 It's always weird when you run into a corporate sponsored video game and it ends up actually being halfway decent, or in some cases, pretty good. Look at Coolspot for both Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis. That game is a perfectly good playthrough, it stars the old 7-up logo and the entire game is designed to get you to go and buy soda. Meanwhile, on the NES there was stuff like Yo Noid, starring the old Domino's Pizza mascot, The Noid, a mischievous little claymation dude whose primary objective in life was to prevent Domino's customers from getting their pizza in 30 minutes or less. Whoa, wait a second, this game was published by Capcom and developed by Now Production who had a hand in games like Jackie Chan's Action Kung Fu and the Adventure Island series? This game can't be bad. Well, it's not bad, but it's not all that great either. It's essentially a reskin of the Famicom title, common-known ninja, Hanamaru, and it was localized in the US a few months later to include The Noid and all sorts of references to pizza. The story was also changed, so you have to rid New York City of Mr. Green because John Mayer knows you can, I guess? You use your super yo-yo and various other power-ups to get through 14 levels on 3 lives and 1 continue. No saves or passwords and there's 1 hit deaths here. Yup, you better believe it is cheap as hell. Even touching water kills you. The thing is though, the point system makes it very easy to earn extra continues, so don't let that scare you off. The end of each odd-numbered level has not a boss fight, but a pizza-eating contest against that particular area's defending champion. And it's pretty much just a card game. Your opponent selects a random card, then you pick a card, one with a higher number if it's available, and whoever has the higher number wins that round and earns the difference between the two numbers in pizza. Whoever fills their meter at the bottom first wins. For example, if the computer selects a card with a 2 on it and you select 3, you get 1 pizza. You can also deploy tactics like choosing the pepper card that makes the boss's pizza taste like crap, and you can collect these items for later use throughout each level. This is a nice idea, and I appreciate that it's something different, but it drags on for way too long, and after a while I'd have preferred just a good old-fashioned boss fight. There's also levels where you're on a skateboard or floating around with this mini-propeller thing or bouncing around on the Noid's pizza crusher. There's hidden areas you can jump into where you play whack-a-mole for a while, and there's also power-ups available if you hit these scroll things with your yo-yo. You can eventually use Dark Noid, which allows you to speed up and jump higher, and there's clear screen attacks you can use as well. Just press down and B to make them happen. I should note that in the original version of this game in Japan, instead of a yo-yo, your character has a hawk that sits perched on his shoulder and attacks enemies. Your hawk also carries you instead of using that propeller thing. It's entirely cosmetic, but I don't know, it sure seems a lot cooler than, you know, some goofy pizza mascot. The boss fights are the same, only instead of pizza you're comparing weapons, I guess. It's still just as tedious, unfortunately. Most of the other stuff between the two games remains the same, they just altered the settings and the enemies in the North American version. So yeah, Yo-Noid is extremely average. It is an interesting game at times, but certain parts can really drag and bore the hell out of you, and overall the game does just barely enough to vary the enemy and level design to keep everything at least kinda sorta worthwhile. Like this auto-scrolling level here that evidently takes place on a merry-go-round, or the propeller stage, which is actually pretty tricky. Still, there's a lot here that's just the same old platforming stuff you've played through in a million other games. Yo-Noid is a great example of the sentiment, you could do a lot better, but you could also do a lot worse. And I wanna thank you for watching, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.