ToeJam & Earl

You can’t go home again.

One could say that is the story of ToeJam & Earl, a game about two aliens from the planet Funkotron stranded on the planet Earth. But it’s also the story of retro game players seeking the games they loved as children.

ToeJam and Earl was my first purchase on the Wii Virtual Console. The experience was comparatively painless (even allowing me to use a gift card to purchase company scrip). The download took perhaps a minute, and now the game appears on the front page of my Wii main menu. In a nice touch, returning to the main menu from the game quietly suspends it and saves your state, even across reboots. This allows you to ignore save points in Virtual Console games with aplomb.

ToeJam is a bit mysterious. At first glance it looks like a simple platform game: run around, avoid enemies, collect powerups, and try to find the pieces of your missing ship. If you play for a while, though, you’ll notice a few interesting things.

First off, each area or level is large and takes a while to explore. After you’ve fully explored a level (and found a piece of your ship, if one is there) you can proceed to the next level. Along the way you’ll find little presents. When you first find the presents, you don’t know what they do. Opening a present uses it and also tells you what it is (for example, you may discover that all green presents with purple polka dots and a yellow bow contain roller skates). So using a present is somewhat like reading a magic scroll. The equivalent of healing potions can be found in the form of food. The yummier the food, the more it heals you – bad tasting foods, conversely, hurt you.

Periodically you’ll meet a man in a carrot costume who, in exchange for money, will identify your presents. The presents are randomized at the start of every game.
That’s when the realization hits you like a ton of bricks: ToeJam & Earl is a rogue-like game. It’s NetHack for the Sega Genesis crowd.

In some ways, ToeJam is even better than most rogue-likes because it is multiplayer. One player can control the bright-red three-legged ToeJam, resplendent in his baseball cap and gold chains, and the other player can control big orange Earl of the Ray-Ban sunglasses. Players can explore together, or wander off in different directions and play via split-screen. If players bump into each other, the funkotronic aliens will high-five and heal the more injured character. You can count the number of games on the market that have an enjoyable cooperative mode on two hands. So if you enjoy playing co-op games, that might be reason enough to pick up ToeJam & Earl.

The user interface is simple and straightforward: move with the game pad, and activate and manage present effects with the buttons. The graphics are primitive, even by 1992 standards. As a single player game, ToeJam and Earl is less fun than you remember. As a cooperative game, however, it can shine.

ToeJam & Earl was distinctive enough that it spawned two sequels: the more traditional Genesis platformer, Panic on Funkotron, and the weakly-received Xbox release, Mission to Earth. I like to think that the latter two games failed because they were less like NetHack.

If you’ve been looking for something to spend your Wii Points on, this is one of the three best choices at the moment.