Yo! Noid Victory
This is a guide on how to win at Yo! Noid for the NES. It is dedicated to my friend Ryan. This game is a 2D side scrolling platformer. It may seem like a cheesy low budget game at first glance. But after playing it for the past couple months off-and-on, I’ve come to hold a great deal of respect for this fast paced game. Yo! Noid does not in any way allow the player to “Go Easy” on his or herself. You need to be alert and thinking ahead every step of the way. If you are the kind of player who is good at dodging enemies, you will need to use those skills to survive. If you are an aggressive player that likes to rack up points, you will need that personality as well in order to maintain your score and get extra lives. And believe me, you will need all the extra lives you can get. Do you remember in Batman Begins when the main bad guy was training Bruce Wayne at the frozen lake? There was a part where he said to Bruce Wayne, “Mind your surroundings, Bruce.” You will need to heed that advice for Yo! Noid.
Instead of giving you a complete walkthrough of the entire game, read on to have the skills you need in order to be victorious in Yo! Noid In the first couple stages, you will notice that there are strange blocks that float around with roman numeral, “II” or “III” on them. Also, you may see an exclamation mark floating around as well. If you pick these up and survive to an odd numbered stage, you will get to a pizza eating contest with an enemy Noid. The evil Noid will always go first. If you pick a higher numbered pizza than the enemy noid then you will eat the difference of the pizzas. If you use one of those roman numeral things then the amount of pizzas you will have eaten will be multiplied by either “2x” or “3x” depending on whether or not you choose a “II” or “III” pizza modifier. The most important thing to know about this is that if you are able to fill up all the pizza slots and not let the enemy Noid eat a single slice, then you will not only recieve 100,000 bonus points. (You only need 200,000 points to get a free life) You will also get an extra continue! This is key to winning the game because the game gets challenging, especially in the later stages. The first stage you won’t be able to do a clean sweep against the enemy Noid, so you should use your slices strategically in order to achieve a close victory. Remember, the hot sauce and the pepper will make it so the evil Noid can’t use his slices, so use those whenever the Noid picks a high-numbered card of slices.
As you get to the later stages you will be tempted to use your multiplier cards sparingly against the Noid in order to win the battle. But the key is to try and beat him as fast as possible. One thing that you should know is that in the stages beyond stage 3, there are many slice modifier “II” things that are actually invisible. And you need to attack the air like a fool constantly in order to make them appear and for you to take them. So make sure to jump around all the time and search with your yo-yo to find these items. If you don’t do this, you won’t collect enough modifiers in order to do a clean sweep against the enemy Noid on the pizza eating contests.
One thing to mention is that if you do not win the pizza eating contest, you will loose a life and will be sent back to the beginning of the last platforming stage. So it is imperative that when you play a pizza eating contest, you win.
The power-ups in the game are small scrolls and large scrolls. If you attack a large scroll with your yo-yo then a special move item will appear. (or sometimes a 1-up item will appear) The special move is usually a snowflake or a pogo-stick looking thing. But there are others as well. The snowflake move is activated when you have at least an entire horizontal bar of “small scrolls” at the bottom of the screen. To activate it you press, “Down” and “B.” Since it takes an entire horizontal bar, you can only cast the snowflake skill twice before refilling your small scrolls. But the cool thing about this ability, is that you can destroy all destructible enemies on the screen, including flying ones.
The pogo stick skill is cool too, because it can kill enemies that are on the ground with an earthquake. Also it only uses a fraction of the amount of small scrolls to do so. But being able to destroy flying targets is far superior so I prefer the snowflake skill.
There is a fast-run skill also but I haven’t had a lot of luck with that one. Maybe you will have a better time using this ability.
Yo! Noid - Apartment Stages
Sometimes even getting to the pizza eating contest is a tall order. The first really challenging stage is the second one. There is ice everywhere. A thing to remember here is that when you jump on the floating ice things that travel from side to side, they are slippery. So you need to move in the opposite direction of the one that you were jumping in, in order to stay still and not fall off. In the part where there are two of these things, you can jump then walk a bit to the left to stay stationary. Then wait for the second one to pass you, for some reason it is safer to be patient here. Then when you get closer the second time, do a timed jump onto the other moving ice platform. But you will probably need to jump immediately after you touch down and do a jumping dance on the platform in order to get across. I’ve only been able to land on the second one and stay still a couple times. And it takes a serious amount of practice.
When you’re on the skateboarding stage, the trickiest thing is the football dropping guys. Their footballs explode after a short amount of time. But if you are patient, most of the time these enemies will simply fly over you and their footballs will explode before they hit you. The long jump at the end is doable by picking up some speed from the incline and jumping at the last second before falling off the ramp.
The stage where the dock moves up when you hit a “dock icon” is where you first encounter the invisible, “II” and “III” items. So you should start attacking the air and memorizing where you find the power-ups. The main thing to keep in mind for this stage is Patience. There are this flying fish that jump out and if you are too hasty, they will kill you. So when you jump to a new area inch forward a bit and take out the flying fish. There is this one part where you encounter a silver frog who seems to be invincible. I’ve tried hitting this fool hundreds of times with my yo-yo and he keeps on dancing. This frog is legit and it is best to just jump over this kid before he 2-steps all over you. The cannons in this stage are tricky but you can use the snowflake skill to destroy the bubbles before they explode. If you hit the cannon bubbles with your yo-yo they will send out dangerous smoke that kills you in a wider radius than it you dodge them or use snowflake skill.
In the strange propeller flying stage, you need to immediately press “A” to get a boost of altitude. It was really funny when I first played this stage because I just dropped like a log and died. I busted up laughing when this happened. “Little warning, thanks?!?” Watch out for the flying squirrels.
Yo Noid! Late Stages
The next stage that is worth mentioning is the circus level. This stage scrolls automatically and you need to move quickly to survive. Many of the carousel creatures turn into bad guys. But the ones that are over botomless pits never turn into bad guys. You need to jump on these things fast and don’t be too patient. If you hesitate then you will die. In later levels the main things to think about is searching for the “II” and “III” items. This circus stage is especially in line with this. The Enemy Noids keep getting more and more slices of pizza to choose from during each pizza eating contest so you will need all the bonuses you can get.
The second to the last stage which is a tall winding apartment exterior is definitely worth discussing in detail. There are these flower pots that come out of windows and you need to get close without dying. Then within range, fire your yo-yo blindly for a while until you kill a couple of them. (you will hear a sound) Then jump over the window. This part is kind of like real life. Standing underneath an open window is a bad idea. You want to stay moving on this stage. There is this sewing machine thing that fires out debris. It is really dangerous. You need to move extremely quickly and get it to shoot at you in one direction and then jump up to the next ledge as fast as you can. If you stand still you will get killed. The hilarious part of this stage is when you go up against a police officer who is tossing a barrel down at you. You need to jump over the barrel. Running away from it will not help. If you run away it will seriously chase you down the entire ridiculous stage. And if you get too close to the police officer he will pull out his Billy Club and terminate you. But if you hang back the cop will simply jump down the apartment to his doom. So don’t try to 1 on 1 the police.
The last stage is another flying stage and it is actually really fun. Just make sure to pick up as many “II” and “III” items as you can. Because you will need them for the final battle with the Green Noid.
Overall this game is excellent for building reflexes and pattern recognition. Like many of the old games, it focuses on dexterity and skill instead of level grinding and perseverance. Even though it is extremely easy to die in this game, it is not very discouraging and if you give it breaks it is a lot of fun. It isn’t rewarding enough of game play to jam out during a weekend. This game is best come back to over a longer period, very casually, in order to gauge how your reflexes and zen concentration is building.
I’d recommend this game to anyone who wants a beatable game that has serious challenge. This is not an impossible game, but it does require some memorization of enemy movement and hidden item locations.
-Tyler