Journey to Silius

The Good
Journey to Silius is another game I have a specific sentiment for. Among the others this was a game I was raised on. I remember my brother coming with the cartridge, beating the shit out of the bosses and me watching in amazement. I always enjoyed the graphics, music, atmosphere, but time has come to be critique now. My numero uno in the game is naturally the music-unremarkable, not even the midis or remixes can beat the atmosphere the Nes tracks spawn. The techno beats and Anime-like melodies were some of the best music tracks I've ever heard in a game. Castlevania, Guardian Legend and other classics shrink down to alsmot nothing when compared to these. The graphics were also top-notch. The atmosphere the professionaly graphics spawn is catching and nearly magic for a 14 Year old game. The enemy graphics are awesome, the huge bosses are drawn very realistic. Altough the enemies are limited to 4 colours from the pallette their done very well and professionally.The Backgrounds make it look like a SNES game.

The Bad
The first thing that throws itself on the table is the tough gameplay. Naturally, I lough beating trough this game, however, at times it was almost impossible to beat certain bosses on certain health ammounts-plus the healing orbs were as rare as they could be. Without an emulator and it's saving options-playing on Nes it's more than obvious You will go mad when dying for the ?th time, because the bosses, altough have easy patterns, the sub-bosses and numerous traps (especially on the fifth level) make Your life as miserable as You could imagine. What I also don't like is Jay's look. I do agree that he looks like a dork, but once You focus more on bosses You will forget about having a large quadratoid shape for hair :) I have seen the alpha pictures from several mags (let's not forget-this was going to be a Terminator game) that the hero looked totally different-larger, more detailed and I can't understand why for holy sake they scrapped that hero. I would certainly enjoy playing the role of a cyber-soldier more than an astronaut kid with a huge square head. Perhaps it was the intention to make the character deformed (or Chibi as Anime fans say) but this doesn't work. The game is also really short. A total of 5th (each containing 1 mid-boss and 1 main boss) levels take no longer than one evening for an experience player. I really wish there would be at least 2 more levels. The lack of multiplayer also decreases this game's replayability and leaves it with a simple one-finish if You have a dozen of others. I predict You won't play this more than twice if You don't fall in love with this game as I did.

The Bottom Line
If You don't have it You should be ashamed of Yourself. If You own a NES this is a must-I see nothing absolutely wrong with saying that this is one of the best games for Nes, if not the best. One thing still puzzles me-in Poland this game was released with a name "Irafi". I would swear Jay's character looked differently, plus the title was different. I was surprised to find it with a title Journey To Silius. I have searched the entire Internet for this name and end up with no results. It has become a mystery of my life-if anyone knows something about this please drop me a line at [email protected]