PrinceWatercress plays Silent Assault - Part 1 of 4

I'm surprised I never played this one earlier, to tell you the truth.

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It's been a while since I played an unlicensed NES game...and hoo boy, is this game a quaint one. It's a clone of Contra, albeit not a very good one. A jumps, B shoots, D-Pad moves left and right and ducks and aims and whatnot.

You start with six hits, but the game only lets you have to five of them while refilling health after you get hit. You also have three lives, and there's no way of knowing how to get extra lives. I just know that you can if you can destroy enough enemies.

Stage 1

Aside from the soldiers and their bullets, you'll also have to shoot things that fly around in triangular patterns. You'll need to shoot them down for the weapons that they drop, and they'll constantly bother you throughout the game. You start with a rocket launcher (which looks like a knife, which is why I call it the knife at first), but you can also get a three-way shot as well as a shotgun that does more damage with its single shot. Sadly, it's hard to tell the last two apart, so I just grab a gun and hope I get the three-way shot. If you get shot enough times, however, you'll go back to the rocket.

The circle with the smaller circles around it gives you temporarily invincibility. This is good in case you don't want to jump over the lumps of pizza dough that are actually landmines, which instantly kill you if you run into one. Hearts will refill one hit point if you pick one up. Power-ups disappear almost as quickly as they show up, so you'd better be ready to nab them!

Also, enemies turn into demons shortly before they're wiped off the screen from being shot. I'm not sure why.

There is a boss at the end of every stage. To beat the first boss, avoid the firepower from both the cannon above and the turret below as you shoot at the turret in the wall. The turret fires slow-moving arrows regularly, while the cannon shoots down an orb that travels across the floor when it lands, so you'll need to be ready to jump over both at the same time. Once the turret is down, you can take out the cannon.

Stage 2

For this stage, you'll need to the upper path for most of the stage, but you'll eventually need to make your way back down. The worst thing you'll have to deal with on the upper path is the soldiers that throw wrenches flashing funky colors at you (which reminds me of Final Fantasy 6), but once you're forced down there, you'll have to deal with all of the spiked crushers that you avoided previously, and sometimes moving past those can be hit or miss.

If you get stuck on the upper path from not going down, you'll die if you jump over the wall. The game takes it as you looping from the top of the screen to the bottom and instantly offs you, as if the game is saying "Next time, drop down, dumbass!"

As you make your way towards the end, gently tap the A button to jump low and get up the stairs without getting hit by any obstacles. You'll also have to be super close to the flames in order to jump over them without taking damage once, and that can also be touch and go.

The boss is a set of gears that fires smaller gears at you that travel across the floor when they land. Jump over the gears and shoot at the brown cores of the two gears in front of you. When you take one down, that's fewer gears you'll have to jump over. Once the other one goes down, it's on to Level 3.