Played on FCEUX 2.2.3

If you've ever read a list about "hardest NES games" or even just "hardest games ever" in general (and consequently you may have seen this one in a "worst games ever" list, personally I have) it's very likely Silver Surfer was in there. A title with a reputation so infamous I ended up trying it out of curiosity and...I'm not sure how it earned it. My guess is James Rolfe doing a funny, albeit rather poor job at playing the game + a bunch of shady gaming websites sharing a similar opinion for the sake of popularity.

That's not to say this game is perfect because there IS a ton of frustrating, dumb design that will catch beginners off guard. For starters autofire is a must. Each enemy takes AT LEAST 2-3 hits to die, and some of these formations are so fast and erratic there's rarely a break, you gotta keep shooting or risk losing everything. Plus there's this beautiful thing called carpal tunnel and this game without autofire is probably a guaranteed way to develop it.

Another thing contributing to the difficulty are hitboxes. Silver's hitbox covers almost the entire sprite except for the very tip of the surfboard, you feel like a sitting duck the entire time. Scenery is also really bizarre when it comes to this (shmup tip: if your bullets go through the scenery it's very likely it won't kill you). And I feel this hurts the game more than everything because the hitboxes are so huge there can't be any too complex stage layout which would've made things more interesting, and when they do try to ramp up the difficulty it just feels cheap and random (I'm looking at you, end of Magik Domain 1 and final boss).

Checkpoint placement is rather poor as well. Magik Domain 1 is the worst place you could possibly die on, if that happens you'll burn through whatever extends you may have, even if you're still making progress it will probably spiral into a Game Over anyway. Emperor 1 is also really stupid when underpowered and I find some of the enemy placement to be kinda painful. Out of all the stages Mephisto 2 and Firelord 2 have the most amount of RNG (hands section and pumpkins popping up without warning) so I decided to start with those.

Besides the normal shot upgrade you find Options and they're the most important element for survival since you can fire in multiple directions too. You can have 1 for sidescroll stages and 2 for vertical stages. You also get bombs that destroy (almost) everything on the screen. I rarely used them since I can deal with most of this game just fine but nevertheless, they're still extremely useful if you get caught in a tight spot.

Gameplay aside. The graphics are very good for NES standards. I particularly like the portraits during the cutscenes and section intros, good use of the NES' limited color palette. Stages look cool too although I have no idea what's going on in terms of enemy roster and obstacles, rubber ducks, floating eyes and ghosts, I don't know.

Main highlight for me, though (and honestly, only reason I even bothered with this clear), is the music. If you're into NES-SNES chiptunes you've probably heard about Tim Follin and his insane work during that era, and I think at least out of his NES stuff, this truly is his best work. There's not even that many songs, not that it matters because man they kick ass regardless, each one of them very long and complex. Closest we will probably ever get to something like Yngwie Malmsteen on the NES. Considering the game as a whole, it's not a terrible title on the NES library (you can do much, MUCH worse especially on this console) but not a great shmup either. I guess for NES standards this is fine but I have almost no experience with shmups on this console tbh.

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