I won’t even go through the pretense that this is a review. This game is awesome, it’s going to get 5/5. Alright? If you don’t agree then stop reading now; you may as well have slapped me across the face with a wobbly pink, ribbed Katana and told me the earth doesn’t revolve around the sun; we have no shared conception of reality, nothing in common and there is no purpose at all for any continued interaction between us.
Hoping that I haven’t lost any lifelong friends with the above outburst, what about the game itself? Revenge of Shinobi (or Super Shinobi at it was known in Japan) was released in the west for the Mega Drive in 1989, a sequel to the earlier smash hit arcade game (and home console release) of Shinobi. The game was designed to showcase the power of Sega’s new 16-bit home console, with one of the company’s most prominent directors Noriyoshi Ohba placed at the helm. During development composer Yuzo Koshiro was brought in to produce the objectively incredible soundtrack.
The game itself follows the efforts of Shinobi Joe Musashi to track down and destroy the evil shadow-organisation Neo-Zeed. As that organisation had been named Zeed in the previous game, presumably that poor effort on the part of Zeed’s marketing department meant that Joe didn’t have too difficult a time finding their ‘secret’ bases throughout the world (especially as they quite often literally have ZEED signage placed all over them), setting out to fight his way though their henchmen with shuriken, sword and short stabby thing in a super-cool-looking way.
Considering Shinobi was a relatively early Mega Drive release with a small cartridge storage size it features a remarkable number of different background locales
Stand out Moments
Now that any pretence of this being an objective review is out of the window, a list of why Revenge of Shinobi rocks balls.
The Opening Sequence
Look I made a meme of the wrestling guy which shows the reaction of my 12 to 40-year-old selves to this opening sequence.
Actually that kind of ruins it, so here is a link to the actual video, which deserves to be watched.
Seriously though, I first saw this as a kid at my cousin’s house and it left such an impression (one that has stuck with me to this day). You immediately realised that Sega's new machine was head and shoulders above anything else around at the time, and unfortunately gave my Spectrum back at home the appeal of playing with a ball in a cup, while being sat on an anthill (sorry Speccy!)
The Gameplay
You think, you press a button, Joe does. It’s that simple. If you’re a chump and fall down a hole or into machine-gun fire it’s your fault, not Joe’s. Move on. If you’re really good at the game you can keep hold of the ‘power-up’ sword and super-shuriken which can blow up enemies in one hit and let you block incoming fire including bullets with a sword. Holy mother of fucking shit that is so fucking cool, mother fucker (sorry got carried away there, but it is kind of neat).
The Music
Check out this link, off to Youtube with ye! Composer Yuzo Koshiro got such an incredible response from the Yamaha sound-chip that he must have signed a pact with the devil, in exchange for his soul, to create this music. It was also almost certainly one of these tracks that Tenacious D were talking about with their greatest ever song in the world. Yuzo, when you die and are sat in hell with boiling oil being poured over your testes for all eternity, it was totally worth it.
The Magic
Musashi-san has a choice of magics that were apparently learned by him at Ninja School while he was reading on the loo, Joe being such a dedicated student that there was literally not one minute of the day not focussed on being the best ninja it was possible to be. Even when straining out a particularly fiendish wasabi and teriyaki sashimi from the night before, crouching over those god-awful hole in the grounds that they still insist on having in Asia despite having the technology for magnetic levitation trains, Joe was getting his study on.
The magic system really adds to player involvement as you have to make a judgement call on when and which type to use; do you knock out a boss with lightning blasts, get protection earlier in the level with an electrical shield, or even obtain increased agility to help you pass levels with lots of dangerous jumps? The decision is yours.
The Intellectual Property Theft
The game is a product of that wonderful time when cool ideas could be stolen mercilessly without an army of lawyers waiting to beat the shit out of you. As a consequence this game allows you to be a Ninja and take on Rambo, Spiderman, Batman, the Terminator and Godzilla and therefore sets a benchmark of coolness that, like the constraints of the laws of relativity which limit the maximum velocity of objects and their ability to go faster than the speed of light, will surely be forever outside of man's capability to surpass.
These images are from the initial Japanese version of the game. For the western release Rambo had the distinctive Stallone mullet removed and Batman was replaced (see below). Strangely, the Terminator (and the Arnold Schwarzenegger likeness) as well as Spiderman were allowed to remain, while for some bizarre reason the latter was re-coloured in pink for some later compilation releases.
The American & European version of the game had a kind of giant bat with chapless fur pants on in place of Batman, showing what sinister conceptual black hole would have awaited if the developers had been forced to come up with ideas themselves. Apparently design director Ohba admitted that he was short of original concepts and had drawn some provisional sketches based on existing film characters, thinking the rest of the design team would modify them to something else during production. However they didn’t do so, meaning that the end designs were instantly identifiable as Arnie, Stallone and Spidey et al.
Despite the exhaustive list of cool stuff in this game, there are three stand-out moments that definitely take the edge off of Joe’s otherwise razor-sharp killy sword (although shut up it still gets 5/5!)
The Final level
Up until now the game has been more or less playable on about 3-4 brain cells. Move left to right, kill stuff, repeat. Why then did the dastardly developers wait until the last level to put you in a lab experiment for rats and give you a maze to solve? Which way do I go? What do those glyphs on the doors mean? And that f***ing music! Press play on the widget below and imagine this playing on repeat for the next 30 minutes, while you go back and forth through the same doors over and over and over again.
Your brow furrowed, hands becoming cramped on the controller, sweat running into your glazed eyes you desperately look for a pen and paper to try and draw a map. But none is available and you reach for the only other thing available, a craft-knife, and in your feverish state you start carving the door glyph markings into the skin on your arms. Hours later a member of your family finds you on the floor, passed out on the floor from loss of blood (the music is still playing). They scream at the sight of your pale, twisted form lying prone in a pool of blood. You survive the trip to the hospital and weeks later, assuming from the markings on your arms that you have been involved in some sort of religious ritual or exorcism, you are committed to a facility for the mentally insane. Your hair, beard and fingernails continue to grow, giving you the appearance of someone that has been ship-wrecked, except you are always wearing one of those surgical gowns that tie around the back so that your naked bottom is visible from behind.
Four years later you are released from the hospital and forced to begin your life anew. One of the first things you do is buy a mega drive and a copy of the game off eBay, determined to finish the final level. Learning from your previous mistake of attempting it unaided you visit GameFAQs.com and download a copy of a map that was no-doubt written by someone that had had a paper and pen to hand. You give a brief mumble of thanks to that brave soul as you manage to complete the level, and then go onto Amazon, leaving a 3-star review. You would have liked to have given it 5-stars, but that final level and those years in the mental institute and the constant visits from ‘Big Dave’ have just taken the edge off of it a bit.
The Final Boss
Oooh boy, this one has given me some major hang-ups about old Chinese men that use their unfeasibly long hair as a weapon. Firstly, before you start the fight, it turns out there is some previously undisclosed woman being held captive (unless you had read the game manual, but who bothers with that really?!) She is about to get crushed unless Joe can save her. But wait, I don’t know the context here: Perhaps the old man was about to get placed in a care home by his gold-digging trophy wife? He managed to avoid taking the happy pills for a couple of days and realised his predicament and has managed to escape, turning the tables and trapping her in her own torture device. Who am I to interfere with that kind of domestic situation? I decide that the wisest course of action, rather than get involved in a lengthy lawsuit, is just to let her get crushed.
Aside from this the boss is an absolute horror and makes Godzilla on the previous levels look like a declawed kitten that has been force-fed Prozac by comparison. Make sure you have a full stock of max-strength Monster Energy drink before you attempt it and the swear jar close at hand.
The death of the Tiger in The Walking Dead TV series
OK I admit I struggled to come up with three things..
I sat through many years of shocking, repulsive horror, happily munching on a sandwich on a Monday evening as I watched people’s faces being ripped off, heads being bashed in with baseball bats and children (even admittedly annoying ones) being eaten alive. But, the death of the tiger somehow crossed a line in the sand, and remarkably (in a series that consisted of the dead being re-animated with absolutely no attempt at explanation) broke the suspension of disbelief by asking us to believe that 800lbs of pure muscle and razor-sharp claws could get caught and overwhelmed by a gang of hungry thick people.
I said when the tiger first appeared “if the tiger dies I will stop watching the Walking Dead” and that is what I did. I turned off the TV, walked away and I think probably watered the plants before going to bed and have not watched an episode since.
Done enough of the reading and want to do some playing?
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