Ninja Emaki (Arcade)

Ninja Emaki (also known as Youma Ninpou Chou) is a 1986 entry into a now mostly dead shooting sub-genre: the Commando-style top-down walking shooters. Nowadays, it seems that vertically scrolling shooters have to either be more standard ship-style games with player's shots only going in one direction, or twin-stick shooters where the player's movement and firing directions are totally independent.

You play as a ninja in fuedal Japan who, in a mildly cliched story, goes off to rescue a princess who we see being carried off by a giant flying snake at the start of the game. You're armed with a crossbow as standard, and there's also magic scrolls that periodically appear, giving access upon collection to your choice of eight different offensive spells. The way this works is very versatile: once you collect and activate a scroll, the magic will work for twenty seconds, and during those twenty seconds, you can cycle through the different weapons as much as you like. They're all pretty different, too, having effects from a crashing wave that course up the screen destroying enemies, to a series of small whirlwinds that surround you, killing enemies that come near, to a simple power boost for your crossbow bolts.

What makes Ninja Emaki stand out from the pack (and believe it or not, there is something of a pack of ninja-themed scrolling shooters) is its slightly manic pace and structure. Though you start the game in the skies riding a cloud, each area you enter is different: you're riding a cloud, then you're running through a field, then you're on a boat, then fighting giant spiders in a graveyard, and so on. And I say "areas" rather than "stages" because there's never really a solid "end of the stage" like you'd expect in most games. Instead, you just travel up the screen, going from one situation to the next, the action never stopping for more than a second or two.

Though its qualities don't instantly jump out on first playing, Ninja Emaki is a fun, exciting game, and definitely worth your time. And if you find it too easy (which is definitely a possibility, as it's pretty generous with the extra lives), apparently the Japanese version is a lot harder, though I've not yet played it myself.

Spartan X 2 (NES)

The original Spartan X (also known as Kung Fu Master and just Kung Fu) was an iconic and highly influential game early in the mid-80s. Though it spawned many imitators on pretty much every system popular in Japan at the time (including an old Lunatic Obscurity subject, Dragon Wang), though oddly, it never got a sequel until more than half a decade later, and that sequel never got released outside Japan, nor did it even come close to becoming as iconic as its predecessor.

There's a few reasons for this: Spartan X, while not the first beat em up, was a fairly early entry into the genre, and brought with it simple, fun mechanics and beautifully simple graphics that made great use of chunky sprites and limited colour palletes to depict a classic kung fu cinema-inspired setting. Where Spartan X 2 falls short is that it keeps the simple mechanics, despite the fact that 6 years had passed, and in those six years, the likes of Final Fight and Nekketsu Kunio Kouha-kun (among others) had totally revolutionised the genre, making Spartan X 2's single plane stages and one-hit enemies look old hat by comparision. That's not to say that the single plane beat em up was totally obsolete: 1988's Altered Beast, for example became an icon of its era by adding all kinds of new gimmicks and mechanics onto the idea (and by being a prominent Mega Drive launch title too, no doubt).

Mechanics aside, Spartan X 2 also suffers through its setting and graphics. Gone are the simple, bright sprites of the original, as well as its chinese setting. It's hard to blame the devs for making things look more detailed and up-to-date, but the real sticker is the new setting, having the game take place in a modern-day world filled with crime and violence, just like dozens of other beat em ups and other action games that had been released in the interim years since the original game.

So, if we overlook the ways in which it fails to be a "worthy" sequel to the original, is Spartan X 2 a good game? I can honestly say it's not a bad game, at least. It's decently fun to play, it looks and sounds al right, and it doesn't feel unfair or annoying at any point. The problem is it's not particularly anything special, either. It really is just another one of many, many beat em ups that's not particularly remarkable in any way. It also has the problem that it's far too easy: you can take a lot of beatings and strangulation before losing a life, and extra lives are given out at every 20,000 points (which happens at least once per stage). There's also the bizarre fact that you gain points while enemies are strangling you, which makes no sense to me at all, either thematically or mechanically.

If you happen find a copy of the Famicom cartridge for a (very) low price, Spartan X 2 is a fun game to add to your collection, but otherwise, it's not really good or interesting enough to go out of your way to acquire.