Silver Surfer (NES)

Norrin Radd. The Silver Surfer. Herald of the world eater Galactus. Imbued with the Power Cosmic. Able to travel above the speed of light on his surfboard. Able to survive black holes and the surface of suns. However, in his 1990 NES game, the Silver Surfer will immediately die if he makes contact with fish, ducks, or even if he slowly bumps his head on a ceiling. Now a fairly infamous scrolling shooter, Silver Surfer is definitely a victim of the time period’s emphasis on incredible difficulty coming mostly from how punishing its life system can be, but there are still a few points in this game that can show what Silver Surfer would have been if the designers at Software Creations hadn’t reduced Silver Surfer to one of the most vulnerable NES game protagonists there is.

Norrin Radd’s brutal adventure first begins by way of a nice little comic found in the manual where he speaks with Galactus. While the Silver Surfer is clearly still serving the planet destroyer reluctantly, hearing of a problem the titanic space being can’t solve alone does nail in how important the task he’s given is. An alternate universe known as the Magik Domain seeks to take over the Marvel universe, a portal device comprising of six parts currently held by villains across space. The Silver Surfer must head to their domains and defeat them to keep the device out of villainous hands, although when the game begins only five of the villains are known to you. You can at least tackle the levels they lead in whatever order you like, the domains of Reptyl, Mephisto, the Skrull Emperor, the Possessor, and Firelord all comprising of three segments. One will always be a side-scrolling section, another will be a top-down flight, and the last will be a side-scrolling fight with the boss.

No matter what situation the Silver Surfer finds himself in, his main attack is a single shot he fires from his center, although there are collectibles within a level that can help you become a bit more powerful. F pick-ups will increase the power of your standard shots, the rare B pick-ups deploy a bomb that will wipe out any regular foes on screen, but the Orbs might be your best finds. Grab an orb and the Silver Surfer will be followed by a small sphere that will fire in tandem with Norrin Radd, even having the same power-ups to its firepower. You can aim an orb to your sides or behind you even, and in the top-down vertical flights, you’ll even get to have a second orb to help cover your left and right.

When you do get a few upgrades, Silver Surfer can actually be a fairly fun shooter. Level design definitely plays a good part of it, each domain having unique foes and layouts to help them standout. Despite the cosmic nature of the adventure, Reptyl has jungle inspired areas where you’ll face animals like turtles and piranhas alongside the more sci-fi lizard men and turrets. Mephisto’s levels start with a space like a haunted house with ghosts before the top-down segment goes for a more organic and unsettling approach to horror. Possessor has Roman columns for his statue-filled halls while Firelord sees you going through lava-filled caves, but there will still usually be enough outer space and futuristic elements from time to time to keep things feeling otherworldly with the Skrull Emperor definitely being the one to lean into it the most. Boss battles can even be fairly good caps to their sections, the screen coming to a stop after its usual auto-scrolling so you can face a foe that usually has attack patterns you can figure out and get around.

However, much of Silver Surfer feels like it’s not designed for the level of difficulty it presents. All of these levels could be great in a shoot ’em up where you could afford to take a few hits, but Norrin Radd feels more like he’s made of paper than coated in metal. One hit will be enough to kill him, something that makes the game’s sometimes cheeky ambushes from the back or hard to see bullets rather frustrating. Even worse is the fact that the entirety of Silver Surfer’s massive form is vulnerable. His long board, his somewhat tall body, if any of it makes contact with anything save a power-up, that’s Norrin Radd dead again. The game is not shy about making spaces he can just barely fit through, tunnels and halls where moving a little up or down will send him falling off his ride for an increasingly all-too-familiar death screen of Norrin moping over his failure. Death will get rid of orbs and your power-ups too so even in sections like the more checkpoint friendly vertical scrollers you’ll still be thrown back in fairly weak and likely prone to another quick death. Considering your long surfboard is even more of a liability in the increasingly tight designs of those top-down stages though, you absolutely need those checkpoints to make up for the inevitable deaths, especially since they are often quite guilty of having what counts as background you can fly over or a barrier you’ll crash into be hard to determine when you first see them.

It’s a massive shame that Silver Surfer is so eager to kill you because it also features one of the more impressive soundtracks on the NES. A full-bodied sound for a usually limited system and one with some remarkably catchy music to play over the action stages, you may also grow tired of it as you try to push your way through the experience. Thankfully, Silver Surfer is the kind of game to use passwords, although you need to press Up on two different controllers at once to access it. Each level has a password so you can gradually push your way through with determination, and there are even some passwords that work more like cheats to give you infinite continues or even invincibility. However, Silver Surfer also decides to throw in extra quests as your reward for beating it, but it’s hard to notice if these really have any meaningful differences. The ending is thankfully the same so you don’t have to beat it three times in a row, the already tall ask of finishing it once likely to take you enough time on its own.

THE VERDICT: Creative stages, excellent music, and some stretches where your orbs or power-ups do let you hold your own against a range of unique enemies show what Silver Surfer could have been if Norrin Radd didn’t immediately die to the lightest bit of contact with any enemy or surface. His body is simply too large for the spaces he needs to navigate and his movement not particularly fast, but if it was any faster it would likely make the times you have to thread the needle even more likely to end in a fatal error. Passwords can at least let you eventually slog your way through if you don’t resort to the cheat codes, but the Silver Surfer was nearly a classic shooter everyone could have enjoyed if its powerful cosmic superhero could actually survive more than a stiff breeze.

And so, I give the Silver Surfer for Nintendo Entertainment System…

A TERRIBLE rating. Passwords really are a player’s best friend in Silver Surfer, slicing up a brutal experience into chunks that can better be tolerated despite the severe difficulty that holds back the experience as a whole. You’ll still be irritated by how you’re forced into tight spaces where movement means death or sigh when you’re in a top-down level and guess wrong on if the area ahead is safe to move through or an ornate wall you’re about to smash into. You’ll still miss how easily your firepower comes or goes, because even when it’s supported by an orb or fairly high the enemies usually do still hold their own well enough that you wouldn’t breeze through a stage by being allowed to be so strong. But if Norrin Radd could just take a few hits, or maybe if hitting walls wasn’t deadly, or if his surfboard couldn’t be hit and only a bit of the surfer himself was vulnerable to injury, this shooter could go from an example of how NES games used brutal design decisions to prevent you from seeing their end more towards the kind of adventure that players of all ages could appreciate. A little more leniency wouldn’t make the game too easy, the levels are designed well to pose challenges, and even sections like the fire spouts in Firelord’s level that are very hard to time slipping through could stay in a theoretical easier version of the game to have some sections that deliberately play rough. When you are facing a boss, when you are dodging the latest new enemy types, it’s easy enough to see their potential in a shooter that wasn’t so eager to kill you. Only four continues by default feels like it almost wasn’t designed to be cleared if not for the passwords, but those passwords are also a life preserver for a game that deserved to be better. They don’t clear up the issues, but either with unlimited continues or stage specific passwords, you can at least gradually see what the game could have been and maybe even have some stretches where the pick-ups let you briefly face the danger ahead of you with something that can almost keep up.

While being a good game would have certainly earned it some love and its soundtrack is at least still well-regarded, Silver Surfer on NES at least managed to snag a legacy as one of the system’s hardest experiences and not in an uninteresting way. The ease of death is frustrating in an easily understood way, but the levels also mean there’s more to the experience than balking at the Silver Surfer brushing against the floor and dying for it. For what may be the only video game this Marvel hero might ever headline, he could have done far worse than a game that feels like it could have been something great but still remains memorable because of how egregiously its difficulty impacts the experience.