We all have those little guilty pleasures - things we secretly enjoy but feel reluctant to admit to anyone.

For me, The Super Spy is one of those guilty pleasures. It's a repetitive game that's hated by many, and honestly I felt the same way for a long time. But over the years I started to develop a weird appreciation for the game. I discovered that there was a surprising amount of technique that could be involved in the gameplay. I managed to work out strategies on how to go about getting as far as possible on one credit, and even finished the game without using a single continue (once). Why did I bother to put all this time into a game that very few people bothered to play more than once? Hell if I know. (actually it probably had something to do with a certain character near the end of the game). But at this point I certainly feel like I know more about The Super Spy than anyone else out there (minus those that actually worked on the game of course). So I guess now it's time to come clean and talk about the game in detail, because god knows nobody else wants to.

Great, I'm already being overly negative... but stick with me on this one! There are definitely some highlights along the way.

But first, some backstory about the Neo-Geo itself! Here's the scene - the year is 1989, and SNK is working on games to prepare for the launch of their new Neo-Geo system the following year. It put them in a strange situation - they had the arcade Multi-Video System, a cartridge-based arcade board that made it easy for operators to swap out games, with cabinets that supported up to 6 different games at once. And then there was the home console, which came with the guarantee of being able to play the same arcade-perfect games in your home - but at a premium price of ~$200 per cartridge. The home console version obviously was not considered anywhere near as successful as its arcade counterpart, but SNK (later SNKPlaymore) still showed support for its faithful users, producing new home cartridges all the way through their last official release of Samurai Shodown V Special in 2004.

The situation that SNK was in back before the Neo-Geo launched was that while the games were virtually identical between arcade and home, they were now faced with the challenge of making games that were enjoyable for both the regular arcade players, but also enticing enough to make home console adopters spend $200 on a single game. A lot of arcade games in the late 80's were often designed to be played through in around 20-30 minutes, if the player was good enough (or had enough tokens to keep continuing). That's all well and good, but if you were buying a $200 game, then it better be DAMN good if it's all over within half an hour. I remember reading a review in EGM of Ninja Combat, where the entire Review Crew all complained about the game having unlimited continues, making it a $200 game that "lacked challenge" since there was no way to discourage people from just mashing that Start button and seeing the entire game with no effort.

SNK immediately thought of ways to prolong the lives of some of those first generation releases. NAM-1975 contained the ultimate "fuck you" to people who just mashed on continue by disabling the continue feature entirely when the last boss appears - players would often immediately get fried by a lightning-fast bullet that the last boss fires with no warning. Any leftover lives would be quickly lost while the player tried to figure out the boss's shot pattern, and once you were out of lives you were subjected to a bad ending. Of course, this feature was kept in the arcade version too, which was a real dick move to people who inserted another token without knowing about this "feature", then being forced to spend that credit on the machine on a new game. The home version of Magician Lord ended up implementing a "checkpoint" system on deaths that sent you back to the beginning of the area you were in, whereas the arcade version always let you resume immediately where you left off (okay, Magician Lord was technically an ADK game but they were basically SNK so shut up). In later years, SNK would actually remove the unlimited continues feature from many of their home releases, instead limiting each side to 4 credits each. The only other way to get around this limitation was to use a memory card.

Yes, a memory card! Long before the Sony Playstation popularized the use of memory cards as a means of saving game data, SNK was doing it with the Neo-Geo in 1990. Not only did the home consoles have the memory card slot, but it could also be found on original arcade multi-slot cabinets (along with headphone slots, another rarity to see on an arcade cabinet). Save data was also compatible between arcade and console, which was used as a selling point, but... it always seemed like an unlikely situation to me. If you already owned the home cartridge, why would you be spending money playing it in an arcade? Let's face it, SNK just wanted to show off how the games were the same from arcade to console. But anyway, this was a means to satisfy both parties - with a memory card, a player now had a way to play through a longer game in the arcades, and a longer game would be a more attractive $200 purchase over one that was over in a half hour or less (of course, this introduced a new problem... WHERE do you get the memory card in the first place? Only a handful of retailers carried Neo-Geo stuff in the first place, and despite what that above flyer says, I don't think many arcades ended up selling the memory cards. Anyone who wanted a memory card that didn't have a store to buy them from would have to resort to ordering from a mail order store in the back of those game magazines). Games like Baseball Stars had a "season" mode which let you track your team's progress so using a memory card for something like that was mandatory if you were playing in the arcade. And then there was Riding Hero, the only motorcycle racing game with an RPG-style "Story" mode... which ran off a timer in the arcade, so good luck getting through that without spending serious coinage in one session. Of course, they had to make sure the games were still fully enjoyable by arcadegoers without needing a memory card, too.

And then of course, there was The Super Spy. While they did not place a limit on the amount of continues for it in the home version, they decided to take the approach of making the game longer than the average arcade game. You could still finish it in the arcade without having a memory card, although it would take one looong play session and most likely a lot of tokens if you didn't know what you were doing (which was everyone who dropped a token in). How did it all pan out? As most early experiments usually go, and judging by the reception the game got even back then... not very well. But we're going to take a look at it anyway...

For its time, The Super Spy was definitely a bold and original concept not seen before in an arcade game. It's best described as a cross between Double Dragon, Punch-Out!, and an RPG. It's sort of a precursor to the first-person shooter craze - except it's more of a first-person walk-around-and-punch-or-stab-and-occasionally-shoot-stuff game. In theory, that sounds like it could actually be pretty cool!.... if done right.

Let's take a look at the story given in the manual:

Roy Heart, the 28-year old American Karate master sighs heavily as he hears the news that an enormous and most powerful bomb has been detonated and killed thousands of people in the underground area of the city. He realized that only one notorious and brutal terrorist group could be responsible. As his phone rings he thinks twice in answering it.... "Roy! You have been assigned to go in!.... under the C.I.A. Special Force Division, you are the only one we can trust...." Roy's suspicions were right, it was the terrorist group "Zolge King" and they have taken over the Tadoya auto building. The auto makers skyrise headquarters held many employees who are now hostage and will be killed if the demands of the terrorists are not met. His mission: To assassinate the evil 8 bosses of Zolge King and to steal the drawings of an even more powerful bomb that the C.I.A. intelligence says can destroys thousands more and level several cities at once. Roy left his apartment and walked toward the street carrying only his knife, gun and his mastered karate skills knowing he could not let this horrifying act continue. "Taxi!.... The Tadoya building, and step on it!"

Yeah, that's great that Roy is apparently the only person they can trust to carry out this mission. Unfortunately they sent Roy in with rather limited weaponry, going into the mission with only a knife, and a pistol with 12 bullets... maybe he was in such a rush that he forgot to bring some better weapons (or even some more ammunition!) along. Or maybe he's just that overconfident in his "mastered karate skills".

During gameplay you see the action from Roy's first-person perspective... as a disembodied pair of arms. Pushing left or right on the joystick lets you move back and forth in sort of a strafing motion, you're always facing straight ahead and can't turn your point of view around, such as in Xybots, or every first-person shooter game ever made. When you come to a hallway corridor, pressing Up or Down will let you walk forward or backward in that direction.

You can also press Down when enemies are onscreen to "duck" and avoid attacks. You can move left and right while ducking, but after a couple seconds the game will automatically pop you back up to normal height. Ducking is necessary to dodge bullets from asshole enemies carrying guns. For some reason, you're not allowed to duck when fighting an enemy inside a room (which makes every single boss fight in the game harder since all of them are behind doors. Fantastic!).

Let's move on to the ways in which you can attack. Pressing the A button delivers a left-handed punch, pressing it again immediately after does a second left punch, and a third time will do a right punch that knocks down the enemy (but is easily countered a lot later on... see the strategies section for more on that).

When an enemy is on the verge of death, the A button turns into an uppercut to KO the opponent for good. Satisfying.

Pressing the B button delivers a wimpy-looking knee attack that comes out slower than the punch. It seems to cover a little more horizontal range, but it's still not very good.

Occasionally by pressing the B button against low-level enemies you'll deliver a close-range knee bash, but I still don't know the exact specifics on how to trigger this. It's actually a bit of a surprise when it actually comes out.

Sometimes when the enemy is almost dead the B button turns the knee attack into a full-on high kick to knockout the enemy, but it doesn't happen every time for some reason. Stick to using the A button uppercut for delivering the final blow to enemies, if you're not already using the knife.

Pressing the A + B buttons together makes Roy temporarily go into a "block" stance. Enemy attacks can not be blocked entirely though, "blocking" an attack simply makes you take half damage. Certain attacks like enemies' machinegun bullets can obviously not be blocked. In addition to all this, you have to be very precise on when you press A+B together or else you'll get a regular punch. Don't worry too much about remembering to use the block move because it is not that crucial, trust me.

Holding down the A button begins a charge-up punch. Once the charge starts, you'll see the fist icon at the top of the screen start to rear back. When it's fully charged, releasing the A button delivers a guaranteed knockdown punch. This sounds like it could be useful in certain situations, but it's really not - to charge the punch you have to remain completely immobile, which means you can't use it when trying to make progress on a floor. Even worse, if you start charging when enemies are already on the screen, their AI will always recognize it and try to move to a spot onscreen where your punch will whiff, and then immediately counterattack you. Cheap! It's worth mentioning though that connecting with a charge punch, whether it's fully charged or not, will award you 200 points - every other single player attack only gives 100 points. This almost seems like it would have a use then if you're playing for score (but why would you play for score on this game?!), but alas there's one more problem - if you do too many partial charge punches against enemies, they somehow will start counterattacking you immediately after your punch makes contact. So it's not even worth doing it for score attack either!!! Like the blocking move, don't worry about using this.

Pushing Up-Left or Up-Right + A will make Roy do a hook punch. On contact the hook punch knocks an enemy down but only knocks them back a short distance (as opposed to knockdown attacks that knock opponents all the way backwards into a wall / down a hallway). This is actually a very useful attack because you can establish a rhythm with it (I'll explain more on this later), where you can "trap enemies in a pattern" and do 5-10 hook punches in a row, taking them from the right side of the screen all the way to the left edge that won't let you move any farther. However, you have to be careful with this move! Like the third (right) A punch, enemies have a high chance of immediately counterpunching you if you do this move out of the blue. You have to time your hook punches early so that an enemy ends up "walking" into it when they're approaching you from a distance. The other problem with this move is that it does not immediately kill an enemy when their life should hit 0. The enemy will actually be able to withstand a few hook punches before dying, whereas switching to any other form of attack (punch uppercut, knee kick, knife, etc) will immediately kill. If you've hit the enemy with too many hook punches, try throwing out a punch with the A button and see if it turns into the uppercut.

The C button is what's used to change weapons. It will cycle from fists, to the knife, to the pistol (if you have the machinegun, it replaces the pistol), then back to fists.

The knife is a very crucial weapon! If you don't want to do the hook punch loop, you should be using the knife pretty much all the time over the fists. Reason being - it comes out much faster than the regular punch and is harder for enemies to retaliate against. Every third knife stab done in a row results in a knockdown stab, much like the third attack done in a row with your fists. Because of this, you can usually get away with just mashing A and being able to hit enemies on the third stab before they can counterattack. "Midbosses" and real bosses tend to have a higher frequency to succeed with their counterattack though, so be careful.

There is some confusion regarding the knife and how "useful" it is once it's rusted. When you start the game, your knife will be a clean white color, and does roughly double the damage of your fists. However, after you've used the knife a few times, it will start to get rusty and will do slightly less damage. A few more stabs and it becomes completely covered in blood/rust and does pretty much exactly the same damage as most standard attacks. So it is still more useful than regular punch attacks just because of its speed. Along the way you'll find people inside doors who will help you out by giving you a fresh knife, meaning you get increased damage again for a very short period of time. What's even stranger is that there's only a grand total of TWO spots in the entire game where you can get a fresh knife. Why bother?!

Switching to the pistol lets you just shoot the fuckers instead by pressing the A button when it's equipped. Early on in the game the pistol is VERY powerful - it kills enemies on the first few floors with a single shot! As you progress in the game the enemies become more and more bulletproof, to the point where you practically need a full clip to take out one enemy. At this point it's better not to use it as a means of damage dealing, but as a way of getting a guaranteed knockback on an enemy so you can then start up the hook punch loop.

Pushing the B button while the pistol is equipped lets you pistol whip enemies. This is a REALLY REALLY SLOW attack, it sucks. However, it does feel like it has really good horizontal range, which means it could be useful if you're attempting to "strafe" enemies and hit them after they've committed to an attack while they're not lined up with you. Still, why would you try to attack with anything other than the knife?

Hostages in certain rooms can also give you a machinegun. The machinegun will replace the pistol until you run out of ammo with it. One press of the A button will make Roy spread 8 bullets back and forth on the screen (but it only deducts 1 bullet from your ammo count). Pretty much every time you use it you can expect every enemy on the screen to get hit by at least one bullet, so this is obviously a very nice upgrade from the pistol. But again, it gets less and less useful with each successive floor you reach since unlike your melee attacks, the power of guns doesn't increase with your experience level.

The machinegun also has its own melee attack, which is a LOT faster than the pistol but seems to have less horizontal range. Better off sticking with the knife anyway, but this attack could come in handy in a pinch if you don't have time to switch and don't want to waste ammo.

---

Interestingly, the game actually has an RPG-style level system. Enemies award experience points when killed, with enemies on each successive floor awarding more experience points than the previous floor. Except for the ones summoned by a security camera, those enemies are always worth 2 exp points which is another reason to be avoiding those. Get enough experience points and you level up, giving you increases to your PW (attack PoWer) and AC (Armor Class, aka defense... I think it's funny they went with old Dungeons & Dragons terminology here). The exact numbers that go up for each level are somewhat random, but the exact number doesn't make a difference - it's important just to get the level up, period. Here's a list of how much experience is needed for each level:

Level 1	0 EX
Level 2	90 EX
Level 3	400 EX
Level 4	1000 EX
Level 5	5000 EX
Level 6	11000 EX
Level 7	30000 EX
Level 8	50000 EX
Level 9	70000 EX
Level 10	100000 EX

Your experience count will still continue to go up after you hit the max level 10, but there's no real point to it obviously.

So far, this might not sound so bad if you've never played the game before. You've got a variety of attacks (well, some of them are worthless), and beating up enemies in first-person view is a neat change of pace, especially if you're a fan of Punch-Out!!. But alas, here comes the fatal flaw that unfortunately drags the game down.

When you're walking around the building, enemies will always show up. That's understandable. But once enemies are onscreen, you're not allowed to scroll the screen any farther past a certain point until every enemy is defeated. Once the final enemy is knocked out, 1-3 more enemies take their place within seconds, and you're again not allowed to move the screen any farther past the short distance you were able to walk between the spawn time of the two groups of enemies.

Even worse, those vertical hallways where you can walk up and down? You will NEVER make it all the way through one of those, enemies always show up right as you're nearing the end of it. Even stranger about these hallways is that you're not allowed to move left or right at all, you can only press down to duck. The enemies get to slide back and forth though, so you're locked into place for the duration of the fight. Luckily, a lot of times there will be enemies that will attempt one attack on you and then jump up off the screen, or you'll have the machinegun guys who will fire bullets and then run away. So always be ready to duck just in case the machinegun enemies drop in for a visit.

Basically, this is akin to playing an RPG where you have to go into a "random" battle every two steps, without having the option to run away (although as mentioned before, some enemies will escape on their own). And combat in this game requires a little more concentration than just zoning out and pressing "Fight" or casting a spell. This can get really frustrating if you happen to get lost somewhere along the way, which is a definite possibility if you're not paying attention to where you're going. And there are a couple cruel spots later in the game that are designed to trip up the player if they go in the wrong direction.

So........ against my better judgement, here's an attempt at a walkthrough for the entire game. WARNING: this is going to be long. Really, really fucking long. I'm actually typing this part out before I start on it, because I know just how bad this is going to be. If you're actually reading this, then somehow I actually managed to finish and upload it all to the internet. Or maybe this text will just stay on my hard drive for years and years until the drive crashes. Who knows??

(Please ignore any inconsistencies in the score/experience from screenshot to screenshot. I ended up having to go back and take more screenshots of certain things I didn't take screenshots of the first time so I used cheats to speed things along)

The game begins! "Base to Roy... destroy enemy bomb and its blueprints!" Great, 5 seconds into the game and we already have a kinda Engrishy order. The first enemy terrorist punching bag shows up, who can simply be taken out with two punches.

A couple more enemies appear in front of an open door. If you don't check every door, you may end up getting stuck - doors lead to rooms that might have innocent hostages who'll give you info (or waste your time with Engrishy nonsense), hostages that will actually help you out by restoring life or giving you machinegun ammo / new knives, or they could be traps with enemies inside... but these rooms are also the locations of bosses who contain the necessary keycards for advancing. Let's see what's behind door #1.

Ok, what about it?

........

Right.... guess I'll be leaving now...

Hey, another door. Let's see who's in this one...

Damn, I'm sorry to hear that bro.

Moving on, we come to the first hallway that requires walking north. You're going to learn to hate these, as each hallway means one guaranteed enemy encounter and you lose the ability to walk left and right for that battle. Better be ready with that knife.

Here's another door. What useless information will we get this time?

Fuck, this is even worse. Midboss battle!

This room in particular is a complete early dick move by the designers - this bald scientist dude is a tougher enemy than the first couple enemy types. He does more damage with his attacks and is much faster with the counterattacks too. Speaking of which, let's talk about a couple of these attacks. He can give you a too-close-for-comfort view of his bald head, which surprisingly hurts a LOT, an instant 2/8 of your health gone. And what has to be one of the most amusing means of attack in the game, he can shove a screwdriver in your face. I'm not saying getting jabbed with a screwdriver wouldn't hurt, it's just... a rather unexpected means of attack. I'm trying to think of another game in which a player or enemy can attack with a freakin screwdriver, but am coming up empty. Kudos to SNK for being sorta original, I guess.

He also has the ability to leap off the screen and come down a couple seconds later. This isn't even an attack, it just wastes your time. Well, I guess it could be considered an evasive maneuver to make you miss if you're trying to shoot him with your pistol (which you need to do if you make the mistake of entering this room). If you've tried using your pistol on the low-level terrorist thugs, you'd see that they die with one shot... but this guy takes 3 bullets. Definitely the safest thing to do since if you try fighting with the knife or your fists, it'll take around 32 hits to kill him. THIRTY-TWO. Considering enemies up to this point have taken 2-6 hits (Even less if you were stabbing with a fresh knife), this is such a dumb thing to throw at the player so early on. I never really observed how long other people's credits lasted in this game when they played it in the arcade, but I imagine that quite a few people met a Game Over here if they didn't know to use their pistol. God, fuck this guy.

So anyways. If you did enter that door and had to fight Baldy McScrewdriver, you'd probably be thinking "Hmm, maybe I shouldn't enter every door I come across". You might feel so inclined to skip the next door you see, but that's a mistake as it's the first USEFUL door in the game.

Hell yeah, now we're talking! Thanks anonymous injured dude, I'll put that machinegun to good use.

Unfortunately, the next door you see is another person providing no help with anything.

Scroll all the way to the left to receive an interrogation from Don King. Pointless. Instead try to head up the hallway, which you'll soon find to be a surprisingly frustrating endeavor. You have to be PERFECTLY lined up with the hallway in that brief period of time before the next group of enemies appears. Use the guide arrows at the top-right part of the screen to figure out whether or not you can walk north. You don't want to screw up the placement and have to slog through another battle (although most of the enemies won't be putting up much of a fight right now).

Then you have a choice on which direction to head. The left route gives you another hostage. Head to the right instead.

Oh great, the first door of this route is a trap room with two enemies in it. At least they're easier to kill than Baldy McScrewdriver!

The next door reveals... a map. And as we can see from the map, we're almost at the end of the floor when they decided to show us the map, with the elevator closeby. There's just one door inbetween you and the elevator... is it worth entering?

The answer is YES. Because here you'll find a hostage that will "stop your bleeding" and recover up to 4 hit points of damage. These guys are the only ways to recover your health, so if for some reason you're playing this game in an arcade (riiight) or for score (ahahaha), you need to seek these hostages out!

(Hell, if you're playing for score, and you have 5 to 8 hit points when you reach one of these doors, you could actually build up some points by "leeching" enemies and continually killing them until you screw up and take enough hits to get down to 4 hit points. THEN you can enter the door and move on with the game. But, ya know... this is The Super Spy and there's combat everywhere... sooo....)

And with that, we're finally at the first elevator! We've completed the first stage of the game! (out of how many, you ask? You're probably better off not knowing. Ignorance is bliss).

Alright, starting with this floor I'm just going to put the map at the beginning and quickly mark off/screenshot what's in each door, because I don't need to explain EVERY screenshot, I hope. But I will explain some stuff about each floor...

The green X is your starting point. The yellow X is your goal, the elevator on the other end of the floor. The red square is the map room, obviously. As for the rest of the doors: