Spy Hunter (NES) Playthrough
310A playthrough of Sunsoft's 1987 action game for the NES, Spy Hunter.
The game has no formal ending and just loops once you've reached a certain point, so I played until I got a game over on the third loop.
Spy Hunter is one of the first games I played on the NES. One of my neighborhood friends had it, and whenever we'd go over to his house, we'd always end up plugging in either this or Ms. Pac-Man on the 2600. (This was 1987, so the 2600 was still fair game!) I was into both games, but Spy Hunter was definitely the cooler of the two.
It's a conversion of Bally Midway's popular 1983 arcade game, and it's a pretty good one! The entire game consists of a single track that you race across as the seasons change. You're supposed to "protect" the innocent people (red vehicles) by wiping out the criminals (blue vehicles and helicopters), getting as high a score as possible before you run out of lives. You can shoot at the bad guys with your hood-mounted machine gun, and once you've hooked up with the supply truck, you'll also have missiles, oil slicks, and smoke bombs at your disposal.
If you can figure out a way to get to the ramp, you can also grab a speedboat and rocket down the river that runs parallel to the track, but this is really only a good option if you're feeling especially lucky. Or suicidal.
As a kid, I'd get so excited when I got to the boat part, but more often than not I'd end up dead almost instantly. That was usually pretty crushing because the game was so hard and it always felt like a feat to make it that far, even.
Of course, back then it never occurred to me to race at anything below the top speed, and that's probably the worst way to play the game. At your fastest, you won't able to reliably dodge the cars you're trying to overtake, and you'll end up exploding a lot. It becomes much more manageable when you ease off the gas. Your stock of extra lives may even manage to last for longer than thirty seconds!
The game looks pretty good on the NES, and the 8-bit rendition of the Peter Gunn theme from Blues Brothers gets down and funky with that triangle bass.
It's funny to think back now on how many hours I put into Spy Hunter as a kid considering how little there is to it, but even now I still enjoy playing it. In my mind, it's a classic NES game. What do you guys think?
Also be sure to check out its NES-exclusive sequel, Super Spy Hunter. It's amazing. https://youtu.be/6nRAxly-RIQ
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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