YMMV / Joust

• Breather Level: In the original Joust, every fifth wave is an "Egg Wave" where all enemies start out as eggs; the more you can collect before they hatch, the fewer enemies you have to joust down later. The sequel's version of the wave is moderately more challenging but is still trivial with the right strategy and proper use of the players' mounts' transform ability.
• Demonic Spiders: The pterodactyl is played up to be invincible, but it's "merely" one of these.
• First Installment Wins: Good luck finding someone who's heard of Joust 2 or the pinball adaptation. The former having a much lower production run compared to its predecessor of only 1,000 units and never getting any ports until the 2000's and the later having an even lower production run of less than half that didn't help either case.
• Goddamned Bats: The Lance-nosed Crystal Bat enemies in Joust 2. They are about half the size of the riders but play by all the rules of jousting and they get their own dedicated waves before the Egg Waves where the players must fight swarms of them.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • A minor bug in the pterodactyl's AI makes it possible (but difficult) to kill it and score major bonus points in the process. Arcade operators back in the day were not amused.
  • Due to the height difference between the birds' flying and walking animations, it is possible to fly so low to a platform that the bird cannot actually land on it, and instead 'bounces' across the surface while flying. A particular glitch in the Wrap Around stage design can allow a player to "belly flop" through one platform and score a kill on an opponent (or player) camped out underneath it.
• Memetic Mutation: "Buzzard bait!"
• Retroactive Recognition: The Famicom port was the very first game Hal Laboratory made for Nintendo, and the very first game their future CEO Satoru Iwata programmed for them. It is a remnant of a failed deal between Atari and Nintendo to distribute the NES in Western markets.

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