Action/Platformer
June 1986 (TOSE/Bandai)
I think there might be a point to Ninja Kid. But I don’t hate myself enough to find out. So I’ll give you some information about it and let you decide for yourself.
It was made by that timeless partnership, TOSE and Bandai. I’ve ripped them apart enough for all of us to know what to do when we see that coming.
Needless to say, at this point Nintendo is the dominant force when it comes to publishing and developing games. They have some good ones. I’m not going to count because I know it’s more than 0.
Ninja Kid is the best game from TOSE and Bandai so far though. I guess that’s not really saying much, but it is what it is.
The entire game feels like an ice level in Mario. And I hate the ice levels. Bad combination. This also might be the first instance where stairs aren’t really stairs. It looks like I’ll have to jump up to get to a higher level, but instead I can walk right through. Why? I don’t know, but it’s so crazy I’ve made a video just to show you.
I would think that someone would just make the world and stick with it. A terrible layout is better than an inconsistent one. I would even settle for different placement of the levels if I had to go through them in the same order. I know that in some of those instances I had a choice of which level to go into. But that’s the point, sometimes there’s a choice and sometimes there isn’t. That’s not just bad game design, it’s downright lazy.
There are parts where the stairs aren’t really stairs. They’re roughly stair like pieces of mass that you can walk through even though common sense says you shouldn’t be able to do that. I played levels where the point was to kill enemies, to light candles…
Actually, lets go on about that. If the point if the level is to make a flame pass over a candle so it can light, I need to be able to make the flame pass over the candle. It’s way too hard to do that.
I could go on for a while adding stuff about levels where I couldn’t figure out what I was supposed to do and the unfair way some enemies come onto the screen and act like they’re playing Contra1.
I’m going to be optimistic. The next game was made by different people. But I have a feeling this month is going to be a giant stinker.
- Although we haven’t seen Contra yet. So maybe we should say they’re going, well, we just haven’t really seen anything like that yet. [↩]
