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- Dec 20, 2004
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I had heard of SAR: Search and Rescue but had never bothered to play it. It was released in 1989 and was the last game SNK made before they created the Neo-Geo. In my mind I had always imagined it as something in the vein of P.O.W. or Ikari Warriors, thanks to the very generic name. I wasn't too far off - the gameplay was similar to Ikari, a top-down shooter with rotary controls. But to my surprise, there was no search and rescue in this game at all. Instead it was heavily inspired by Aliens and was one of the goriest games they ever made.
Look at that arcade flyer, doesn't a game like that just scream Search and Rescue to you? They really dropped the ball with that name.
Immediately upon starting the game my jaw dropped as I was greeted with one of the most incredible common enemy death animations I had ever seen, with zombies exploding into a hundred pieces.
This is the biggest selling point of the game, the gore. This is something that had never been seen from SNK before. Even after, games like Cyber-Lip chickened out by having enemies explode as robots, and in Mutation Nation the enemies exploded into some kind of green gloop that was more comical than horror.
Even some of the zombie enemies will crawl with their entrails hanging out.
The biggest influence to this game, as evidenced by the flyer from above, was Aliens. And there are indeed xenomorph enemies in this game; sometimes they'll even attack by extending their inner mouths just like xenomorphs. If you damage them enough but don't outright kill them, they'll look like half their body exploded and just walk off-screen without ever bothering the player again:
Unfortunately the game isn't that great. The repetition of backgrounds makes the game feel monotonous despite the colorful enemy deaths, and the four total bosses in the game are a bit of a letdown design-wise compared to just the common enemy death animations. The game itself can be beaten in about 15 minutes and is worth checking out at the least. An interesting game mechanic is the player is able to do a long jump that makes it easy to skip past enemies entirely.
There aren't many discussions of this game on the forums; it's fair to say that compared to Ikari and Guerrilla War, this one flew in under the radar big-time.
Enjoy this for sale thread of the PCB by @ForeverSublime in 2005: https://neo-geo.com/forums/index.php?threads/sar-search-and-rescue-jamma-pcb-for-sale.105246/
Look at that arcade flyer, doesn't a game like that just scream Search and Rescue to you? They really dropped the ball with that name.
Immediately upon starting the game my jaw dropped as I was greeted with one of the most incredible common enemy death animations I had ever seen, with zombies exploding into a hundred pieces.
Spoiler:
This is the biggest selling point of the game, the gore. This is something that had never been seen from SNK before. Even after, games like Cyber-Lip chickened out by having enemies explode as robots, and in Mutation Nation the enemies exploded into some kind of green gloop that was more comical than horror.
Spoiler:
Even some of the zombie enemies will crawl with their entrails hanging out.
The biggest influence to this game, as evidenced by the flyer from above, was Aliens. And there are indeed xenomorph enemies in this game; sometimes they'll even attack by extending their inner mouths just like xenomorphs. If you damage them enough but don't outright kill them, they'll look like half their body exploded and just walk off-screen without ever bothering the player again:
Spoiler:
Unfortunately the game isn't that great. The repetition of backgrounds makes the game feel monotonous despite the colorful enemy deaths, and the four total bosses in the game are a bit of a letdown design-wise compared to just the common enemy death animations. The game itself can be beaten in about 15 minutes and is worth checking out at the least. An interesting game mechanic is the player is able to do a long jump that makes it easy to skip past enemies entirely.
There aren't many discussions of this game on the forums; it's fair to say that compared to Ikari and Guerrilla War, this one flew in under the radar big-time.
Enjoy this for sale thread of the PCB by @ForeverSublime in 2005: https://neo-geo.com/forums/index.php?threads/sar-search-and-rescue-jamma-pcb-for-sale.105246/
. This game indeed has rarely been brought up over the years, though I’m sure it didn’t help that it didn’t see a console version or compilation release until the jp psp exclusive SNK Arcade Classics 0 and the newer SNK 40th Anniversary Collection.
