Conversion CAPERS

Which of the various home versions comes out on top?

Commodore 64

The C64 version looks good (despite the enemy sprites lacking detail) but plays poorly, with wonky collision detection leading to frequent frustration. Some elements are missing, too – there are no poles to swing on and the new York freeway is suspiciously quiet.

amstrad CPC

despite using much smaller sprites than the Speccy version, this runs at a snail’s pace and is barely playable as a result. The screen flicks, rather than scrolls, too. The Mode 0 graphics are nice and colourful, sure, but that’s about it for this weak release.

amiga

This is it – the best home conversion available, by some margin. It’s extremely accurate throughout, and even recreates the opening cinematic from the coin-op. Support for twoplayers is included, and it’s hard to imagine how this could be any better.

Zx Spectrum

It may look ridiculous today, with its large characters and their even larger sprite masks squashed into a tiny playing area, but this was widely seen as a solid coin-op conversion on release. It’s technically impressive and faithful to the original arcade version.

PC/DOS

It may bear the title ‘Ninja Gaiden’ but this looks and plays more like a knock-off than an official version. All the cool moves are missing, which makes the gameplay especially repetitive. The in-game music is beyond awful. In fact, it’s just awful all-round.

atari ST

This looks a lot like the Amiga version, minus some graphical trimmings. But actually play it and you find that it’s flick-screen rather than scrolling – not ideal for a scrolling beat-‘em-up. The sound is good, though not up to arcade or indeed Amiga standard.

atari lynx

The only console conversion is pretty good, offering up a faithful version of the arcade game that can be played on the go. That said, two of the original six stages are missing and, while it’s not a deal breaker, you can’t hook up two Lynx consoles for co-op play.