Welcome back to The Best Games You Don’t Even Know Exist, the feature that drops knowledge about classic games that many gamers don’t remember or have never even heard of.  This time, my focus is Solar Jetman:  Hunt for the Golden Warship, an NES game from 1990 developed by Zippo Games.  Zippo Games was a pair of brothers, John and Ste Pickford, who broke off from another game company, Binary Design.  They were brought in by Rare to make NES games, and one of their creations was Solar Jetman, a goofy space exploration game about an astronaut searching for the fabled “golden warship”, a futuristic holy grail that’s been broken into pieces and spread throughout the cosmos.

Solar Jetman is all about exploration, and not getting killed.  Since it involves an astronaut looking around remote planets for hunks of the ultimate form of space transportation, it’s easy to imagine that the journey is going to be highly dangerous.  Each level is a planet that the player’s large spaceship has landed on.  This is the player’s base of operations, and out of its top launches an exploration pod.  The pod resembles a blue egg with a windshield, and at the beginning is only equipped with thrusters, a gun, and a winch-like tractor beam.  Very soon, the player also finds a force field that can be turned on to lessen damage from enemies and one’s own clumsiness from crashing in to the planet’s surface.

The object is to explore each planet with the pods, gather enough fuel to move to the next planet, and then find a piece of the golden warship.  There are many other goodies scattered around, such as weapons, gems, and pod upgrades.  If the pod takes too many hits, the player controls a little space man who is agile but vulnerable.  If he makes it back to the big ship alive, the player gets another pod.  Die as the spaceman, and the player loses a life.

Solar Jetman’s gameplay sounds simple, but what sets it apart from other NES titles is its innovative physics system.  Zippo Games used gravity and inertia to determine how the ship moves and interacts with the objects you find.  The player can rotate the ship and use thrusters to move forward, but once they do, the ship will continue going in that direction unless they use thrusters to slow down or run into something.  Momentum is important.  Bringing objects back to the main ship weighs the pod down, so thrusters have to be used continuously to pull an object to where the player wants it.  In addition, tethered objects themselves have their own weight and momentum.  This means if the player needs to turn the ship, they will swing back and forth like a pendulum until their momentum begins to match the pod’s.  The player must also evade bad guys, and using your force field disconnects the tether to the object.  Fortunately, untethered objects remain stationary until retethered (remember these are “innovative” physics, but not necessarily realistic).  This pattern never really becomes stale since each planet has its own gravity, map, backgrounds, and combination of enemies.

Graphics and sound are very good for the time.  The designers use a lot of different colors, animation is smooth (especially for the player’s pod), and the between level animations are cool to watch.  The music sets the vibe for each planet, some with a funky bepop, and others with a foreboding eeriness.  If you’ve played other NES games Rare was involved in, such as R.C. Pro-Am, you’ll recognize some of the sound effects, but they all work very well to depict what is happening on the screen.

The challenge level of this game is high, so be forewarned.  I can get through the aptly titled first level “Preludon” fairly easily, but any level past that is quite tough.  That’s the games biggest drawback, since the high challenge level can discourage players.  This game came out with a lot of attention, and even had a feature in Nintendo Power, but I think the high difficulty (even for its time) had a lot to do with limited sales.  I still like this game a lot, and it’s worth trying out, even if just for the pleasure of zooming around an NES game with a unique physics model and plenty to explore.  It hasn’t been re-released for download on any current gen systems, but vintage stores tend to sell it in the $3.00-8.00 range.  Emulation, while technically illegal unless you also own a cartridge, at least gives you access to save states in case the difficulty setting is too merciless for you.

See you in outer space…