Super Spy Hunter (NES) Playthrough
476A playthrough of Sunsoft's 1992 combat racing game for the NES, Super Spy Hunter.
Super Spy Hunter is not a conversion of Bally Midway's 1987 arcade game Spy Hunter II. Rather, it is an original work by Sunsoft that was originally released in Japan under the name "Battle Formula." Since Sunsoft still had the rights to the name after publishing the NES version of the original Spy Hunter (https://youtu.be/EfEVTwvjWq4 ), they rebadged Battle Formula as Super Spy Hunter to capitalize on the popularity of the name.
The premise of both games is similar - you're still driving a car at breakneck speeds while blasting anything that gets in your way - but Super Spy Hunter amps things up considerably.
This time, the action is split up into six distinct "scenes," each featuring their own tracks, backdrops, and hazards, and each is capped off with a boss battle against some sort of massive mechanical monstrosity. You can collect items to give you access to special attacks and upgrades to your life gauge and weapons, and you also have the option to allow the computer to control the aim of your roof-mounted canons. At one point your car even turns into a plane and the game temporarily becomes a proper vertical scrolling shooter.
These are all welcome upgrades, but the real star of Super Spy Hunter is its presentation. Sunsoft was on an incredible streak in the latter half of 1991, releasing hit after hit after hit on the NES. Being released in the same six month span of time that brought us classics like Batman: Return of the Joker, Ufouria, and Mr. Gimmick, Super Spy Hunter is a shining example of how far Sunsoft had come since the early days of the NES. By early 1992, their mastery of the NES hardware was second-to-none (besting even the mighty Konami in many ways!), and they had they honed their "house style" to a blinding finish.
At first glance, Super Spy Hunter doesn't even look like an NES game. The fast-scrolling roadways twist and turn through some creative manipulation of raster interrupts to create the illusion of rotation similar to what you'd see in SNES games that used Mode 7. The animated backdrops, use of foreground objects, and some nifty special effects (check out the animation of the cables on the suspension bridge at 1:49!) help to sell the illusion of 3D, and for a truly jaw-dropping NES spectacle, check out the faked scaling effect as your car goes flying off the freeway at 14:14.
Granted, all of these effects really put a strain on the ancient 8-bit hardware - bouts of severe slowdown are a regular occurrence - but the action seems to have been designed around this, and when the screen is covered in heavy fire you'll appreciate the extra breathing room, because Super Spy Hunter is not an easy game. It's a fair but demanding and fast-paced test of your reflexes, and I appreciated how it held off on using most of its insta-kill traps until the final stretch of the game.
Finally, it would be criminal not to mention the soundtrack. Composed by Sunsoft's all-star musical duo Naoki Kodaka and Nobuyuki Hara, the music is an excellent complement to the fast action. Most of the tracks incorporate elements of the Peter Gunn theme used in the original Spy Hunter, and they make heavy use of digitized bass samples, so the music sounds similar in style to games like Journey to Silius and Fester's Quest.
Super Spy Hunter is a top-notch game that surpasses the original Spy Hunter in every way imaginable, and it's a technical tour de force for the NES hardware. If you want to see Sunsoft at their absolute peak, look no further.
At the end of the video I also included a quick look at the nifty hidden Pong mini-game that you can play for extra lives.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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