The Cyber Shinobi (Master System)

This might be just how I rememer it, but it feels to me like the Mega Drive's Revenge of Shinobi/The Super Shinobi was a pretty big part of early 1990s UK childhood, and is still beloved to this day (making its omission from the EU version of the Mega Drive Mini seem like a foolish oversight). The Cyber Shinobi, by contrast, was barely ever heard of back then, and not well-remembered today. A big part of this is probably down to the fact that it was on the Master System rather than the Mega Drive, but another big factor is probably the burial it got in pretty much every magazine at the time. It was written off as an ugly, stupid cash in on the popularity of the Shinobi series.

Those criticisms aren't entirely unfair, though. The sprites and backgrounds are okay, but the game's whole look is ruined by a massive ugly grey HUD taking up the top third of the screen. The strange thing about this is that there's a prototype version of the game where the HUD was still massive, but it was at least a bit more colourful and less ugly. It's also definitely cashing in on the name of a popular series, since it's not a Rolling Thunder-alike like the original Shinobi or Shadow Dancer, nor is it an action-platformer like the previous year's Revenge of Shinobi. Instead, it's a single-plane beat em up with occasional platform elements.

It's mostly actually pretty okay to play. There's some kind of boring design choices (like you you move along a bit, stop to fit a few waves of the exact same guys, then move on to do that again on the next screnn), and some terrible ones (parts of the ground that fall away to drop you into a deathpit that look identical to every other part of the ground, leaving you with Rick Dangerous-style memorisation), but it's still good enough to hold your interest.

There's also a couple of interesting design choices, like the projectile weapons: you collect a P item, you get eight projectiles. But what's interesting is that you can collect up to 24 projectiles, and the amount you have determines what you shoot. At one to eight, you shoot weak shuriken, nine to sixteen are slightly more powerful bullet/missile things, while seventeen to twenty-four are grenades, which are not only more damaging than the other two, but they also explode for splash damage, but they're thrown in an arc instead of shot straight forward.

Furthermore, those "fight the enemies in a stationary screen" thing isn't that bad, either. Every screen has a different layout of platforms and obstacles, along with stationary enemies that shoot at you while you're fighting the more mobile melee enemies. This means that each of those stationary screens is at least a different encounter, making you find the best place to be in each screen to fight the enemies it throws at you. The problem is the repetition within each one: having only one wave of enemies per screen would speed things up, or having multiple waves made up of different parties of enemy types would make them fell less of a slog.

So, The Cyber Shinobi is an okay game sunk in its time by the weight of the name with which it was lumbered. I think if it didn't have Shinobi in its name, it wouldn't have been hated quite so hard by the critics of the time, but it also probably would have sank even further into obscurity. As it is, it's an okay game, and, like most Master System games, you can get it dirt cheap, and it definitely contains like £2 worth of fun.

Satan (Amiga)

Black Tiger is something of an unsung hero in Capcom's late 80s arcade oeuvre. Though it's a great game, it never achieved the level of fame enjoyed by the likes of Ghosts and Goblins or 1942. In fact, though it got ported to various microcomputers in Europe, the first official console port didn't come until 2010, 23 years after its debut! Despite being mostly forgotten, though, it does have its advocates. For example, the first time I encountered it was a fan-made port on the Korean handheld the GP32 in the early-mid 00s, and it had a rethemed spiritual sequel in the form of Sonson 2 on the PC Engine in 1989. Why is all of this relevant? Because the first half of Satan is clearly very influenced by Black Tiger, further cementing its place as a minor cult hit, despite having fallen from the collective conciousness.

Satan's plot is about a warrior who wants to kill the eponymous demon, but realises he needs to become a wizard to do so. To become a wizard, he journeys through some kind of subterranean world killing monsters and collecting money and power ups, until he faces off against what looks like a white dragon from Castlevania. Then his wizardly diploma falls from the 'bove, he grows a beard, and sets out on the second part of the quest. This bit is okay, like a poor man's Black Tiger, pretty much. But Black Tiger is really good, so that's not too harsh a criticism.

The game's second half has you playing as the newly-qualified wizard, using money to buy spells with which you fight Satan himself, who, upon defeat, splits into two and then four flying demons. There's also something about rescuing captured wizards before Satan can kill them, but this is where the game reveals itself to be broken: those wizards are all on platforms that are too high to reach. It seems like there's a whole exploratory part of this half of the game that's just totally inaccessible because your jump isn't high enough. You can still fight and kill Satan in his various forms, though if you go back to the shop once he starts flying, there's a good chance that when you come back outside, he'll be offscreen somewhere, killing wizards with impunity.

It really is a shame, as like I've mentioned on this blog before, it often feels as if the Amiga is a system that coasts by on nostalgia, and doesn't really have many actual good games, and Satan is so close to being a good game. It just lets itself down with one stupid mistake in the latter half. Tragic!