Nobody liked J.J. and Jeff when it was originally published for the TurboGrafx-16 roughly 17 years ago, so it's a bit of a surprise to see that Hudson has gone through the effort of making it available for the Wii's Virtual Console. The game's bathroom-inspired humor is occasionally amusing, but the slippery characters and sketchy collision detection render this Super Mario Bros. wannabe practically unplayable.
J.J. and Jeff are two geeky detectives who have set out to rescue a kidnapped businessman in a land full of wild dogs and snapping crabs. It doesn't matter which character you pick. Jeff wears sunglasses and J.J. doesn't, but they both run at the same speed and jump to the same height, and they both can perform the same high kick and low spray-paint attacks. Getting through all 24 levels contained within the game's six areas primarily involves jumping between platforms and bouncing atop enemies. At the end of each area, you won't encounter an angry dinosaur named Bowser. You will, however, have to kick the bejeezus out of a muscular goon who doffs a new wig every time you meet him. Touching enemies will take away some of your vitality meter, while falling into a pit or landing in fire will outright cost you one of your lives. Conversely, you regain vitality by collecting fruit items or by gambling coins in the slot machines that are frequently hidden in the roadside bathrooms you come across.
Toilet humor is the game's defining aspect. The level layouts aren't especially memorable, the squeaky sounds and repetitive beats are forgettable, and the large characters and colorful backgrounds are merely passable. In 1990, J.J. and Jeff etched itself into the minds of stubborn TurboGrafx owners with frequent references to excrement. Birds will often drop a pile your way as they fly overhead, and other animals will sometimes target you with their dung as they recoil from one of your attacks. About once per level, you'll encounter the character you didn't pick standing idly in the background or hurling soda cans at you from a garbage bin. However, on rare occasions, you'll notice that he's standing there with his back to you with his knees bent slightly, as if he is urinating.
Considering that the Mortal Kombat controversy and the ESRB rating system arose a couple of years after J.J. and Jeff was originally published, you might think it's insane that parents and politicians never made a stink over the game's scat jokes. Part of that is because the TurboGrafx didn't quite have the popularity of other consoles from the era. The other reason is that a good number of people who actually played J.J. and Jeff shut the system off out of frustration within a couple minutes and, as a consequence, didn't realize the extent of the game's toilet humor. Momentum causes the characters to keep sliding when you try to stop or change direction, which makes it almost impossible to survive the brutal jump sequences that are commonplace throughout the game. On top of that, the collision detection varies so much that you'll frequently fall through the edge of a platform or take damage from an enemy that you clearly weren't touching. Fighting with the controls and losing lives for no good reason sure takes the piss out of the game's bathroom humor.
J.J. and Jeff is probably the only console-based video game to incorporate dodging animal droppings as a gameplay feature. While that's neat from an antiestablishment perspective, the presence of poo doesn't make up for the game's sloppy programming.
