The Hunt for Red October (NES) Playthrough
277A playthrough of Hi Tech Expressions' 1991 license-based submarine shoot 'em up for the NES, The Hunt for Red October.
The Hunt for Red October for the NES, based on the 1990 film starring Sean Connery and Alec Baldwin (which itself was based on a Tom Clancy novel), was developed by Beam and released just after the close of the 1990 holiday season.
Like the film, The Hunt for Red October on the NES has you, as Jack Ryan, lurking about in a submarine trying to track down a Russian boat. In order to keep their tech from the Americans, the Kremlin formally requests the aid of the US government in a search-and-destroy operation, claiming concern for the safety of America's eastern seaboard. The Red October is fully capable of launching missiles with nuclear payloads, and the window to intercept is shrinking fast.
So then, you might be asking yourself what this all means when it's translated into gameplay. Is it a strategy game with war scenarios? An adventure game with a heavy focus on military politics? A straight action-shooter along the lines of Sqoon or In the Hunt?
Nope, nope, and nope.
It's a shooter, yes, but it's nothing like those two aforementioned Irem titles, nor is it like any other horizontal shooter I've ever played. The pacing is pretty sedate, and it features surprisingly little shooting. Most levels slowly scroll from left-to-right, and you'll spend the majority of your time trying to avoid environment hazards. Walls will extend out from the background to unexpectedly crush you, rows of pistons force you to carefully time your advance, and mines anchored to the sea floor are always happy to rip your hull wide open if you aren't careful. There are also stages with narrow caves filled with all sorts of rock formations that require absolute laser precision with placement and timing - remember the second stage of Ninja Turtles when you had to swim through the Hudson River, avoiding electrified seaweed while wrestling with really awkward collision detection? It feels very similar to that.
There are enemies, of course, but the majority of the time you won't fight them: if you stop to fight every sub that attacks you, you'll never have enough weapons or power to finish off the stage boss. You just have to do your best to slip by them undetected - much easier said than done.
And yes, I said stage boss. Of course there are bosses. It's an NES game! Whether or not they make sense in context is not the point. Remember in the movie when the US sub had to destroy an underwater military complex, or to blow a hole through a steel wall big enough to drive through?
The final stage, too, is quite the big surprise. Instead of playing like every other level, the game puts you in a platformer-style stage as you search out and diffuse bombs with gun in hand. I'm not sure where they get these submarines, but I've certainly never seen any that had wide-open, ten-story high rooms in them. Watching an 8-bit Connery portrait deteriorate from radiation exposure is novel, though.
The game itself got thoroughly destroyed by the critics of its day, modern critics tend to be even more savage talking about it, and most of the criticisms are completely valid. The graphics are grainy and ugly, the background music is blurpy and strange and insanely repetitive, and the game is way too stingy with resources in the later stages. Without continues, it can become a real slog.
But still, it's not a total loss.
If you're looking for an arcade-style game, look elsewhere. Red October goes for a more heavy-handed, methodical approach. Though reflexes are important, the strategies you use will dictate whether you win or not. The controls are oddly laggy and slow - I think it's an attempt to simulate water physics - but they work well enough the majority of the time.
The cutscenes are thoroughly entertaining, too. The American agent loves to angrily point and glare over the top of his glasses while Nikita Khrushchev mops sweat from his brow and pounds the table when he's irritated, and the game is almost worth playing just to watch how the melodrama plays out. And because it's (probably) the only NES game to feature the likeness of Khrushchev, even if it does leave out his teeth.
Things bog down quickly, though, when the game asks more from you than what the controls are really equipped to handle. Those caves I mentioned earlier - the seaweed-like ones? I won't mince words here - they're abysmal. Sadistic enemy placement and level design really wreck those sequences.
In the end, it's playable, but it's not one of Beam's brighter moments as a developer. Whether or not The Hunt for Red October is worth your time is going to be a matter of personal taste. I had an okay time with it, but I have no burning desire to play it again anytime soon.
I think "meh" sums it up quite well.
_
No cheats were used during the recording of this video.