With a slew of great games ticked off the list, it looks like Hamster is making the rounds and completing the HERE NEOGEO line up with titles from the earliest era of the console’s life. This week saw the release of another one of those games, this time the ninja-flavored beat-em-up. ninja combat ($3.99). It’s one that many of you have probably played at some point, but is it any good? Was that ever? Shaun investigates.
Honestly speaking, there’s not much to say about ninja combat as a game. Not very good, especially in the sober light of hindsight. He has some interesting ideas, some good and some bad. Having your characters throw shuriken instead of using their fists or feet as a basic attack was unusual, and accidentally robs the game of those nice shoves and punches that bring a lot of brawler satisfaction. It has additional unlockable characters that you’ll have access to as you play, which helps keep you up to date even if those other characters aren’t very good. In general he tries to be different, and I think that’s where he often stumbles.
Hamster has done its usual business here, with the same modes and additional options that we’ve seen in all the HERE NEOGEO line. That means you get external controller support, which isn’t a bad idea here. You will need external controllers to play two player mode, which is local only. Online leaderboards are here, even if this isn’t really the type of game where attacking the score is a lot of fun. If you’re stuck with touch controls, it’s not the worst thing in the world. After all, you can roll through the credits all the way to the end, and it doesn’t take a lot of finger magic to play such a basic beat-em-up.
Well, let’s deviate a bit. ninja combatAs it turns out, it wasn’t a launch title for the NEOGEO console in Japan. it was very close. Close enough to make it to the North American release a few months later. And that’s why I tend to think of it as a launch title. When NEOGEO was launched in the West, I was about eleven years old. I spent a lot of time in arcades with my friends and I remember the first time we walked into our regular arcade and listened to the speakers on the NEOGEO MVS. I don’t remember the four games loaded there, but I know that ninja combat was one of them.
Like most kids born in the era I was born into, I thought ninjas were the coolest thing ever. No real ninja of course. But the goofy superhero ninjas that permeated pop culture in the 1980s. So the leading twins of ninja combat, with their Day-Glo outfits and complete lack of stealth, really drew me in. I thought it was cool that they were throwing shuriken instead of punching. There was a button that made them do backflips! There are also so many weapons that they can pick up. And heck, look at the way they walk. Putting one foot in front of the other carefully, like ninjas do.
Maybe because I didn’t have access to NEOGEO games at home, some of these early games really stuck in my head and ninja combat and cyber-lip they were probably the two largest. She would daydream about them. She would draw the characters on the back of school worksheets. For me these games were among the best to be found anywhere. When they were taken out of the MVS rotation forever, I was sorry. I waited for the Super NES or Genesis ports. I mean, we have fatal fury. Have fighting art. Have heroes of the world. Surely those ports of ninja combat and cyber-lip They are coming. But they didn’t. At that time, she really couldn’t understand why. Eventually they faded considerably from my brain. street fighter iiyou understand. Mortal Kombat. Easy to follow.
I didn’t get a chance to play these games again for over a decade. Ah, time to play cyber-lip and ninja combat again, those fantastic arcade classics from my youth. It didn’t take long with either title to realize because they had not been ported. why almost nobody else talked about them. Because no other kid around me had been obsessed with his characters and game mechanics like me. These games were not good. they were not good absolutely. they were not memorably bad, any. They were plain toast. An unsalted cookie. As important to NEOGEO as half the songs on the average pop album were to the person who bought it. They filled up the slots, took a few coins from people gawking at the new cabinet, and vanished when it became clear they weren’t getting as much attention as other games.
why the hell someone play cyber-lip rather metal slug? Who in his right mind would play ninja combat rather sengoku 3? The lies that nostalgia likes to tell were exposed once I restarted those games and memory collided with reality. bad games. boring games. Boo. Another for the stack with Bubsy the Bobcat, Road Runner’s Death Valley Rallyand the rocket man for the NES. The fool loves a fool child whose imagination could fill any gaps left by an overworked development team.
And yet, and yet. and yet i still buy ninja combat and cyber-lip when recently available on a console or device I own. I know exactly what kind of games these are now, and I know I’m not going to have a good time playing them again. But I buy them and play them, not quite sure why. Probably chasing my childhood, like many of us. Maybe hoping to find something good to grab onto, so I can promote them as a hidden gem in some sort of fancy list of games where I’m trying to look like an iconoclast. But there just isn’t that kind of thing in ninja combat. Nothing more than a pair of Day-Glo ninjas clumsily clubbing considerably less clad opponents, their hair billowing in perfect rhythm as their bodies heave with each breath.
I buy, I play. And so I have it again. And it is here in this meandering essay that I say the only reason why you should pick up ACA NEOGEO Ninja Combat it is if you too are affiliated with this particular shade of times past. I can’t imagine most people getting much out of it, as it may well be the blandest NEOGEO beat-em-up of them all. So yeah, this one is just for Shaun and the people who have read all of these words and nodded their head to at least half of them. The rest should just wait and see what next Wednesday brings. Maybe cyber-lip?
