Spy Vs. Spy / MagMax / Seicross retrospective: Espionage-à-trois | NES Works  

Gotta admit, that one Spy Vs Spy track is catchy. It was sampled by Flying Lotus in the track "All Spies".

As much as I enjoy Spy vs Spy these days, and it certainly is a decent enough game, I will always remember it for one of the stupidest video game decisions I ever made as a kid - trading my copy of River City Ransom for it, considering I got the better part of the deal. What was I thinking!?

I got an NES in 88 when I was 5 and I got the NES Deluxe set the one that came with Rob the light gun (grey one) two controllers and it came packaged with the Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt double cartridge, Gyromite, and I kid you not Spy vs Spy in the NES box brand spanking new. I did not understand this game until two years later but by then I had over 35 games and Mike Tyson’s Punch Out!! But now at 40 I still get great memories thinking about this game and how much fun I had with it and telling my young father at the time thank you for the memories.

“Defeat king Ghidorah in a courageous battle against copyright” made me legitimately laugh out loud.

I was afraid you'd give Spy vs. Spy the short end of the stick, though I'm glad you at least had lukewarm things to say about it rather than negative things. It remains one of my favorite NES games, though, if only because it was one of THE best 2-player experiences on the system, as far as I'm concerned. Or I should say, one of THE best COMPETITIVE 2-player experiences on the system. Whenever I had somebody over and wanted to crush them in something, I would always fire up Spy vs. Spy, Archon, or Anticipation -- the trifecta of 2-player head-to-head, in my mind. Of those three... well, OK, Archon is my favorite. But Spy vs. Spy isn't too far behind! I'm glad Kemco localized the first game, and not the Island Caper, as -- frankly -- the first game is a considerably better experience. Yes, the second LOOKS nicer, but gameplay-wise, it somehow feels a lot emptier.

Man I loved Spy Vs Spy. At the time I had no idea it was originally a comic (MAD wasn't really a thing over where I lived), but I had so much fun playing that game vs my best friend. It kept us occupied for months. We actually got to know each other because he saw me playing the Adventure of Link through my bedroom window as he walked past our house, and Spy Vs. Spy considering was probably the first game we ever played together. We're still best friends 30 years later! I also enjoyed the sequels on the C64. They were a big larger in scale, but also a fair bit harder.

Did alot of Spy vs Spy growing up. It was a blast in a room of full of friends on hot seat. Rather dull single player.

Magmax is a rental game. Buying magmax is definitely sad, but as a rental it’s not bad at all. Especially considering how rental shops worked. You were at the mercy of which rental store your parents went to. Was it the grocery store with only 30 games total , the local shop where the owner just bought a bunch at once without caring , or the other local shop where one of the employees actively games and curated an amazing rental selection. Selection was everything. If your options consist of urban champion, magmax, stack up, or uncanny xmen, then magmax sorta shines like a diamond.

Just to be pedantic about old scifi anime, the wave cannon physically resembles Space Runaway Ideon's robot-held Ideon Gun more than the battleship Yamato.

“Oh boy, the new Pony Canyon games!” -Hypothetical gamer in 1988, who probably doesn’t exist.

“no one has Magmax in their top 100” I must be alone I guess.. it’s more a sentimental favorite, it was the only game at my grandparents house and would play it whenever I was sick unless I smuggled one of my games with me in a backpack!

Spy VS Spy is like a "battle mode" extension of the mechanics of a game like E.T.. in both games the objective is a timed scavenger hunt for several objects and items that will allow you to escape the stage. And the modern version of that would be Dead By Daylight or the Friday the 13th game.

Me and my brothers played the hell out of spy vs spy. years later we found similar fun with Trapgunner on the Playstation.

In a world where the contemporary star gets more views on their latest music video in one week than you will get on all your videos in a year, thank you. This is the stuff I love and happy to see someone cover the games of yesterday. I wish more people appreciated your work, but it's their loss.

Speaking of FCI/Pony Canyon, probably 10-11 episodes away from Ultima III at this point. Looking forward to Jeremy's take on one of NES's earliest RPGs.

Well, this was educational in a way I didn't expect. I knew about MAD and Spy vs. Spy thanks to the Cartoon Network show from a few years ago, but had no idea of Spy vs. Spy's origin

Recently picked up MagMax in my ongoing quest to buy the cheapest retro games I encounter at resale shops. The robot building mechanic is so fun and unique, it definitiely was worth the $5 entry fee in 2022

Hell yeah, SPY vs SPY!!! 😎👌 The first game and its ports were just perfect! Spy vs Spy was pretty popular in Japan, often labeled as a "friendship destruction" game due to how rage-inducing it can be. You still see a couple references to it in anime every now and then (e.g. in the first season of Maid Dragon). A shame we're not getting new games in its style anymore (the second and third games kinda deviated from the first one's formula), but there IS a fangame called "Spy vs Spy vs Spy vs Spy" for four-player spy shenanigans!

You didn't mention that Spy Vs. Spy was also released for the Sega Master System as a Sega Card. I was a huge fan of MAD Magazine as a kid, and I played the hell out of the SMS version. Looking back now it wasn't one of the better games on the system, but as an uncritical kid I enjoyed it. Pretty sure I never played 2-player though.

I was a dedicated Seicross player. I hooked up my NES Advantage and played it until I maxed out the points. I forget how long that feat took, but there are no saves and you have to do it with the limited lives that you have so it had to be in one sitting, minus pausing for bathroom breaks. Then I took a polaroid and mailed into Nintendo Power in hopes of getting in the section they listed of high scores on games.

Growing up with what I perceived as massive sprawling adventures like Legend of Zelda and Super Mario Bros 2, to years later picking up MagMax from the library and going back to a score attack game was almost a bit of shock to my perception. I didn't even consider that games could BE like that on the NES. Still, the box had robots on it and the name was close to "MegaMan" so I picked it up. It wasn't anything impressive to me then, and to me the most interesting thing about the game was that bootleg King Ghidorah was named "Babylon".

"In MagMax you need to build the Zeta Gundam in order to collect the Yamato's Wave Motion Cannon and destroy King Ghidorah in a courageous battle against copyright." 🤣 Great writing as always.

The Spy Vs Spy music, a constant minor key affair, puts a lot of fear into me and makes that game really tense 😂

Huh. Spy vs. Spy could make for a neat 1 vs. 1 game to be played online... Or locally via a wi-fi connection. The important part being that then your opponent wouldn't be able to see what you were doing.

I have an illogical sentimentality towards Seicross. After a rental, the music, bike-bashing mechanic and the Tron-like boxart made an impression. I picked up a cartridge a few years ago long after I stopped collecting NES games in earnest. Occasionally firing it up on my CRT reminds me of simpler times.

Next to Aeroboto, MagMax was my favorite game robot at the time. But I can admit that it does not present the best home experience.

Bootleg King Ghidorah definitely likes to pop up in 1980s video games. Alas, Pony Canyon's American arm FCI never quite inspires confidence. And on the next NES Works: a bad port of a David Crane game.

I still say legally Not King Ghidorah still looks rad. Also, I guess I will have to wait a while before you cover one of my favorite Kemco titles - Rescue:The Embassy Mission.

MagMax!!! I've been trying to remember the "build your ship into a robot game" for years!

I had an earlier version on the Commodore 64.I really enjoyed the brilliant sequel which takes place on a deserted island.

I first played both Seicross and MagMax on an xxx-in-1 multicart my grandparents had in the early 90s. Along with others like Battle City, City Connection and Nuts & Milk, I grew fond of early NES games despite much more advanced games being out by that point and they helped jumpstart my plunge into import gaming towards the end of the decade when I aquired my first actual Japanese Famicom. While they aren't amazing, I picked up Seicross and MagMax on Famicom in the early 2000s for 100 yen each fron a friend in Japan. At least at that time, these games held almost no value. Are they amazing? No. Are they worth 100 yen? Absolutely. Spy vs Spy though, I have no experience with. I do recall having a bootleg copy of it on C64 and I couldn't ever figure it out when I was a kid.

I have a soft spot for Magmax, but even still, it's pretty mediocre. Nice seeing the arcade version in this video though, I had no idea it had such quality background/floor effects. I've never played Seicross, but as a simple arcade style game, it at least looks like it has some interesting concepts. I may have to give it a try. Spy Vs. Spy definitely does not look like it holds up well, but I could see it being fun when it was new. There weren't a lot of NES games like it.

Woah I totally forgot Magmax! I played that a lot back in the day, wasn't very remarkable but it was entertaining enough for me as a kid.

I've always thought about the fact that many folks actually purchased these games in order for them to be out there in the secondhand market. Particularly - games like Seicross that didn't even look remotely entertaining. It's like nothing at all was learned from the Atari days.

Also: Nichibutsu is the king of skirting copyright. Cosmo Police Galivan? Space Sheriff Sharivan (better known in America as part of VR Troopers). UFO Robo Dangar? UFO Robo Grendizer. The entire Terra Cresta series was a riff on the combining ships plot device in so many Japanese television shows of the 1980s. I suspect Nichibutsu's just barely legally distinct copies of intellectual properties were less out of malicious greed and more out of a genuine love for Japanese pop culture.

Me, who's been doing my wanikani: haha, seicross must mean starcross! I'm learning! 1980's Americanized titles: this word sounds vaguely Asian right

Such fond memories of renting spy vs spy with my cousin!

What a shame "Crazy Climber", probably Nichibutsu's best game, didn't get a U.S. NES release.

I had MagMax on NES! wasn't a particularly mind-blowing shmup, but I found it fun. Never made the ghidorah connection to that mechanical three-headed dragon boss til you mentioned it though! man arcade games in the day really skirted the line of copyright law, didn't they?! didn't play a whole lot of seicross, it was alright but there were definitely better NES shmups. spy vs. spy was an interesting idea I'm surprised more companies didn't try to emulate, at least for the time.

I had MagMax as a kid, bought used in the early 90's after I already had an SNES, and used to wonder if there was some extra context I just didn't understand or a trick to see the ending. A friend and I eventually concluded that no, probably not, and that the game was simply so old that this was the kind of thing kids at its time of release had to tolerate because no better games existed. I'm not sure how we decided that.

I always thought the blue guys in Seicross looked like The Beatles from the cover of Help.

randomly just discovered Mappy Kids and it's weird 2 player mode and made me think of spy vs spy

2:05 How can it be a scanline effect in Seicross on arcade with the screen rotated on its side like this? technically the screen is being drawn in vertical strips in this case, not horizontal ones, yet the game scrolls horizontally so it can't be a HBlank register scrolling trick in this case, it must be something different.

There are so many US home computer games that got NES/Famicom releases that turned out awful. For every Lode Runner, it seems like there's three Spy Vs. Spys, M.U.L.E.s, Infiltrators, or whatever. In fact, Lode Runner is the only one of this genre that really turned out well that I can think of, although that's just off the top of my head. What happened to M.U.L.E. is especially bad; through the porting process almost all of the game's soul was removed, in addition to much of its nuance.

Magmax does strike me as surprisingly lifeless, even for an NES port, and ESPECIALLY for a game about mecha. The way your robotic Not-Ghidorah foe just... switches off instead of going out in style? Maybe mega man x-style cascades of explosions when a boss goes down have spoiled me, but how do you make a ufo/ robot dragon hybrid yawn-inducing?

(reviews Spy vs. Spy on NES) (RU-vid shows a picture of Spy vs. Spy for Master System) My sole fond memory of Magmax was climbing into the cockpit of the game at the local arcade and punching the coin return button for extra quarters. A very generous game, but not a very good one.

I do remember a lot of excitement when my cousins got Magmax. Imagination goes a long way when you are told you can build a robot. I rented and played Spy vs Spy for a weekend, but not sure I ever understood it.

Spy vs. Spy was my college roommate's favorite NES game and he kept trying to sell me on it without success. On the other hand I have a weird fascination with Nichibutsu games. They feel very low budget and strange compared to their peers at the time. Terra Cresta is probably their best effort on the NES but I spent a lot of time playing Seicross as a kid. The arcade version is really neat. I always get bored with Mag Max but I liked the combining mecha concept and would have loved to see it done better in other games.

My brother and I played the heck out of SvS on Apple II as kids. Sure, screen cheating was a thing, but we were kids, and not adept at such things. Man, nostalgia bomb right there.

I hadn't seen the NES version of Spy vs Spy before, and boy does it look sloppy with the visible pallette change before drawing the next room. Couldn't have they inserted a black frame or is there a hardware limitation that prevents hiding the drawing of the screen?

When I was 6, my friend had MagMax and we both thought that it was somehow related to Mad Max, which neither of us had seen. Was very confused when I finally saw the movie and it involved zero giant robots (but it did have people shooting each other in a wasteland)

Three games that worked just fine as 1986 Famicom releases, but all three were pretty much obsoleted by the time of their US releases, all in 1988,

I never saw arcade cabinets for the two listed, and like most things of this vintage timing being a huge factor. They looked really impressive for 1985 and hopelessly outdated by 1988 once their pre mapping chip famicom versions made it to the US. Conglaturations will be in order next week

I bought Magmax back in 1989 and boooooyyyyy was i disappointed. What a misleading cover

The wave-motion gun looks VERY similar to the Ideon Gun from Space Runaway Ideon, another giant robot show made by Gundam creator Yoshiyuki Tomino.

There's nothing wrong with seicross as a game, but it always felt oddly out of place on the new.

3:19 I think that's the first time I've actually heard "ersatz" pronounced.

Seicross is the game that I keep mixing up in my head with Cobra Triangle, which speaks to the remarkability of both. Shame about FCI though; I was only aware of them for their fairly competent SimEarth port on SNES.

Kemco was such a strange publisher, a Japanese company focused on porting western games to NES, even republishing them in the west. Of course, nowadays they just push out by-the-numbers JRPGs for mobile devices every few months, so I'm not sure things have improved much. (Of course, FCI spent a lot of time doing the same, although the focused specifically on western RPGs like Ultima and the Gold Box AD&D games.)

Ghostbusters is a grate game that prooves the justice of our culture.

We had so much fun wirhb2 player Spy Vs. Spy as kids.

Does anyone know how to MOD NES classics? I live in the Philadelphia suburbs. I discovered this channel a few weeks ago and I really wanna play some of these unloved forgotten gems. Great video.

I remember seeing Seicross in one of those Consumer Reports strategy guides and thinking it looked pretty neat. Never played it, though, and I certainly didn't remember its name. I think I saw Spy vs. Spy first in the same guide, too, but I didn't play it until decades later. What it does is kinda neat once you know what you're doing. Definitely don't play it without the instruction manual!

I played MagMax back in the day, and have rather fond memories of it. I later learned that all of the good things about this game were execugted even better in SideArms for the TurboGrafx-16. I had no idea that there was an arcade version of MagMax, though! I wonder how many units are still operational, if any.

Lol battle over copyright infringement

I've heard that Japanese title was changed to Sector Zone because some people were using the term Secross as an indirect terminology for certain kind of organic reproduction pair effort. I wonder if Among Us took any inspiration from the Spy vs Spy PC game.

I like Spy Vs. Spy way more than I really should. Me and my buddies would play the hell out of it back in the day.

Magmax and Ghostbusters were my first famicom carts. I loved them.

Spy v Spy is largely just a realtime implementation of the old dial-up BBS game Murder Motel.

I remember being intrigued with spy vs. spy but having absolutely no idea how to play it

I think Spy vs. Spy was actually kinda popular in Japan. Feels like I was always seeing it referenced in Famicom parody videos or finding music covers years ago. Would explain why they even got a sequel at all. (Also I won't stand for any Seicross slander.)

That Spy vs Spy theme is like a NES sound piece done by Bach.

I think a game like Spy vs Spy could work today with a more cluttered area to explore

> Spy vs Spy worked better in its original tech than it worked here *stares at every remake/port of Spy vs Spy from here on out* Are you sure about that? Man though like fr, this game is underrated as hell. Maybe I'm just biased but like, this game is actually really fun. Especially the later remakes/ports. (I personally recommend the GBC port and ESPECIALLY the Xbox remake) Shame it never got ported/remade on anything modern. (Think the most recent port was the iOS release), I'd KILL for a version of this game with online support. (Aside from the previously mentioned Xbox remake) Also can kinda understand them never porting the Island Caper, that one and the third game that takes place in the arctic are...a bit weird.

Amazing. The stinger for the next episode is more entertaining than the game it will feature.

nes works? i sure hope it does!

I loved C64 Spy v Spy and it's sequel

A video game based on a satirical comic short about the absurd futility of the Cold War... for kids!

Spy Vs Spy was fun

Ive always wanted to split the audio/video out from the NES to 2 different TVs and each TV has one half covered. That way no one could cheat. And of course, the TVs would have to be back to back or in a way that the other player couldnt see it. I love the idea of taking something like this to the extreme, like at a con when people would bring 1 copy of FF: Crystal Chronicles, 5 TVs, 4 GBA players with play disc, 5 GameCubes, and 4 wave birds. You need 1 TV and GameCube to run the game, then 4 GameCubes each with GBA players and disc, controller, GBA to GC link cable and their own TV. That way everyone gets their own TV instead of using a GBA. Its stupid, but its also kinda awesome. You could do the same with Zelda Four Swords as well. Or for something simpler, 1 NES, 4 Advantages, a Four Score and a copy of Smash TV. That way you can play with true dual stick control. I was amazed when I learned you could play with 2 NES controllers turned sideways to play Smash TV in its intended way. You need a Four Score if you want to play 2 players

I play Spy Vs. Spy a lot when I was a kid and it's still fun today. 😀👍🎮

it must've took great restraint to not namedrop xevious when discussing mag max's psuedo 3-D height element to the over ground sections! game looks kinda neat though, aside from those underground sections, those look absolutely dreadful to play

Love the neon colors in Seicross, and Jeremy’s copyright jokes. But to insult Nintendo Power as a “propaganda rag” is too much. Sir, I demand an apology. Or more jokes.

You are my favorite channel to learn about retro games from! I actually buy and stay away from games on the Virtual Console because of the information in your videos.

My dad owned a bunch of MAD Magazine compilation book that collected all the various different comic strips the magazine ran into trade paperback format, so I was well-acquainted with Spy vs Spy (as well as the comics of Sergio Aragones, their various movie parodies, Snappy Answers To Stupid Questions and more). Never played the game, though, and it doesn't look like I was really missing out on much.

Not a god on NES for sure. Nothing prooved.