NES #29: Ninja Gaiden

Developer: Tecmo

Publisher: Tecmo

Release Date: 12-9-88

 Ninja Gaiden is truly a landmark game. It is the game that introduced gamers of my generation to integrated storytelling. It was not the first game to tell a story of course. Games had at least had a token storyline for almost as long as games had existed. However, there had never been a console game to tell a story quite the way Ninja Gaiden did. Complex stories were mostly confined to more complicated genres that didn’t appeal to kids as much like RPGs and adventure games. Even more complicated NES games like The Legend of Zelda kept most of the lore in the instruction manual and did very little storytelling in the game itself. Ninja Gaiden is an action game. At the time action games had very little story at all. You might get a text heavy intro if you were lucky. Ninja Gaiden sneaks great comic-esque cutscenes in between every chapter. In 1989 I had never seen anything like it. Who can forget the classic opening featuring two dueling ninjas? Ninja Gaiden sets itself up right away as something more grown up than the typical NES game. I was instantly hooked. Of course Ninja Gaiden also illustrates the danger of narrative gaming, especially in the early days. If you were a typical kid you might’ve been wowed by the intro, but never had the chance to find out how it all ended.  

 

Ninja Gaiden is difficult. I feel that the internet exaggerates the difficulty of many old games, but Ninja Gaiden is the real deal. I’ve been playing this game for thirty years and have it just about memorized, but I still have trouble as the game rolls along. I did legitimately beat this one many years ago, but I’ve never been able to repeat that achievement. Like so many NES games the difficulty comes both from design and flawed execution. The developers loved putting enemies in weird places like tiny unavoidable ledges and high platforms where they can get you but you can’t get them. Sometimes they are almost impossible to defeat without a special weapon, so you’d better hope you have the right one and enough points saved up to use it. Everyone knows about the infamous swooping birds, but luckily they are fairly rare. Still, they are so annoying that they have been written about to death. Enemies also respawn almost instantly if you move the wrong direction. Moving backward is needed because of all the platform jumping, so expect to see plenty of respawning. Thankfully the game has unlimited continues, but it does not have a password. If you are playing on original hardware make sure you clear out you afternoon if you actually plan on finishing it. Oddly most of the bosses are fairly easy. They have very easy to memorize patterns and receive a lot of damage from your attacks. Of course this all goes out the window in the game’s final chapters. The last two bosses are brutal even if you know what you are doing. Ninja Gaiden defines Nintendo Hard.

 Luckily the levels are fun to play through in spite of the difficulty. It has that wonderful NES mix of unique level designs with bizarre enemies. I get fighting other ninjas, but why are there boxers and witches scattered about? And why do they want to kill me?  I love old games for their bold unreality. You can have strange ruins filled with physically impossible platforms and out-of-place enemies who patrol the same five inch ledge for infinity without anything feeling like it doesn’t belong. It also has great visuals and music. Every different level is distinct and they move in different directions. It’s not just left to right, so you never know what the next level is going to be like. The music is some of the most iconic on the system, and the developers did a great job of making sure the songs fit the mood. I can tell this game was made with great care.

So Ninja Gaiden is a fun game to play even if you don’t plan on finishing it. It’s great for that nostalgia fix. However, it does illustrate the difficulty of telling a story while making a fun, engaging game. It’s a debate that rages on to this day. In 2023 of course you can go on Youtube and watch the ending to almost any game you want. That was not the case in 1990. You might get some screenshots in a magazine, but if you weren’t good enough than you’d never know what happened. This became especially troubling when Ninja Gaiden II came out and continued the story. If you never finished the first game should you even play the second one? The third game is much rarer, so I guess not as many people made it through the gauntlet and saw the story wrapped up. I know I haven’t. I should work on that.

 

Ninja Gaiden is still a personal favorite of mine, so like most of the classic NES games it is going up high on my list. I know I”m already a bit Nintendo heavy, but NInja Gaiden is going in at #10 knocking out 8-bit Sonic the Hedgehog. My goal at this point is to find 101 good NES games, and this gets me one step closer.

 

NES quality percentage: 15/29 or 51.72%

Intellivision #2: Astrosmash

 Intellivision #2: Astrosmash

 

Developer: Mattel

Publisher Mattel

Release date: 10-15-81

 

These days it’s hard to write about the original Intellivision without bringing up the doomed Amico. At this point people are still trying to figure out the true intentions behind the project. Was is simply a failed console that started in good faith or an investment scam from the get-go? Was this a case of inexperienced console developers getting in over their heads or was there something more nefarious going on behind the scenes? Hey, but they made all those videos showing off the games, the must’ve meant they were trying to make it, right? Well not necessarily, because the types of games they were showing off could’ve been thrown together very quickly without any true intention of release. One of the four deep dive games they showed off was a remake of Astrosmash, and they really hyped it up as a classic game that people are clamoring to play forty years later. It was something more unscrupulous Amico defenders used to defend the project. Everybody loves Astrosmash, right? Who wouldn’t want a remake in the 2020s? Of course, the answer to that question is almost every person on planet Earth. If you want to play Astrosmash you have almost unlimited options available. Get an Intellivision compilation on an already owned console or even an original Intellivision. It’s one of the cheaper classic consoles, and it is worth checking out. Of course, that’s all beside the point. The main problem with using Astrosmash to sell the Amico is that Astrosmash just isn’t that good of a game. It’s not even all that memorable. The only thing that makes it stand out is how much different it is than the rest of the Intellivision library, and as we know different doesn’t always mean better.

 Astrosmash is a game that is as simple as they come. You are a ship stuck to the ground that can only move back and forth such as in Space Invaders. The object is to shoot things until you die. If you shoot objects in the sky you gain points and if they hit the ground you lose points. That really about sums it up. It’s strange for an Intellivision game to be so easy to summarize. They had some weird and complex games. It does have a bit of that Intellivision flair though. At certain scores the background color will change up until it turns gray and then repeat. This does give the game a sense of accomplishment. The screen can be filled with objects moving at different speeds which is impressive. The graphics are clear, and the sound affects are effective. If you want to play a brainless shooter this is certainly a choice. However, I feel that Astrosmash crosses the line from brainless to boring. This is not the exciting twitch shooter that can define a console.

 

The more I play Astrosmash the more surprised I get by how little strategy is needed.  There are a few things that will chase you or shoot at you, but 98% of what you encounter will be indifferent rocks that do nothing but fall. Sometimes you will shoot them wrong, and they will split in two, but the two pieces will just fall at an angle. There are ships that will shoot at you, and I live for these ships. It’s the only time in the game that I feel alive. Who wants to shoot boring old rocks when there are alien invaders out there? There are also bombs which will cost you a life if they touch the ground, but even these don’t thrill me much. It’s so easy to rack up lives that losing a few doesn’t really matter. There is no strategy required to get high scores besides moving around a little and trying not to get hit by rocks. The games can also last a very long time without much changing. Objects get faster, but this isn’t enough to keep things interesting. I got tired of playing long before I lost all my lives when I was playing for this review. When I turned it off I had roughly 50,000 points and 22 lives. I am better at this game than I used to be, but boredom is never a good sign. At least someone thought to put rapid fire in the game so your thumbs won’t fall off trying to push those stiff buttons on the Intellivision controller.

 It’s always great ending a review talking about how the game is so shallow that there’s nothing left to say. So let’s do it. This game is so shallow that there’s nothing left to say. Mattell really pushed this game back in the day. They even gave it away with consoles. It shipped almost 1,000,000 units which is almost a third of total Intellivision consoles sold. Of course, this doesn’t say much for the game itself. The obvious reason they promoted it so much is because it’s the Intellivision game that most resembles an Atari game. In fact, it resembles several Atari games without borrowing the best parts of any of them. I can understand trying to copy Atari in the early 80s, but Intellivision could, and later would, do better. Still, this isn’t a terrible game and I know it appeals to some people so it’s going to end up in the middle of the list at #72. It’s not quite in the good section, but it’s a textbook okay game.  I’m not an expert in the Intellivison library, but I imagine that this will end up in the middle of that list as well. I’ve only ranked two so right now it’s on the bottom, but don’t worry Astrosmash fans, it won’t stay there.

 

Intellivision Quality Percentage: 1/2

 

Intellivision Rankings

 

1. Pinball

2. Astrosmash

Ranking List

screenshots are from mobygames.com