Hi there!

My favorite Ninja on my favorite 8-Bit computer - a match made in heaven?

Well, the honest answer is that it's nowhere near the fabulous Sega Master System version. Coming from the "Random Access" team it's still pretty good and somewhat above the usual arcade conversion rush job though. As far as I remember Shinobi was one of the last C64 cracks I got back in the day, before switching completely to the Amiga

The level graphics are closely modeled after the arcade stage designs, but they are composed from noticeably limited tile sets, so all in all they feel a bit more blocky than they probably should. The sprites also seem to suffer from some kind of memory shortage: While all enemies are there, they sure could've used some more frames of animation.

Sound FX are also sparse, I'd be surprised if it actually were more than 5 different ones. Where the game really shines though is in the boss battles, which are surprisingly close to the source material. Especially the screen sized helicopter of the 2nd stage looks impressive.

Overall the game is very playable, albeit there's a handful of very rough spots that definitely could've used some fine tuning. These passages seem almost impossible to pass through without losing a life. Of course there's the smartbomb-like ninja magic you can unleash once a level, but I'd prefer it if everything in the game would be also manageable without them.

The ending is pretty lame once again, just some pointless text scrolling in:

Some future day the "Playing..." series may see its sequel "Shadow Dancer", but first it'll continue with something else.

Greetings,

Manuel