Strategizing for the ammo/health balance in Journey to Silius

Journey to Silius is balanced such that ammo is more valuable than health. This is the case because the player possesses 3 health bars to a continue and only 1 ammo bar*, though expending ammo rarely saves health in a 3:1 ratio. For ammo to be of greater or equal value to health, it would need on average to decrease the health lost to the enemy it was used upon by a factor of 3. Put differently, it would need to kill damage-dealing enemies 3x as quickly, below which rate it would not be useful against enemies with less than a 2/3 chance of dealing damage.

The "ammo" and "health" abstracts underpin a strategic decision presented to the player: to fire a weapon [consume ammo in exchange for advanced targeting or damage rate] or to accept a mechanical limitation [smaller attack zone, shorter action timers, longer conflicts] which creates varyingly a finer tuned style of play or a higher probability of error, dependent upon the enemy/layout at hand and the player's technical** skill. Where the prolonged conflicts (resulting from the slower damage rate of ammo conservation) exceed the full cycle of an enemy's actions, this puts especial pressure on the player's ability to repeat a single technique reliably.

Thence, Journey to Silius feels like a lot of doing the same thing over and over. In a way it's like a survival horror game where you can kill everything with the knife if you kite it properly, except that in Silius it's slightly easier and much more necessary to do so. Like if you took RE2 and gave the player only a knife and a shotgun with one bullet for every dozen zombies, then placed a dozen zombies at every bottleneck.

*Journey to Silius features ammo and health restoratives which should alter these ratios. However, as far as I have discovered, the rate of appearance of these items is completely random. This means the player can't rely on their presence and must plan/execute as though they will not appear - that, or accept a built-in failure probability even on a perfect execution.

** a "technique" here refers to the combination of a game input and a timing. A timing is the combination of a [feedback] trigger and a length of time.

Let's Meet: Super Spy Hunter

Sunsoft put out a good deal of mediocrity, to be generous. Their early NES offerings, like Atlantis no Nazo and The Wing of Madoola, bear charming concepts tied to ornery gameplay and brutal difficulty. Later, as the 16 bit generation wore on, Sunsoft published unpleasant titles like Aero the Acrobat and Taz-Mania. Granted, at the time, Sunsoft was also developing some decent U-four-ia spinoffs.

Blaster Master is kind of THE Sunsoft game.

But there, in the late 80s and early 90s, Sunsoft had a good thing going. Blaster Master is among the best-known adventure platformers on the NES, and Batman remains an exemplary licensed game. Additionally, internet critics like the Happy Video Game Nerd have since praised lesser-known Sunsoft games from that period, such as Journey to Silius and Gimmick!. Every one of these games evidences Sunsoft's forte: hectic but (mostly) fair action, following a school of gaming not unlike Konami's Contra.

If those last two paragraphs lost you, that's kind of the point. Super Spy Hunter was released in 1992, towards the end of Sunsoft's golden era. Being an NES game, it would've been obscure at the time, and there's already a boatload of better known Sunsoft games to unearth - some good and some bad - so it's easy to see why so relatively few have discovered it. It's not impossible to find discussions on Super Spy Hunter, but its brethren get much wider acknowledgement.

But Super Spy Hunter stands unique among its peers. With any game, the player must learn its interface. In a platformer, for instance, this means learning how high your hero jumps in response to your button presses. Usually, this is an up front cost that's soon forgotten as you settle in for the game. Super Spy Hunter, however, makes learning how to control the focus of the game.

Initially, the controls may seem like a standard vertical space shooter. Hold up, and your car moves towards the top of the screen; hold down, and the car will move towards the bottom. However, pressing up and down adjusts your car's speed first and its placement on the screen second.

At your fastest, you'll have consistent aim, making it easy to strike down enemies. More than that, it gives the gameplay a nice, exciting pace while things whiz by at high speeds. But this brings in tension, since your car will sit near the top of the screen at its fastest, giving you little time to react to oncoming traffic.

For this segment, you'll need to slow down
in order to handle a diagonal bit of road.
However, this means you'll have a hard time
pegging that neon pink helicopter.

At your slowest, you'll have more time to maneuver. Not only will your car be farther down the screen and away from the onslaught spawning at the top of the screen, but your car itself will make sharper turns. But now, your nose will stray left and right as you move in those directions, making your aim inconsistent. Plus, if a bullet approaches you, you might not have enough momentum to evade it.

The first stage looks dumb and easy, but it's aimed squarely at making you look terrible with Super Spy Hunter's controls. Turrets installed on the side of the road will follow you, but you can't outrace them; instead, dodging their fire means slamming on the brakes, potentially screwing up your gunfire's fix on an enemy vehicle. Later in the stage, enemy drillcars will accelerate to pierce your car from behind; in order to escape their attack, you'll have to decelerate in just the right way to trick them into passing you without hitting you. Simple acts of moving up and down become calculated measures. If you clear this stage, it's safe to say you know how to use Super Spy Hunter's car.

Not only will your car trudge through
this sand, but quicksand will tinker
with your steering, too.

The second stage will drag you through a desert with sluggish, shifting sands, taking your car's basic controls and rigging them against you. Enemy craft remain simple, though. They don't employ any special patterns or attacks; they just shoot directly at you or try to run you off the road. It tests how well you can handle your car in adverse conditions.

So, it's only fitting that stage three is a bore. You've proven your skill at handling, and the game doesn't have any smarter enemies to throw at you. Instead, you get a casual cruise along a highway while you face squads of fighter jets that can only aim straight ahead. This is only halfway through the game, and I found myself asking what the point was.

As if in response, stage four abandoned the acceleration mechanic altogether, letting me move anywhere on the screen I wanted without any sense of momentum. Granted, the game also saw fit to pile mobs of enemies on me; if organized packs couldn't take me, Super Spy Hunter figured, maybe organization wasn't its best bet. Overcoming that, the game sent my car on a series of jumps through flocks of hostiles, complete with floaty horizontal aerial momentum and death if I didn't catch a bit of highway on my way back down.

The game continues like that to its conclusion, constantly rewriting the rules in search of some way, any way, to frustrate the player's success. The first half proves the extent to which the game can muck up a car, so the second half goes as far as possible to change what a car can do, even going so far as to transform it into different vehicles.

And I didn't even get to talk about
how awesome the bosses are.

Let's Listen: Sound Samples

On olden game consoles, sometimes synths alone didn't do the trick. In that case, you'd load up a real live sound, compress it to fit on the cartridge, and slap it on in a song.

Snake's Revenge - Metal Gear

When I mention Konami NES samples, you might think of Double Dribble's opening voice clip. However, Konami had some great snare samples that they used in their shmups, brawlers, and, well, this game. Snake's Revenge is the sequel that never should've been to the Metal Gear port that also never should've been. While its soundtrack is rough around the edges (for Konami fare), it's still enjoyable.

This track in particular must understand that all you want to hear is the snare, because at 0:29, it just piles on as much as possible. Aside from that, the track is one of those quick and shallow tunes that keeps your blood pumping with a few really tight bars.

I know I said that it's rough around the edges, but that's not a knock against the soundtrack's production value; that aspect is just as top notch as your standard Konami NES OST, and you can really hear it in this song.

Sonic the Hedgehog 3 - Mid-Stage Boss

Who doesn't like getting to join in music? Maybe you whistle to the Mario Kart Wii tracks that have whistling in them. Or, maybe you listen to the Sonic 3 midboss music and join its voice samples, the Michael Jackson yelps and "come on"s. I've always preferred the funk edge of Sonic 3's soundtrack to Sonic & Knuckles' flavor, and it was a shame that Sonic 3 & Knuckles ditched this track in particular. Anyway, don't let anyone hear you enjoying this song.

Gimmick! - Happy Birthday

Sunsoft has some killer bass samples that create a sense of badassery in Blaster Master and gravity in Journey to Silius. (Also check out Sunsoft's Batman games on NES.) However, I recently realized that they used the same bass in Ufouria, a relatively cheerful game, so I wanted to see how happy Sunsoft got with their bass.

It's harder to get happier than a birthday--in fact, "happy" is in the track name. The bass here doesn't sound bad, since it's well composed and plays a decent role in the song. However, it still feels out of place to have such a deep, gritty bass in an otherwise upbeat, happy-go-lucky song. Maybe I've spent too much time playing Journey to Silius.