Take pursuit of the top score as the bad guys pursue you.

The font is a bit hard to read.

To Beat: Complete the Winter season and the River section
Played: 11/21/16 – 11/23/16
Difficulty: 5/10
My Difficulty: 5/10
Video: Spy Hunter Longplay
Bonus Video: Spy Hunter Glitch

This is another first for Take On The NES Library with the first racing game covered on the site. However, if you know anything about Spy Hunter then you’ll already know that this is a loose claim at best. Since Spy Hunter is less about racing and more about combat, survival, and high scores, we will have to save the first true racer for another day.

Spy Hunter is originally an arcade title released by Bally Midway in 1983. It was supposed to be a James Bond game and it carries that kind of vibe. Spy Hunter was popular enough to spawn a pinball game bearing the same name in 1984. Later the game was ported to a host of home computers and other consoles. The sequel Spy Hunter II was released in 1987 and featured more of a 3D perspective from above and behind the car as opposed to an overhead view. The NES port of Spy Hunter was also released in 1987 and was both developed and published by Sunsoft. In 1991, Sunsoft released a Famicom title called Battle Formula which plays as a racing shooter game similar to Spy Hunter. When they brought the game to the NES, they obtained the Spy Hunter license from Bally Midway and released the game as Super Spy Hunter in 1992.

Spy Hunter experienced periods of dormancy sandwiched between a number of reboots. The next Spy Hunter game was released in 2001 along with a sequel, Spy Hunter 2, in 2003. Around that time a Spy Hunter movie was starting up but it has not yet seen the light of day. There was a movie tie-in game called Spy Hunter: Nowhere to Run that was released in 2006 anyway despite no movie release to go with it. After another long quiet spell, yet another video game reboot of Spy Hunter was developed for handhelds in 2012. There have been rumors that a Spy Hunter film is still in development as recently as 2015, but at this point it seems unlikely this will ever come to fruition.

Just crusin’ along!

Spy Hunter is a top-down racing and shooting game. You control the G-1655 CIA Prototype Interceptor as you are being chased by a bunch of enemy agents who only want to destroy you. Your task is to take out the enemy agents, protect innocent bystander vehicles, and drive as far as you can.

The controls are simple. Use the D-Pad to steer your vehicle left and right. You go faster by holding up and you slow down by pressing Down. Your Interceptor is armed with a machine gun that you can fire with the B button. If you have a special weapon you can use it with A, and the Select key will switch between special weapons if you have more than one. There is no pause feature with the game which is a significant omission as far as I’m concerned.

When you begin the game you are unloaded by the big brown weapons van and you can start driving right away. Your score counter is displayed on the upper-right of the screen and it increases as you drive. You want to stay on the pavement since you don’t get score while you are riding along the edge of the road. If you go faster you accrue points more quickly while at a higher risk of crashing. There are a number of vehicles and hazards that will get in your way from both ahead and behind so you want to maintain a decent speed. You also earn points by defeating the enemy agents. If you happen to bump into or destroy a non-enemy vehicle your score counter blinks and stops increasing for a little while.

Try to avoid shooting the regular cars.

There is also a time counter on the bottom-right that ticks down pretty fast from 999. The timer ties to an interesting mechanic concerning your lives. As long as the timer is running, you can crash your vehicle and you can get right back on the road with no penalty. The timer runs out quickly and it only counts down once at the start of the game, so this juncture is when you want to be more careful. You want to drive well enough to earn at least 10,000 points before the timer runs out. Fail to reach that score and your next crash ends your game immediately. However, if you reach that mark then you get an extra life that is shown where the timer used to be displayed. If you play really well and get to 30,000 points you get another extra life, and you can earn another life at every 30,000 points beyond that.

The enemy vehicles on the road all share the same deep blue color so you can easily distinguish them from the others. There is a skinny enemy called the Tire Slasher. You can easily shoot it with your machine gun when it is in front of you, but if it gets to your side it will deploy spikes out of its tires and try to collide with you, causing you to lose control of your vehicle completely. The second enemy agent is a thick car called a Bullet Proof Bully. Naturally this vehicle is immune to your machine gun, so the way to take it out is to bump it off the road with your Interceptor. This enemy will try and do the same to you, so be careful. The third agent is a long Limousine. This vehicle attacks you via a backseat passenger firing a pistol out the side windows whenever you run along side of it, so you want to avoid approaching it just as you want to avoid the Tire Slasher. There is a fourth enemy which is a white helicopter. This is the only flying vehicle and you can hear it coming long before you see it. The helicopter drops deadly bombs on the road that create a deadly pothole in the ground should you run over it.

The helicopters are relentless!

To help fend off the enemies, you can find three special weapons. At certain times the same brown van that drops you off at the start appears with a symbol on the top. If you get close to the van it drops a ramp so that you can drive up into the back of the van. If you do this, the van will pull over to the side of the road and drop you off with your new weapon. The weapons are indicated by letters in the upper-left corner of the screen. The one denoted by an S is the smoke screen which lets you spew a wide fan of smoke out of the back of your Interceptor. This pretty much causes everything behind you to crash, including innocent drivers which halts your score counter. The M is a homing missile that is used solely to take out the helicopter. You have to drive in a way to keep the helicopter still long enough so that you can hit it, and getting the hang of it takes some time. The O is an oil slick which drops a car-wide stream of oil behind you. The effect is similar to the smoke screen but it is much easier to target a single enemy. These weapons are useful but if you crash you lose them all.

As you drive you will occasionally find forks in the road. You have to be careful to pick a side so that you don’t crash in the median. You will also drive across long bridges. When you come out of the other side the background scenery changes. There are four different areas you drive through and each one corresponds to a season. You can bounce around a bit between the different seasons, but usually you go through Spring, Summer, Fall, and then Winter.

If you get really far into the game you will eventually come across a small branching path to the left with a small building at the end. It’s very easy to miss it when you are going fast, and it is completely optional anyway. Drive into the building and you switch over to a boat and drive on the river. There are two types of enemy boats you will encounter and no friendly vehicles to avoid. Cruise boats fire torpedoes both ahead and behind them, and speed boats drop explosive barrels you need to navigate around. Enemy helicopters can also join the fray. You can stay on the water for as long as you want, or eventually you can find a path back to the boathouse and get back on the road.

The water is more dangerous than the road.

Looking around online, it seems a common rumor about Spy Hunter back in the day was that the game eventually has an ending if you play long enough. I can put that rumor to rest: Spy Hunter is an endless game. With an endless game comes deciding on what constitutes a win. The closest thing Spy Hunter has to levels are the seasons and the river. Winter is always the last unique season you will encounter in the game, so my winning condition is to drive through the Winter scene and also survive one loop of the river.

Spy Hunter is one of my childhood games and one that I spent time with on an occasional basis. Play sessions are pretty short so this was a good choice for a pick up and play game. I never committed to it long enough to ever get really good at the game, so this was my first real shot and beating it and seeing everything the game has to offer.

Because Spy Hunter is a pretty short game I ended up recording all my attempts, so I have some hard data on my effort in beating the game. It took me 18 attempts over almost exactly an hour and a half of total playtime. 17 of those attempts took place the first night I played, and the next time I sat down to play I had my winning run on the first try. I took on the river at my first opportunity and ended up getting through it for the first time in my life. The river scene was a childhood gaming nemesis that I was super proud to finally conquer. Going from car to boat or vice versa is the only time the game stops for long enough to capture a proper picture since there is no pause feature. I managed to capture a quick image with my camera even though I hadn’t technically finished the game yet. I was able to drive well enough to pass through Winter and beat the game with a final score of 108,595.

I don’t think many Spy Hunter players have seen this snow!

My 11th attempt was where I got my highest score. I looped through Winter twice and was going pretty well when I decided to go for it and try the River. Unfortunately, I failed out pretty fast. I earned a score of 134,525. I don’t remember what happened after that but I must have been pretty disappointed that I missed my best chance to that point. I stopped recording for a little while and then started back up again a little later. Those last attempts that night were not very good so I smartly cut my losses and went to bed.

During my 4th attempt I unintentionally triggered a glitch that soft-locked my game. I was trying to drive into the weapons van when I bumped into another car at the same time. The game started the sequence of steering the Interceptor into the van without actually putting the car inside. It left my car in a state where it was hovering over the road where I couldn’t move it and no one could touch it. That’s the first time I’ve seen that happen while playing and I had no choice but to reset and start over. I bet the timing of the glitch is really tough to reproduce!

Spy Hunter is a classic game that would be a good fit it any NES collection. There may not be a lot of substance to the game, but it plays well and it is a great game to pop in if you just want to kill a few minutes. I’m just glad to say that after all these years of playing that I have finally seen all there is to see, and it didn’t take me nearly as long as I thought!

#38 – Spy Hunter

Don’t forget your spy gear because you will need it to make your escape!

It’s nice that they are saving the fight for the actual game

To Beat: Win against the computer on any difficulty
To Complete: Beat all 8 difficulty levels
My Goal: Complete the game
What I Did: Complete the game
Played: 2/1/16 – 2/3/16
Difficulty: 1/10
My Difficulty: 2/10

When playing two-player NES games, I think it’s better to have simultaneous play compared to alternating between two separate one-player games. Most of the time if the game is fun two-player it is probably just as much fun playing single player, however some games are tailor made for two players and Spy Vs. Spy falls in that category. I only player single player for the blog and Spy Vs. Spy left a lot to be desired, although I bet it really shines in two-player mode and I’m looking forward to trying it out sometime.

Spy Vs. Spy is a comic strip that debuted in January 1961 in issue #60 of MAD Magazine. The creator and cartoonist Antonio Prohias fled his native Cuba and pitched the idea of the Spy Vs. Spy cartoon to MAD Magazine in New York. They hired him and he would go on to write Spy Vs. Spy for over 27 years. The comic strip has been passed on to a few other writers over the years and it is still being created today.

The Spy Vs. Spy video game was released in 1984 for a large variety of computer platforms. It eventually made its way to the Famicom in 1986 but it wouldn’t debut on the NES until two years later in October 1988. All versions of the game were developed by First Star Software and Spy Vs. Spy is the only game they would develop for the NES. It was published by Kemco and it was their first NES release.

That briefcase might be up for grabs soon.

Spy Vs. Spy is an action game where you must race both your opponent and the clock to retrieve a set of items and escape the embassy. The embassy is a maze of single screen rooms and you can move to and from the interconnected rooms freely as you choose. This is a split screen game where both the white spy and the black spy are exploring the embassy and racing to meet the same goal. Everything is done in real time so you can see your opponent’s every move while they can also see yours. To escape the embassy and win you must first collect a briefcase, a passport, a bag of money, a key, and secret papers. Each room has a number of objects you can interact with such as furniture, pictures on the wall, doors, and so on. These hide the items you need so you will need to look in and around everything to find what you are looking for. Normally you can only hold one item at a time, however once you have the briefcase you can store all the required items inside of that. When a spy has an item you can see him visibly holding it on screen. You can also hide an item you are holding inside the furniture as well. Once you have recovered all of the items in hand, you must locate the exit door to escape and win the game.

While all this is going on, your opponent is also looking to complete the same objective so he will be actively trying to run your plan. If both spies end up on the same screen then they square off in hand to hand combat. A club and a knife are hidden in the embassy and these weapons can be held alongside one of the required items. The weapons are stronger than the default punch and will certainly swing the tide of combat. The spies don’t have to fight if they are in the same room and sometimes escaping into the next room is a smart strategy. Each spy has a power gauge which indicates health remaining. When a spy runs out of power in combat he is killed and floats up off the screen as an angel. That spy is out of the game for 10 seconds giving the other spy the advantage of free time as well as the ability to recover any items the defeated spy held. There is also a 30 second deduction to the clock when a spy is killed. Each spy has his own clock and whenever time runs out that spy is killed permanently for the rest of the game. Both spies will not necessarily run out of time at the same time which may be all the edge needed in a close game.

There’s nothing like a little slapstick!

The other major feature of the game in which to hurt the opponent is with booby traps. The spies have a seemingly unlimited number of them to use. Holding a trap will cause you to automatically hide any other item you are carrying so that’s something to be mindful of. The traps must be hidden inside the furniture and you can see the spy laughing to himself any time a trap is successfully placed. There are four booby traps at your disposal. Both the bomb and the spring can be hidden inside any of the pieces of furniture except for the room doors. A water bucket must be hidden on the top of a closed door. The time bomb can be hidden in any room regardless of furniture. If a spy peeks into a piece of furniture armed with a trap, that spy is killed with the same penalty as if he died in combat, along with a humorous death animation. The time bomb is a bit special as it kills a spy if he is in the room for too long. You know you are in a room with a time bomb if your face turns blue, so escape right away. There are also remedies hidden in the embassy that disarm traps. A water bucket (not the trap water bucket) is found in a red fire box and disarms a bomb, the wire cutters are found in a white wall-mounted tool box and they disarm the spring, and an umbrella can be found on the coat rack and prevents damage from the water bucket trap. The time bomb is effectively disarmed if you are able to leave the room before it goes off. A remedy for a trap can only be held only if the spy’s hands are empty, so you can’t hold another item and a remedy at the same time.

This all seems really complex, and it is in the beginning, but it all eventually makes sense. One thing that helps is that each spy can also look at the map of the embassy. The map screen appears after cycling through all the possible traps. It shows the location of both spies, which rooms have items, and which rooms have traps. It is quite helpful but it does have a few shortcomings. It doesn’t show which rooms are connected, it doesn’t indicate if a room has both an item and a booby trap, and it doesn’t show the presence of an armed time bomb. Despite all that, the map is very much appreciated as it makes the levels much more manageable.

The map preview shows what you are up against.

When starting a game there are three modes to choose from. Training mode simplifies the game by requiring only the briefcase and one additional item instead of needing all of them to escape. Vs Com is the main game against a computer opponent, and Vs Player is the main game against a human opponent. You can also choose from one of eight levels. Each level is a different embassy map and they are progressively larger and more complex. The lowest level embassy only has 6 rooms in total while the later levels have 30 or more rooms as well as a second floor in some instances.

I have played Spy Vs Spy before when I was a kid. One of my babysitters had an NES with some games and this is one she had. I sort of remember playing it but that’s all. I acquired the game in a three game lot on eBay around 2009. It came with Stinger and Bump ‘N Jump. It’s an ordinary game lot for sure, but the real reason I remember that lot is because those carts arrived in mint condition. I don’t like how often the word mint is used in describing condition as I feel it is mostly exaggerated whenever it’s used. In this case it’s true. They are beautiful carts and they will be on my shelf for a very long time!

I admit I was not looking forward to playing this game. I felt that it was too complicated after reading the manual and that I was going to struggle completing all eight levels. As it turned out, I more or less breezed through this game. There is a bit of a learning curve to be sure but a quick run in training mode alleviated those issues for me. I started on the levels after that and didn’t lose once. I found the AI to be pretty dumb overall. He moves between rooms slowly and focuses more on setting traps and less on acquiring the items needed to win. In the early levels, it’s possible I guess to lose if you don’t get the hang of combat and run out of time quickly. I can see it happening too if I were to get all the items and get killed right in front of the exit door. Other than that, I’m not so sure if the AI is good enough to win legitimately on its own. The later levels are big but as a result you don’t interact as much so it is more about figuring out the layout of the level and beating the time limit.

Somebody set up us the bomb (sorry)

I developed a successful strategy early on that carried me through, so if you want to try this on your own skip this paragraph. You’ve been warned! I use the map to locate the rooms with items and seek them out as quickly as you can. I would usually acquire the knife during my search giving me the upper hand in combat. The priority is the briefcase so if I come across it, great! If the other spy has the briefcase, then I would go after him right away and take it for myself. I would also make a mental note of where the exit is if I passed by since it doesn’t appear on the map. I barely bothered with traps at all. One time I trapped the other spy in a dead end with the water bucket, and the time bomb is useful at the bottom of a ladder for a guaranteed kill if entering the room from above. I don’t know if this is the optimal strategy but it certainly worked for me!

There were two other Spy Vs. Spy games but neither one made it to the NES. The second game is Spy Vs. Spy II: The Island Caper which takes place on a tropical island. Features include larger rooms that scroll instead of the fixed sized room in the original game. Players must also build their own traps from parts found on the island. The game did receive a release on Famicom. The third and final game is Spy Vs. Spy III: Arctic Antics and it was only released on various PCs. This one obviously takes place in the arctic! A fourth game was planned and would have likely been called Spy Vs. Spy IV: Spies in Space if it had been released.

The black spy may be in the lead but it’s far from over.

You may be wondering what is up with my difficulty assessment on this one. There are two things I want to address. The first is the 1/10 difficulty. I went on and on about the initial complexity and I’m not backing down from that. The game is so easy simply because it is very short. Considering strictly the bare minimum to get the ending, I say the game can be beaten in 15 minutes or less on the first time playing. It takes a little bit of time on training to get used to the controls, how the traps work, and how combat plays out. The first level has a time limit of only 5 minutes and it doesn’t take that much time to finish since that first area is so small. I’m sure it’s possible to luck into a win even if things don’t go too well. The other spy has a bad habit of running into his own traps. The ending sequence is the same after each level and the only difference is the text showing which level was completed.

The other thing you may have noticed is that this is the first time I gave a game a higher personal difficulty than the overall difficulty. I based my difficulty on my goal instead of just the minimum to beat the game. I didn’t find the game to be very difficult, but it does take some trial and error to navigate some of the larger levels. I don’t think Spy Vs. Spy is quite among the easiest NES games when going for completing all the levels.

Spy Vs. Spy is a clever concept that plays well, but it ultimately falls short as a single player experience. I am definitely keeping this game in mind to play with friends sometime. As it stands for me right now, this is just another easy title for me to mark as finished.

#16 – Spy Vs. Spy