 |
|
Ambush Trap |
|
 |
 |
FINAL BOSS! |
|
|
|
|
  This is it - the final floor. If you look at the map though, it doesn't look like an overly complicated floor compared to some of the other floors. Let's take that as a good thing. No health or machinegun ammo in any of the doors along the way either, just a lot of hostages and one enemy room. If you just want the game to be over, you can skip every door until you reach the very end. That's really the best course of action anyway.  Let's do it! The final battle!
Oh of course... remember how Back Gallop was dressed up as King? It all makes sense now, this was another way for SNK to reuse a boss sprite. Wooowww. The last boss of this game is a friggin palette swap of a previous boss. That... that is completely lazy. They should have just pulled a Guardians of the Hood and made Pink the surprise true final boss instead. That would have been a fun twist!   Not surprisingly though, as the last boss he's a lot more difficult than Back Gallop was - he's faster, hits harder, and now has a jump kick. And of course, he takes waaaay more damage than any other enemy. If you're one of those lameasses that does nothing but fire 12 pistol shots, die, and then continue... it's gonna take you at least 3 continues since this man is somehow capable of surviving 40+ bullets.   And... uh... well... what else is there to say? It's the same boss from the 7th floor! This article's already a bit too long, we really need to put an end to this.  Tough talk from a dead guy in a suit! But that is finally it. Now for the ending we worked so hard for...       ........
.................................... But hey, how about all that talk of terrorism over a skyline that has a pair of buildings that sorta resemble the Twin Towers?
 ... Well, it did come out 11 years before *that* happened... I'm not saying there's a connection or anything... ...yeah... uh.... maybe I should just shut up...
The Super Spy is a very ambitious game that might not have turned out exactly the way that its' creators wanted to. It's obvious SNK's first generation Neo-Geo games were made to try to show off the systems' capabilities, so a game played in first-person view would give them an excuse to work in lots of hardware scaling. They were inspired by RPG's and wanted to try to find a way to make an arcade game with RPG elements, knowing it would be a tough sell for players that weren't willing to spend hours and hours on a game in an arcade. Perhaps the game would have turned out better with a heavier emphasis on shooting instead of melee combat. The Super Spy was never ported to another system, and for the longest time was not been made available in any format other than the three Neo-Geo systems - AES, MVS, and CD. It didn't make the cut for SNK Arcade Classics Vol. 1, and is not even one of the included games for the new Neo-Geo X Gold handheld system (though perhaps it will be releasted later?). As of May 8th, 2012, The Super Spy did get a release on the Japanese Virtual Console service for the Nintendo Wii, making it the first time the game has been playable on a system other than the Neo-Geo... but there has been no word on if/when it'll see a release for the VC in the US and Europe. Hopefully I remember to update this if it does ever see a release.
And uh... well... that's it. I've talked about this game enough. Or have I? On to the usual bonus section, then... (my god, this is never going to end)
Yeah, this is actually some interesting stuff. Let's do some side-by-side comparisons just for the hell of it!  Well you only get one face shot of Roy for the entire game so I guess this is somewhat close. The first picture sort of gives off a Die Hard vibe I think, it's pretty obvious the game was inspired by it, what with the whole "fight terrorists in an office building" theme. The second artwork kinda makes him look Harrison Ford-ish for some reason.  Okay first of all, the "characteristic" saying Nick is the weakest boss - NO. NO, NO, NO, NO. Fuck you, SNK. Anyways, they pretty much got him right in the artwork, compared to some of these others. "Donaugau", though? That's certainly not a very common last name...  I'm STILL confused over the whole Back Gallop thing and his cosplay fetish. Why was one of the leaders disguised as his boss? That sure is a guy in a suit though, I guess it's pretty close. I guess.  Not quite a perfect match here either, artwork Machine isn't anywhere near as ugly as his in-game counterpart. Why does the manual say he has two machineguns in hand when in both the game and the art, he's clearly only carrying one? "He is powerful, but lacks footwork" sure is a great way of using the old "big and slow" cliche I guess.  Yeah okay, the Geese in-game looks nothing like that... which is actually a good thing, as he got his own unique sprite instead of being another guy in a suit. I think this artwork has actually caused some confusion, people who see the picture in the manual and the name Geese come to the conclusion "Oh shit, could that be the same Geese Howard from Fatal Fury?!"... but clearly, it is not. Geese Howard never dressed up like that or used a knife. And he never tried to blow himself up with dynamite either, instead he just dies by falling off of buildings. Hmm wait, this game does take place in a high-rise office building............  And then there's Pink. Wow. The Pink here looks more like a kinda-but-not-really slutty Japanese woman, as opposed to the completely slutty Caucasian woman in the game (her nationality is unknown!). Dark hair instead of blonde hair, no armsleeve things. "She uses her beauty to approach you"... if by taking a free cheap stab at you with a knife they mean "approach", sure. Also, "she is good at karate"... while she certainly hits a lot harder than supposed martial arts master Roy Heart, I don't know of any karate dojo that teaches the ultimate forbidden attack, THE NAILS. Must be a self-taught style.  I guess they wanted to obscure the picture of King so as not to completely spoil what he looks like. But if you make it to the Back Gallop fight, then you'll have already seen what he looks like! Silly. "He is a mighty fighter.". So mighty that other people can completely copy his fighting style, I guess...
Yes, having the power of unlimited continues is an easy thing to abuse. But try playing the game without mashing on continue. Just once, try playing for score. Yeah, the game has a silly scoring system, but most people don't even notice that the game even HAS a high score list.
 If you've played the game before, here's a question... have you ever beaten that default 30,000 high score? If you didn't know how to survive for a while on one credit, well you have no excuse now. I've written in detail how all the attacks work in this game, how using the "hook punch loop" can get you good damage on midbosses/bosses once you have the timing down, and provided maps on where all the health/machinegun hostages can be located (although the FAQ on GameFAQs is a simpler resource to consult). I think with a little practice, anybody who gets the basics down and learns the first few floors should be able to at least clear the first mission. With some more practice it shouldn't be too hard to reach Nick, but getting past that asshole is obviously a big problem... It's a little challenge I extend to anyone reading this. You might ask, what is the point of doing so for a relatively unliked game that came out over two decades ago? I mean, it's not likely you're going to find this game nowadays in a public arcade, unless it's some dusty old neglected MVS cabinet where the operator pretty much never changed the cartridges out for new ones since buying the cabinet in the early 90's. But you might see the game in a new light, and feel a sense of accomplishment, and isn't that worth something? And so I throw down the gauntlet. Can YOU topple the default high score of 30,000 and hear the bizarre jingle the game plays? I would love to hear from people and start a mini-scoreboard kind of thing if anyone is willing to attempt this. Play on whatever system you wish - Neo-Geo MVS, AES, Neo-CD, or even on the emulator of your choice, as long as you're not using savestates or cheats (be honest, please!). Pretend it's 1990, it's the last token in your pocket and you want to make it last.
If you can accomplish this, go ahead and email me (preferably with screenshots, and any details you want to share about your play). Maybe I'll make a little scoreboard thing if there's any participation. This would be your chance to get recognized on the bottom of a ridiculous article about an old game on a website that nobody reads! Good luck! Maybe I'm getting my hopes up too much, but I am very interested to see if there are any noticeable gameplay differences in this version. It could be nearly identical to the final release, or it could be a very early version of the game, like the Burning Fight and Alpha Mission II prototypes that surfaced recently (which both had some very interesting differences from the final released games, but were so early that they weren't playable for more than 2 or 3 levels). There is one thing though that I noticed a while back in certain screenshots of the game that SNK used (click for large version):
 Right there in the center of the page is of course The Super Spy:
 You might not notice it at first, but look closely at the lifebar. Instead of the usual 8 larger-sized rectangles, there's 10 smaller squares. Perhaps this early version of the game had a more lenient lifebar that allowed for another hit or two before dying? 10 units of health instead of 8 would have made the Nick boss fight a LITTLE less cheap, at least. I guess having such small squares didn't make much sense when they still had room on the screen for that row, so they enlarged the size of the "hit points" and reduced it to 8. Maybe the reduction was put in just to make the game harder and more of a quarter-eater for people who didn't know what they were doing. It's all conjecture at this point. Also note the high score is 50,000 instead of 30,000. It's possible the player may have gotten that score beforehand and that it's not a change in the default high score, but I'm leaning towards the possibility of it being the former. Unfortunately, we'll never know for sure (not that anyone really cares).
Will the aforementioned earlier version of the game that was found have either of these changes? Who knows! Whenever the roms become available, I will definitely be covering it on this site, with the hopes that there are some different and noteworthy things to document. Stay tuned! Finally... there is of course my one-credit run. The culmination of a shitload of wasted time playing this game. This video doesn't really show off the Engrish or anything like that, I tend to just skip all rooms that don't have items in them. Also I didn't know about the brass knuckles at the time. But here it is for all those people that swear the game is "impossible".  |
