In the 1980s, people fucking loved Ninjas. There were a shitload of Ninja related movies made, there were a bunch of cartoons involving Ninjas (like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) and of course a massive amount of games where you play as a Ninja (and don't forget the massive amount of games where Ninjas appear as enemies... like in Gun.Smoke. Yes, a goddamn western game had Ninjas in it. Thats how much people loved Ninjas) We all know about the greatness of the Ninja Gaiden games, and even the games based off the Ninja Turtles. BUT what we didn't know about is this fine little gem from American Sammy.
American Sammy made like 3 games for the NES BUT in my mind they were all pretty damn fun games. Amagon, Vice Project Doom and today's title Ninja Crusaders. I actually think Ninja Crusaders is the weakest of the three games, with Vice Project Doom being the best of the lot. Seriously, if you like Ninja Gaiden, Cabal or Spy Hunter you need to check out Vice Project Doom, that game is all 3 IN ONE. Now how awesome is THAT? And what makes this game unique is how depending on your weapon you can turn into an animal. A tiger, scorpion, dragon or falcon. All of those animals have their strenghts and weaknesses and I think it's a pretty neat gimmick (also if you are like me and didn't realize you could turn into an animal until you looked it up, you hold the attack button)
Now I think the games graphics are pretty decent for 1990. You can easily tell what everything is, I mean it's not the lush graphics of say Super Mario Bros. 3 or something that really pushes the graphical chip of the NES to its limits but they aren't so terrible they will bother you, but to be fair the bad graphics in NES games don't bother me. Not even in Uncanny X-Men. The music is well pretty decent also, but it's not very memorable. The game is pretty hard but I think if you work at it hard enough you can easily beat it, but to be fair I believe that to be the case with EVERY game you work enough at it and you can do it. Ninja Crusaders isn't as hard as Ninja Gaiden but it'll still take a week or two of solid NES playing to beat it.
Ninja Crusaders is not as good as any of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles games. Well, its better than Tournament Fighters. And it doesn't even deserve to lick the balls of Ninja Gaiden, but really those games are classics and some of the best on the NES. Ninja Crusaders is a fun little sidescroller that has a neat gimmick, but it's no classic. Still worth the $5 you'll shell out to get a copy of it.
No comments:
Post a Comment