The original Olympians had nothing on this crew.

Impressive font!

To Beat: Set the high score in all events
To Complete: Set the high score in all events in a single playthrough
What I Did: Completed the game
Played: 7/1/21 – 7/13/21
Difficulty: 3/10
My Difficulty: 5/10
My Video: Caveman Games Longplay

The humble caveman in prehistoric times has been a classic framing device for video games. The NES has its fair share of caveman-themed titles. Two I previously finished are Bonk’s Adventure and The Flintstones: The Rescue of Dino and Hoppy. There’s also Trog, The Adventures of Dino Riki, Joe and Mac, and more to come. This trend carried on to the 16-bit era with games like Chuck Rock and Prehistorik Man. I think cavemen in media at large peaked with the Geico Cavemen commercials in the 2000s and haven’t yet recovered from there. But no matter, now is a good time to reflect on today’s game, Caveman Games, a series of mini-games with this prehistoric theme.

The game Caveman Ugh-lympics first appeared on both the Commodore 64 1988 and MS-DOS in 1989. The game was developed by Dynamix and published by Electronic Arts. The only other port of this game was to the NES where it was renamed Caveman Games. The NES version was only released in North America in October 1990. The Caveman Games NES port was also done by Dynamix and published by Data East. This game is Dynamix’s only NES game development credit; they were much more prolific on personal computers.

Caveman Games is a simple collection of six mini-games that play out like the cavemen version of The Olympics. There’s no story to be found, and there’s also no ending to this game. The mini-games are called Mate Toss, Fire Making, Dino Race, Saber Race, Clubbing, and Dino Vault. Each game has a default high score, so to beat this game, clear all the games and beat the high score in each one.

Many games would benefit from an Intimidation Phase.

To get started, after the title screen you will select the number of players. Choose from between 1-6 players, alternating play. Each player will get to choose one of six characters from the caveman selection screen. Each character has a portrait and full text description on a separate screen. After that you will see the main menu. Practice mode lets you play any single event as many times as you want. Start The Games is the main mode where you’ll play all six events in sequence. The Caves of Fame is where you go to see the high scores for each of the games. There are practice high scores as well as competition high scores maintained separately. There’s no battery so high scores are not preserved. The menu also has a Restart option to start things over from scratch.

The character you choose will have an effect on your performance in the games. Pick from Glunk, Crudla, Thag, Ugha, Gronk, or Vincent. Gronk is the best athlete and is strong in every event, good for beginning players. Vincent is the opposite. He isn’t good at any of the events and is the choice for experienced players. The other four characters are strong in only two of the six events. In my playthrough I went with Crudla, who is the only female character of the group. I thought she was the most interesting one.

The first event of the game is Clubbing. This is a fighting game between two players on top of a cliff. The event starts off with the Intimidation Phase. Here you press the D-pad buttons and A and B as frantically as you can. A strong performance here will put your competitor closer to the edge on their side. Then you’ll go into the battle part or the Clubbing Phase. Press Left or Right to move along the cliff and press A to do various attacks. Just tap A to do a face hit. Up with A does an overhead smash, while Down with A does a knee attack. You can press Down to duck. Another thing you can do is hold the A button to point your finger in an attempt to distract the opponent. This game has rock, paper, scissors mechanics where some attacks naturally counter others. To win this game, you can either deplete the opponent’s health bar or push them to the edge of the cliff so they fall off. Matches are best two out of three.

Just escaped the jaws of defeat!

The next event is the Mate Toss. This is like the hammer throw. One character drags another character across the screen by their ankles. Press the D-pad directions in a counter-clockwise motion to spin around. As you spin you can gradually speed up the rotation to build up momentum and speed. When you are ready to launch press and briefly hold A. This builds up the angle meter for the launch angle of the throw, then let go of A to toss. You can’t take too long spinning or everyone will get dizzy and you’ll miss the throw altogether. You get three attempts to toss as far as you can.

The third event is the Dino Vault, this game’s version of the pole vault where you leap over a dinosaur. This game is scored based on how high the dino’s head is positioned. You begin by setting the height anywhere you want, then you can start running. Mash the A button to run as fast as you can. When you approach the dinosaur, you’ll press and hold the B button to plant your pole. It will bend back far, and at the right time let go of B to make your jump. If you wait too long to plant your pole, you’ll fall into the ravine. But if you don’t jump high enough you’ll end up in the dino’s mouth, and that’s no place for a caveman. You get three attempts at this event too.

Game 4 is the Dino Race. This race is done with split screen with your character on the top and the opponent at the bottom. When the race begins, mash the A button to start running. This course has obstacles in the way and you press B to jump over them. The dino leaps are deliberately slow so you need to press B in advance to time the jump properly, and you also need to be running fast enough to clear the obstacles at all. If you miss an obstacle, you may have to press Left to back up and try again. Another thing you can try is pressing Right to bop your dino in the head. This can cause the dino to start running faster and he will automatically jump over obstacles for you for awhile. This technique is helpful but is best used sparingly as it can cause the dino to get confused and stall your progress for some time. You only get one try at this event before moving on.

Fire starting is exhausting work.

The penultimate event is Fire Making. This is one of the more complex events, as I would expect starting a fire would be. You will be competing alongside another caveman here. Once again, mash the A button to start rubbing your sticks together. You want to get the meter from the green bar into the red to start making sparks. Here is where you will use Up to breathe in and Down to breathe out to generate some oxygen for the fire to burn. The technique is to tap Down to do short breaths to get the sparks to ignite, then once it starts smoking you want to do deeper breaths in a slower Up and Down cadence to build up the fire. Sometimes you need to go back to mashing A to get more sparks if the fire doesn’t light the first time. If you are breathing too fast, you’ll get lightheaded and dizzy, taking you briefly out of the action. What’s more is that you can press the B button to bop your neighbor and impede their progress, but they can do the same to you. They will look over toward you if they are about to strike. You can duck by pressing Down to avoid the blow and keep your fire going. It’s a neat idea for a game but it takes practice to get the feel for it. For this event, you get two tries to set a strong time.

The last event is the Saber Race. This is similar to the Dino Race with the same split-screen setup and similar controls. The player and opponent appear together on the top half while a tiger is in view on the bottom half. The camera stays focused on you and the tiger on the respective halves. Mash the A button to run and press B on the run to jump over obstacles. If you line up with your opponent, you can press any direction on the D-pad to grab them and shove them backward, putting them in harm’s way before yourself. Of course, the tables can be turned against you too. You only get one shot to clear this event.

This was my first time beating Caveman Games. I have a vague memory of playing this game when I was a kid, perhaps at a babysitter’s house or friend’s house. It’s not the kind of game, thematically or gameplay-wise, that I would have rented myself. This is a common game, worth about $10 for a loose cart.

Putting your opponent in danger is key.

Caveman Games is pretty straightforward to beat. A few runs of the practice mode to learn the controls will lead quickly to a clear of this game. What felt right to me to consider it done was to beat all of the records in a single playthrough. Over multiple playthroughs in a session, this isn’t that bad, but to do it all at once can be tricky. I found the challenge here greater than in Snoopy’s Silly Sports Spectacular, a similar game I already finished, as there is less of a margin for error because here you must do well in each individual event.

The worst issue I dealt with in clearing Caveman Games is fatigue. Four of the six events in the game have a focus on mashing the A button, and they all come in a row at the end of the Games. I was good for two attempts, maybe three, in a single session before I lost effectiveness and had to shelve the game for the night. I don’t know if it was simply fatigue or just general difficulty, but it took many tries to get a clean run at the Saber Race, the final event. I would either get thrown to the tiger and lose or finish too slowly to break the record. It’s annoying for sure for that to be the last event of the sequence where you only have one attempt and are at the mercy of the opponent’s randomness. After wearing out from 20-30 minutes of attempts, I started ahead on the next NES game on my list, and that was the right call.

Mini-game compilations like Caveman Games don’t excite me too much, but this game is well done for what it is. The graphics in the game do well to carry the theme, with an intentionally crude looking font and unique looking characters. There are some nice looking animations at times, such as the wobbling of the pole in the Dino Vault. The music is also pretty decent whenever it actually plays. Much of the game is either in silence or backed by sound effects only. The controls here are solid. Everything responds as it should, and though jumping in some of the running events feels sluggish, I can tell it is done that way by design. It is unfortunate that most of the games resort to mashing the A button, but that is just how these games were designed, a product of their time. I would rather play Snoopy, but that doesn’t make this a bad game, far from it.

#181 – Caveman Games