Silver Surfer (NES) Playthrough
0A playthrough of Arcadia's 1990 license-based shooter for the NES, Silver Surfer.
This video shows all three loops through the game. The second begins at 38:41, and the third at 1:15:50.
Software Creations' Silver Surfer, the second and final NES game published by Arcadia (preceeded by Spot: The Video Game https://youtu.be/a8Ezmf6z3kM ), marked the first appearance of Marvel's shiny-skinned, star-surfing superhero in a video game.
The game is an arcade-style shoot 'em up in which Galacticus, a planet-eating super being, has tasked Silver Surfer with collecting the pieces of a cosmic device that, if assembled, would allow creatures from the Magik Domain to invade and destroy Earth.
There are six worlds, each split into three substages, and you can take on the first five in any order you wish. These worlds are led by a crew of supervillains (Reptyl, Mephisto, the Skrull Emperor, Possessor, and Firelord), and once they've all been dealt with, you can head into the Magik Domain to do battle with the big bad and recover the final piece of the device.
Silver Surfer starts out weak, but you can boost his speed and firepower by collecting power-up icons, screen clearing bombs, and orbs that attach to his surfboard (similar to the option pods in Gradius). At full strength, the Silver Surfer is a wrecking ball that smashes through the opposition with ease, but even in this state, you have to be extremely careful. You go down in a single hit, and since you lose all of your power-ups when you die, a momentary lapse in concentration can turn a seemingly easy stage into an impossibly difficult gauntlet in a blink.
It's challenging, but the difficulty level isn't as extreme as the game's reputation would lead you to believe. It requires practice and memorization, but the game showers you with 1-ups, and once you've figured out how to maneuver your huge character sprite through the narrow corridors, everything becomes much easier. At that point, all that's left to do is to build up your thumb callouses - there's no autofire option, so you'll be hammering the A button the entire time. (My fingers felt like they were about to fall off by the end!)
The game looks great - the enemies are large, the bullets are easy to track, instances of slowdown and flicker are rare, and the artists got a ton of mileage out of the NES's limited color palette. And then there's the music, which is some of Tim and Geoff Follin's best work on the NES. There aren't many tracks, but the ones that are here are phenomenal - there must be some sort of black magic going on to draw sound like this from a mere four channels of PSG synth.
I'm a big fan of Silver Surfer. It doesn't play in the same league as GunNac and Life Force, but it's a stylish and fun game that provides a solid challenge, and it's the best of the Marvel NES games.
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