 just a quick video today about a very simple game and one of my favorites Spyhunter was originally created as an arcade game way back in 1983 where it was then ported seemingly everywhere to Atari 2600, Coleco vision, DOS, x&y spectrum Palm PDA and BBC micro and of course the NES which is what I'm looking at here there's also a pinball version of the game a remake for 6th generation consoles, followed by a sequel, there were even plans for a Spy Hunter movie, but eventually it just ended up being another video game, this time starring The Rock. It's pretty crazy that all that spawned from this quaint little game, just an overhead vertically scrolling shooter where the goal is to simply survive as long as you can. What makes Spy Hunter so interesting is that it's such a perfect match of accessible and frustrating. Anyone can pick up this game and play, and just get the gist of the gameplay within like 5 seconds, or in other words the same amount of time it takes to crash and crash again and again. You know, it's one thing to have an extremely difficult shoot-em-up, but it's another entirely to restrict the space in which you can move around, my god man, but at least you do get some help in the form of these orange 18-wheelers. Just park your car in there, come on, get in there, get in there, come on, sheesh. And they can provide you with power-ups like oil slicks or smoke screens, and that's in addition to your hood-mounted automatic machine gun fire. Spy Hunter's layout is structured a little differently though, because you're given unlimited lives within an initial lead-in time limit when you start the game, so you can crash all you want and cause a traffic jam with all these 18-wheelers going all over the place. After the timer runs out, it's up to you to shoot cars to accumulate enough points for extra lives, otherwise when you crash, it's game over. So yeah, the game is forgiving enough to let you get a feel for the speed of your badass interceptor car, the speed of enemy vehicles, and to let you find out which paths you want to take in the first couple forks in the road. Would you rather head this way, or get bombed to Kingdom Come by this helicopter? I do really like that aspect of this game, it adds some incentive to just get past your initial frustration, just to see what's over to the right instead of to the left, or what's just past this bridge and past these friggin' helicopters. Of course, it's impossible to talk about Spy Hunter without mentioning that iconic music. It's lifted from the late 50s TV series Peter Gunn, that's literally all the music that's in the game, but let's face it, you don't need any other music other than that. Many other NES games have a score written by Henry Mancini, that is bad ass. So yeah, even though you might only play Spy Hunter for literally like three minutes before you're frustrated with it, it's still a worthwhile play today, plus if the game gets the best of you, you can always take advantage of the many, many glitches that are available, like being able to let the road just push you over like this without having to steer, for example. The Spy Hunter cartridge is also still around $7 average, so it's pretty easy to get your money's worth. So yeah, Spy Hunter is a great NES example of a game that's very easy to play, but very difficult to master.