Ninja Gaiden for the NES was dang hard. Like, way hard. But it was great. It was a fast-paced action-heavy action-platformer in the same vein as Mega Man or Castlevania, but the tremendous difficulty here almost puts those games to shame. Seriously, this game is tough, but rewarding. It had good music, epic boss fights, cutscenes that were really spectacular for the time. You played as a Ninja in side-scrolling levels fighting demons or aliens or whatever, and you could pick up special weapons like shurikens to help you on your quest.
Now, the title of my review is Wily Wars 2: Electric Boogaloo. That's because I recently did a review of Sega Genesis's Mega Man: the Wily Wars. Like Super Mario All-Stars, it was a re-release compilation cartridge of multiple NES games, but while Super Mario All-Stars served to faithfully recreate the gaming experience and enhance the visual and audio components of its source material, Wily Wars was a series of uncanny ports that threw off the controls, visuals, and sound, creating a sometimes-improved-sometimes-worsened variation on the original game. That's exactly what happened two years later to Ninja Gaiden Trilogy.
The Ninja Gaiden Trilogy is basically the same game you know and love. Thankfully, unlike Wily Wars, the gameplay was replicated nearly completely faithfully. The disappointment comes in with the audio and visuals, and the control. In the audio department, the Trilogy opted for all-new music rather than updated versions of the old tracks. Sure, some of these tracks are fine and even great, I feel they don't match the NES quality. With the visuals, a lot of sprites and backgrounds got updated, but not in a very meaningful way. For instance, the NES versions had parallax scrolling, but the "enhanced" re-release didn't. A lot of the sprites, despite looking updated compared to its NES predecessor, still look very old for a video game released in 1995.
Last, the control. On the original NES, you had two buttons: B to attack, and A to jump. To use a special weapon, hold up and attack. On SNES, despite a wildly different controller, they keep this layout. They could have had a place in Settings to change your control, to use, say, B jump and Y attack, with A or Y or even L or R being the special attack.
Now, Ninja Gaiden Trilogy is not completely worthless. If you've never played the NES games, you wouldn't even be able to tell these differences. Some of the music is, in my opinion, better. There is a password system that curbs the difficulty, though a battery save would have been more welcome.
The last problem with the game is that the cart is extremely expensive, over $100. For that, you can buy an NES and the three NES carts.
Super Mario All-Stars was great, fondly remembered and still holds up today. It makes the imagination run wild with possibilities. Castlevania Compilation? TMNT Compilation? But we ended up with a botched Mega Man compilation on Genesis, and a botched Ninja Gaiden compilation. Not a terrible game, but such a disappointment.
Now, the title of my review is Wily Wars 2: Electric Boogaloo. That's because I recently did a review of Sega Genesis's Mega Man: the Wily Wars. Like Super Mario All-Stars, it was a re-release compilation cartridge of multiple NES games, but while Super Mario All-Stars served to faithfully recreate the gaming experience and enhance the visual and audio components of its source material, Wily Wars was a series of uncanny ports that threw off the controls, visuals, and sound, creating a sometimes-improved-sometimes-worsened variation on the original game. That's exactly what happened two years later to Ninja Gaiden Trilogy.
The Ninja Gaiden Trilogy is basically the same game you know and love. Thankfully, unlike Wily Wars, the gameplay was replicated nearly completely faithfully. The disappointment comes in with the audio and visuals, and the control. In the audio department, the Trilogy opted for all-new music rather than updated versions of the old tracks. Sure, some of these tracks are fine and even great, I feel they don't match the NES quality. With the visuals, a lot of sprites and backgrounds got updated, but not in a very meaningful way. For instance, the NES versions had parallax scrolling, but the "enhanced" re-release didn't. A lot of the sprites, despite looking updated compared to its NES predecessor, still look very old for a video game released in 1995.
Last, the control. On the original NES, you had two buttons: B to attack, and A to jump. To use a special weapon, hold up and attack. On SNES, despite a wildly different controller, they keep this layout. They could have had a place in Settings to change your control, to use, say, B jump and Y attack, with A or Y or even L or R being the special attack.
Now, Ninja Gaiden Trilogy is not completely worthless. If you've never played the NES games, you wouldn't even be able to tell these differences. Some of the music is, in my opinion, better. There is a password system that curbs the difficulty, though a battery save would have been more welcome.
The last problem with the game is that the cart is extremely expensive, over $100. For that, you can buy an NES and the three NES carts.
Super Mario All-Stars was great, fondly remembered and still holds up today. It makes the imagination run wild with possibilities. Castlevania Compilation? TMNT Compilation? But we ended up with a botched Mega Man compilation on Genesis, and a botched Ninja Gaiden compilation. Not a terrible game, but such a disappointment.
