Ninja Gaiden ("guy-den") was released this month (March) back in 1989 by the folks at Tecmo. This game was highly noted for its level of difficulty (particularly Stage 6-2).
To use the ninja arts one would collect power-ups, the staple to all great side scrollers!
What did Ninja Gaiden bring to the table? The infamous cut-scenes. Not really utilized in games before it, Ninja Gaiden brought us a new form of story telling before the days of Full Motion Video were possible.
"Reportedly, Tecmo was originally going to use the title, Ninja Dragon, in America, but it was dropped (most likely due to Data East's beat 'em up, Bad Dudes, which was originally titled Bad Dudes vs. Dragon Ninja in the arcade). The original arcade title and early home versions of that game were known as Shadow Warriors in Europe and Australia." -wikipedia.org
A Bit O' Trivia
The first two NES titles were also ported to MSDOS, being fairly faithful to the originals, though the graphics were completely redrawn, giving the characters a slightly different look. For instance, in Ninja Gaiden II, the main character sprite is orange while the "split clones" are blue, a reversal of the original design.
This franchise may be one of the first to bring along the concept of the "hardcore gamer." Only the hardcore folks would suffer the difficulty of this game to complete it. Oh, those kids with a lot of time on their hands.
Ah, to remember back to the days of Gaiden...
Derrick
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