Ninja Gaiden

THIS IS MY SIDE STORY

Nick loves learning about games as much as he enjoys playing them and Tecmo’s game schooled him good

» NES » 1988 » Tecmo When I first started to explore my interest in videogame history, one of the biggest problems that I had was having grown up in the UK. I knew that we’d had the odd change here and there – that Lylat Wars was Star Fox 64 everywhere else, for example – but speaking to Americans online was truly revelatory. One of the biggest examples was learning that Ninja Gaiden was not the one-off cool Master System game I knew it as. In fact, I’d had another Ninja Gaiden game all along, the Commodore 64 version of the arcade original that had confusingly been titled Shadow Warriors. Do you see what I mean?

I came to learn that my Master System favourite was actually a wholly unique game in the style of the very popular trilogy of NES games – two of which actually came out here, also under the Shadow

Warriors brand. I finally got hold of the first NES game back in 2007, as part of a lucky haul of NTSC games found in a charity shop, and it felt both familiar and totally alien at the same time. Starting off in the city streets will have made perfect sense to fans of the arcade game, but it felt odd not to be running through the forest. All of the power-up icons were totally different. But the biggest struggle was the wall jumping – the way Ryu Hayabusa clings to walls in this game is a world apart from the Master System game, which relies much more heavily on timing.

Eventually, I came to learn that Ninja Gaiden for the NES has plenty of what I love about the Master System game I grew up with, and I’m glad to have it. The music is very cool, Ryu controls just as well as he always did, and it even has those impossibly irritating bird enemies that seem to always be placed next to bottomless pits. It shouldn’t have really been a surprise, given that the Master System game was the later adaptation, but sometimes it’s easy to miss similarities when you’re initially blinded by differences.