Silver Surfer NES Review

Have you ever played a hard game before? I don't mean the average hard such as Devil May Cry 3 or Contra 4. I'm talking about a game so hard (mainly because of graphical errors) that you're brain just wants to explode from frustration.

The Silver Surfer for NES was probably one of the hardest games for its time. It was your basic side-scrolling shooter like Life Force and Gradius except for the few things that made the game IMPOSSIBLE.

1) The Surfer's surf board was MASSIVE. If the board touched ONE TINY LITTLE THING that it was not supposed to touch, you were dead. Period.

2) The fact of dying in one hit wasn't a new thing to the shooter genre, but it was definitely something that did NOT need to be in this game. No life bar? Terrible time! I say that we all would have been very grateful for a 3-hit life bar even.

3) Seeing yourself die over and over apparently wasn't enough. Every time you died you had to see this pitiful image of The Surfer crying like some flamboyant baby. I DO mean EVERY time you died. It got really annoying after a while.

4) The only way to be successful throughout the game was to grab the power-ups. If you were successful in gaining all the power-ups then you were more than likely blasting your way through the hordes of enemies with ease. But the catch was, you get hit once, you die and if you die, you lose the power-ups. Having no power-ups in this game is like trying to walk through a field of razor wire without getting cut, it just isn't happening.

5) To shoot in this game you must CONTINUALLY tap the "B" button. It doesn't seem like a big deal, but if you physically play the game and see the mass amount of things you must fire at, you'll begin to realize that sooner or later that thumb of yours is going to get a nice cramp. But of course, turbo controllers were invented for things like this.

Overall the game may be hard and very frustrating at times, but in the end it becomes a trail-and-error based game which also becomes beatable.

If you appreciate a challenge and like a good NES game, then this is definitely for you. But you'll have to remember to jump into the game expecting to die...a lot.

As far as ratings go I give The Silver Surfer (NES):
Graphics: 7/10 For it's time
Music: 10/10
Gameplay: 6/10 Great shooter, but terribly hard
Story: 4/10

To explain the 10 for Music:
Honestly, I've heard a ton of NES soundtracks and this game is just amazing. Nothing like fast paced technofied action music to get your blood pumping while you're wasting enemies.

To explain the 4 for Story:
The story does involve many characters from the world of The Silver Surfer comics, but it lacks a bit of in-depth story. The whole thing is about collecting pieces of "the device" as they call it to save the world. Now I don't know why this "device" is needed or what it does to save the world, but apparently it's the hope of the world. In my opinion, Silver Surfer blasting away at a million evil creatures and killing all of the "big bad bosses" behind the whole thing seems like saving the world to me.