Journey to Silius

Journey to Silius is a run-and-gun from Sunsoft with one of the strangest production histories on the system: it began as a licensed Terminator game, the licence lapsed partway through development, and Sunsoft kept the engine, replaced the hero with an original character, and shipped it anyway.

What survived is a tight, difficult action game about a colonist named Jay McCray working through an abandoned space facility. There is no health bar and no double jump - three hits and the stage restarts - so the design leans entirely on learning placement, and the level layouts are built to be memorised. Five weapons switch on the fly, with limited ammo on the special ones, which stops the game becoming a single-button shooter. The reason it is still talked about, though, is the soundtrack. Naoki Kodaka's score is regularly named among the best NES music, and the game's reputation today rests as much on how it sounds as on how it plays.

• ▸No health bar and no double jump - placement is everything
• ▸Five switchable weapons with limited ammo on the specials
• ▸Originally developed as a Terminator licence, shipped with an original hero
• ▸Naoki Kodaka soundtrack widely ranked among the best on the NES