One of the interesting things about having a large retro collection is that there is a lot of games that I own that I’ve never played. I’m not even sure when I got Silent Service. It’s not a game a grew up with, and I doubt it would be I would have picked up at a local gaming shop. Maybe at Goodwill or a garage sale? But either way, it’s in my collection and apparently today was the day I was going to give it a try.

I was surprised after firing the game up to see that Silent Service is a game by Rare, one of my all time favorite developers. Their NES offerings have always been a little weird to me though. I’m sure this is different for other people, but to me, Rare didn’t become Rare until the SNES, with games like Donkey Kong Country and Killer Instinct. That’s not to say that there aren’t good Rare NES games, I love Snake Rattle N Roll and Anticipation, but the amount of games that I’ve been surprised to learn was from them on the NES is pretty high.

Okay, so now that I knew it was from a developer I liked, I found myself pretty excited to try it. Immediately though, I was met with a menu with a million options that I really didn’t know what I was doing with. Silent Service has a submarine on the cover, so I knew the game was submarine themed, but here is where I was surprised to learn that this is a full on simulation title.

You really didn’t see this kind of game on the NES. On the PC, sure, by the NES was much more focused on action titles that were easy to pick up and play. But no, after just choosing the default options on that confusing menu, I found myself on a map screen with some submarine controls on the bottom. After a little bit of fiddling, I figured out that there was a knob that I could move to adjust my speed, one to move my rudder, one to dive, one to surface, and one to raise and lower the periscope. There were four targets on my map, so I pointed my sub in their direction and set my speed to the fastest.

As I started to get closer to my targets, I realized I had no idea how to attack. This is the kind of game that you definitely needed to read the instructions. After mashing buttons for a bit, I figured out that hitting select puts you into a menu where you’re below deck. From there, I could select the periscope, which lets me look through it at the enemy boats. On this screen, there’s buttons for my gun and my torpedoes. Hitting the gun one didn’t do anything, I’m not sure why, but hitting the torpedo one fired the weapon and I sunk an enemy ship.

Now it was a matter of slowly positioning myself to continue attacking my targets. I had to go back to that map screen, move my sub until it was facing the next target, slowly move towards it, eventually switch back to the periscope view, and sink the next one. I tried to do this again for the third target, but suddenly, I couldn’t fire torpedoes. Was I out of them? Probably, but I didn’t know how to get more, or use that gun that never seemed to work. This is where I stopped playing.

Silent Service is a pretty impressive feat for an NES game. You just didn’t see games like this on the console. But that doesn’t mean I particularly liked it. It was mostly just boring and a little frustrating. Maybe if I had a better idea of what it was I was doing, I might have a different opinion. But as it is, I don’t think I’ll be playing any more Silent Service any time soon.