Tecmo’s Team Ninja is bringing the highly anticipated Ninja Gaiden 2 to Xbox 360 very soon. What better way to celebrate than to take a look back to the very beginning, when Ninja Gaiden was at the peak of its popularity on the 8-bit Nintendo? Even back then, Ninja Gaiden was known for its cutting-edge action gameplay, catchy music, and punishing difficulty. After three well-received games on the NES, a game boy spin off , various Sega-developed games featuring the title, and a Super Nintendo compilation pack of the three NES games, the most we would ever see of the series would be Ryu Hayabusa’s appearance among the cast of the Dead or Alive series. When the Xbox was nearing its release, one of the games announced for it was Tecmo’s Ninja Gaiden, an all new game unrelated to any previous game in the series. It would finally see a release in 2004, and became as much of a favorite among Xbox players as the originals had been among Nintendo players. The Xbox game took what was awesome about the NES games and bought it into 3-d. As a nod back to it’s past, it even included the three NES games as unlockables. Lets take a look now at this franchise’s 8-bit roots.
[Read the rest of this entry…]