| paleface [sys=MD; cat=Platformer; reg=UC] |
| | | Third game in Sega's Shinobi series, after Shinobi and Shadow Dancer in the arcade (and Shinobi ported to the Master System). Composer Yuzo Koshiro gets his own copyright notice at the start.
This is one of the Genesis games you can buy in a cheap emulator from Steam that just installs the ROM file loose for you--thank you for selling us the ROMs, Sega! : ) (Wish they'd bring the Sonic ROMs back...) So I'm running it in Mednafen.
Not sure about normal difficulty but Easy gives you 9 lives and oh 4 or so continues; I'm using infinite lives code FFE141:0003. |
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| paleface 11:15:58 05/11/24 [title updated] |
| | | Aha in Mednafen you can use the "-md.region" option to "Emulate the specified region's Genesis/MegaDrive"; on default, this game runs as "The Super Shinobi," the Japanese title. ^ _^
(Boring US title you could get if you ran with "-md.region overseas_ntsc": "The Revenge of Shinobi.") |
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| | | | Posted a 20fps animated gif version of the likeness-removed Steam ROM intro: https://smbhax.tumblr.com/post/750286361658097664/intro-to-the-super-shinobi-md-steam-rom |
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Noob playing through the Steam ROM of The Super Shinobi / The Revenge of Shinobi for Mega Drive / Genesis in the emulator Mednafen (Steam installs the "TheSuperShinobi_JUE.SGD" ROM loose in a folder called "uncompressed ROMs" : P), on Easy / max "SHURIKENS" settings and with the Infinite Lives cheat FFE141:0003 (entered in Mednafen's Alt+C Cheats interface as address 0xFFE141, value 003) from https://gamehacking.org/game/15756 . Oh and I got stuck in the teleport maze right at the end and had to use the map at https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/669897-the-revenge-of-shinobi/map/19587-round-8-2-map to get through the last bit.
The eyes of the big ninja in the intro are different in this Steam version than I see in older recordings on YouTube, where the eyes are sharper and scowling. Ah! This appears to be the most recent revision of the software--apparently the game went through a lot of revisions, changing various characters for copyright-related reasons. From Wikipedia:
"Software revision 1.04 (2009/2012): Since the licensed use of the boss Spider-Man was for a limited period of time, the game was subsequently prevented from being re-released years later. The 2009 release for the Virtual Console as well as the Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network 2012 releases feature a new software revision (1.04) that omits the Marvel copyright notice and replaces Spider-Man with a pink palette swap of the character that still behaves the same as the licensed Spider-Man.[5] Joe Musashi's design in the title screen was also altered to remove his likeness to Sonny Chiba."
(And the guy after not-Spider-Man used to be Batman, the skeletal dino boss was Godzilla, etc, apparently.)
The action was perfectly smooth and intuitive in the two Shinobi arcade games--Shinobi and Shadow Dancer--preceding this. It's like they gave this game to a buncha noobs and were like, figure it out.
This is a ninja action game with a very mandatory double jump that only comes out if a) you hold jump for just the right amount of time to get the optimal height jump and b) hit jump within a few pixels of the apex of the jump; in other words, it's VERY picky; off by a pixel or two and no second jump happens, too bad.
The whole game is pretty much like that. Like, if you jump but hit your head on the ceiling, you levitate horizontally along the ceiling for what the full unimpeded width of the jump would have been. There was really basic stuff about platforming that they either didn't know or didn't care about. Should we have frequent lengthy sequences where the player can flip (if they manage the mandatory double jump, ha-haa!) between a foreground and a background plane, each filled with enemies firing constant overlapping attacks that are all hard to see/distinguish? Sure, why not?
Enemies explode in a satisfying way when you defeat them, so that's nice. |
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