten.Hey! This sneaky rat bastard is the one leaving these things everywhere! Apparently killing him doesn't stop the proliferation of deadly menaces, but I can secure some sense of sadistic satisfaction by murdering these mercurial murinae.The beehives are considerably worse than the plants. Rather than regenerating their health, they spawn wave after wave of deadly bee swarms at you, making it very hard to do the requisite "stand in place and shoot constantly for twenty seconds" rigmarole. If obnoxiousness was a piano, Yo Bro would be considered a bold and exciting new talent.Just to demonstrate what happens to that dog if you do manage to knock him on his constantly juking ass: he just lies there like a sulking toddler.Seriously, the most dangerous thing about this dude is his unpredictability, because he wobbles around like he's been drinking to forget an inner ear infection. Since you have to spend a minute moving the skateboard around to point yourself in the right direction, it's hard to get a bead on him.Anyway, last we'll see of him for a while. Just have to deal with the thousands of bees that spawned while I was getting distracted. Hooray.It is at this point that I say "later days dork!" to Yo Bro, with no small amount of relief.
Yo Bro, tho. While theoretically speaking a smack-talking sk8rbear might be worth a mocking chuckle (mockle?) or two, no further chuckles were to transpire once the game had revealed its means of progression. I would've been way happier skating around the level collecting the various kids in peril instead of tediously eliminating minion-spawning and regenerating enemies - the NPC rescue system worked well enough for countless 16-bit games, including the aforementioned Zombies Ate My Neighbors which felt like a big influence on the game (well, except for the whole "Yo Bro was released first" issue with that supposition).
So, in conclusion, Yo Bro had some interesting ideas for an open-world action game that it failed to capitalize on in a way that didn't make me want to replace a skateboard ramp with my own head, but there would eventually be others to pick up its wiggity-wack slack. I suppose if Yo Bro was in some way indirectly responsible for ToeJam & Earl or ZATM I can forgive its irritating and ill-advised game design.
Talking of zombies, this game was created by the same guys behind the equally mediocre Ghost Manor: ICOM, those pioneers of the point and click genre. Seriously, what happened to those guys?
