 That's drunk. A couple months back I touched on a few NES games that I felt should have received sequels on the Super Nintendo stuff like Bionic Commando, Guardian Legend, and Solar Jet Man, Hunt for the Golden Warp Ship, developed by Zippo Games and Rare. The latter went on to make great stuff on Super Nintendo like Donkey Kong Country, Killer Instinct, and a couple Battletoads games, but this game did not make the leap, which is too bad because it's an ambitious game structure that could be really interesting in 16 bit form. But as it is, it's still a pretty fun playthrough, albeit very difficult. Solar Jetman is actually the third game in a series which originated with Jetpack, which was made way back in 1983 for the ZX Spectrum, followed by Lunar Jetman, later that year. Seven years later we got Solar Jetman, which took the general idea of the original games and expanded it to much larger worlds, and moving on from defender style gameplay to asteroid style controls, where you explore 12 different planets, recovering parts of the powerful Golden Warp ship, which was stolen and taken apart by alien pirates. Hey I'm just going by what the manual says, maybe these pirates are the engineering types that just like taking stuff apart to see if they can put it back together, I dunno. You float around each world in your jet pod looking for these parts, and each planet is its own maze that you have to navigate. You press the A button to fire your weapon, and B to fire the jet pod's thrusters, and when you find a part, a tractor beam will automatically lock onto it so you can carry it back to the mothership, but if you take damage or bump into something you'll drop whatever you're carrying. You can also buy stuff later in the game to help you out, and you press and hold select while pressing either A or B to use your upgrade. Nothing too fancy, just better weapons and thrusters. You can also obtain a shield which you activate by pressing down, but you can't carry anything while it's on, so you have to leave it off while you're hauling stuff back to the mothership, and to turn it off you simply press up. The real standout of Solar Jetman is the basic physics engine, it's really well done, and it stays consistent throughout. Even when you're hauling stuff around, each item has its own sense of weight, so it's not just a simple matter of carrying it back. Sometimes you have to give yourself a head start, sometimes you have to slow down to allow the item to stop swinging around, it's pretty cool. You do run into some surprises, however, like when you reach a planet that has a different gravitational pull than what you're used to. Yeah, just when you think you've got the hang of this game, it throws a change up at you. But yeah, the jet pod controls are what's gonna make or break this game for people. Like I said, it's similar to Asteroids, where right on the D-pad will rotate clockwise and left will rotate counterclockwise. The hardest part for me was to keep the ship still enough so I could aim my weapon and fire at enemies. It's doable, obviously, but it does take some practice. Anyway, if you take too much damage in your jet pod, either from enemy fire or from bouncing around the walls, you don't die right away, you still have a chance to get back to the mothership as that little space person appearing pretty much as they did in the earlier Jetpack games, which is kind of neat. If you take too much damage in that form, you lose a life. So yeah, you'll find that flying back to the ship is a recurring theme here. You do this to recover parts, to get a new jet pod if you take too much damage, or to refuel your jet pod, to refuel the mothership, which you have to do to complete the level, just back and forth, all while blasting enemies along the way. There are warp points here and there, which helps mitigate the tedium so you don't have to go all the way back to the ship. Like I said, there's 12 planets to explore, and there is a password system as well, which is a good thing because this is a loooong playthrough. Yeah, I mean, this is pretty much the game right here, just flying, dodging and shooting while dragging stuff back to your ship. It's pretty dang simple. It may sound boring, but Solar Jetman pulls off this style of gameplay about as well as you could hope for, plus this game gets really hard the further you progress, so there's some substantial challenge here. And in addition to that, this game also does a nice job with the presentation. The graphics here are really slick. I thought the little pixel art scenes when you arrive at a planet really add a lot and give each planet its own identity, so to speak, so I appreciate that. The music here is also really well done. David Wise did the soundtrack, and it definitely has a similar vibe to his other NES work, like Battletoads and Snake Rattle and Roll. There's also little bonus stages here that help you earn extra lives just for something different. Anyway, yeah, Solar Jetman is absolutely worth checking out today. If you don't want to bother with the cartridge, it was part of the rare replay compilation for Xbox One. And I think the main reason it's worth playing today is because the physics behind the core gameplay hold up extremely well. The game is challenging, but very fair. There were only a couple instances where I thought the game pulled a cheap shot or I felt like rage quitting or whatever. Just about every instance of trouble I ran into was through my own sheer incompetence, and obviously I can't blame the game for that. So I don't think Solar Jetman is a top 30 or even a top 40 game on the NES, but it's certainly unique and the gameplay is executed very well, so I would recommend checking this one out. And I want to thank you for watching, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.