The Last Ninja for the Coco 3

[JamesD]

Here are screenshots and a video from the actual game. It seems Tandy canceled it and several other games for the Coco3 that were near completion. Alternate Reality: The City(?) was supposedly another title this happened too.

Link

[Trip_Cannon]

Looks great... A little slower than the C64 version, but the graphics are certainly there. Too bad it never came out for the Coco 3, it was a great game for its day.

[JamesD]

Looks great... A little slower than the C64 version, but the graphics are certainly there. Too bad it never came out for the Coco 3, it was a great game for its day.

Keep in mind that is an unfinished version and with some additional work it might have been faster. With some optimizations for the 6309 it would definitely be faster.

 

Yeah, it was a cool game for it's day.

 

Someone at Tandy must have really disliked the Coco to cancel everything the way they did. I'm guessing someone from the PC projects got into higher management but that may not be true.

[Trip_Cannon]

I don't know much about the tandy legacy, but yeah, I remember them starting to focus more on the IBM clone side of things later on. I guess for its time too, the Coco had some heavy competition from Amiga and the ST.

 

Last Ninja on Wikipedia:

 

Last Ninja was the most successful original game ever on the Commodore C64. In Europe the sales for the C64 version alone were in excess of 750,000 units and international multi-format sales exceeded 2,000,000 units. It won almost every award available and was critically acclaimed everywhere as an original, ground-breaking game. There is no C64 gamer that has not heard of Last Ninja. Even today, people still talk about the impact it had on the gaming world..

[JamesD]

I don't know much about the tandy legacy, but yeah, I remember them starting to focus more on the IBM clone side of things later on. I guess for its time too, the Coco had some heavy competition from Amiga and the ST.

They were more worried that it was competing with their own machines. The coco was their top seller right until the end of it's production.

 

Last Ninja on Wikipedia:

 

Last Ninja was the most successful original game ever on the Commodore C64. In Europe the sales for the C64 version alone were in excess of 750,000 units and international multi-format sales exceeded 2,000,000 units. It won almost every award available and was critically acclaimed everywhere as an original, ground-breaking game. There is no C64 gamer that has not heard of Last Ninja. Even today, people still talk about the impact it had on the gaming world..

Impressive.

[TimsterAA]

I don't know much about the tandy legacy, but yeah, I remember them starting to focus more on the IBM clone side of things later on. I guess for its time too, the Coco had some heavy competition from Amiga and the ST.

 

Last Ninja on Wikipedia:

 

Last Ninja was the most successful original game ever on the Commodore C64. In Europe the sales for the C64 version alone were in excess of 750,000 units and international multi-format sales exceeded 2,000,000 units. It won almost every award available and was critically acclaimed everywhere as an original, ground-breaking game. There is no C64 gamer that has not heard of Last Ninja. Even today, people still talk about the impact it had on the gaming world..

 

 

This C64 gamer never heard of this game until reading this thread earlier today. Hmmmm....

 

--Timster--

[briza]

Looks great... A little slower than the C64 version, but the graphics are certainly there. Too bad it never came out for the Coco 3, it was a great game for its day.

Keep in mind that is an unfinished version and with some additional work it might have been faster. With some optimizations for the 6309 it would definitely be faster.

 

Yeah, it was a cool game for it's day.

 

Someone at Tandy must have really disliked the Coco to cancel everything the way they did. I'm guessing someone from the PC projects got into higher management but that may not be true.

 

Hi James.

 

Don't forget that it was using the standard Grfdrv sold with OS-9 Level II. Which by the time Kevin Darling and Co had finished optimizing It became the Xmas edition of GrfDrv which was going to be the main graphics driver of the OS-9 Level 2 Version 3 upgrade. But Alas Tandy as always. Canceled it before it was fully finished. So The Last Ninja on the Coco 3 would've ran a lot faster and smoother using this new updated GrfDrv.

 

James I would love to know who it was in Tandy that despised the Coco3 so much. I don't think that Mr Roach ever liked the Coco3 that much. But it takes more then 1 person to cripple the Coco3 from the start.

[A Sprite]

This C64 gamer never heard of this game until reading this thread earlier today. Hmmmm.... icon_ponder.gif

 

http://www.lemon64.com/games/

 

The sequel is listed in the poll on the front page as the #1 game for the C64.

Edited June 21, 2007 by A Sprite

[briza]

Here are screenshots and a video from the actual game. It seems Tandy canceled it and several other games for the Coco3 that were near completion. Alternate Reality: The City(?) was supposedly another title this happened too.

Link

 

 

Hi James.

 

The Last ninja might never have made it out for the coco 3. But who knows maybe Steve B will be nice and let the source code and the demo out for the coco community to finish this game.

 

But because of my sleuth work I did manage to find a fully working version of Alternate Reality(The City) for the Coco 2 and coco 3. Seems this game was done. But I guess the company(Datasoft I think) never really got to sell many copies before they pulled out of the coco market altogether. So I'm glad that a fellow coco user just happened to have a copy in his collection.

 

laters

 

Briza

[oky2000]

The CoCo 3 was the wrong machine at the wrong time, it was quite expensive if I remember right, and nobody really cared about 8bit anymore. The CoCo 3 was quite an advanced machine but still had no sprites/blitter/decent soundchip and only 8bit. I can think of at least 3 other similarly advanced 8bit machines with many good features that ALL flopped because the 8bit scene was felt to be the past in the mid-late 1980s.

 

All this at a time when everyone was looking to get a 16bit machine in the future, technically impressive but that's no good for sales. Most people would buy an ST instead, sure it also lacked a lot of hardware like sprites/blitter/decent sound but it was fast and there was a lot of excitement about this 68000 based colour macintosh killer dubbed the Jackintosh.

 

CoCo 1 was pretty rubbish at the time, don't know about the improvements of CoCo 2 over 1 so can't comment.

[Herbarius]

I don't know much about the tandy legacy, but yeah, I remember them starting to focus more on the IBM clone side of things later on. I guess for its time too, the Coco had some heavy competition from Amiga and the ST.

 

Last Ninja on Wikipedia:

 

Last Ninja was the most successful original game ever on the Commodore C64. In Europe the sales for the C64 version alone were in excess of 750,000 units and international multi-format sales exceeded 2,000,000 units. It won almost every award available and was critically acclaimed everywhere as an original, ground-breaking game. There is no C64 gamer that has not heard of Last Ninja. Even today, people still talk about the impact it had on the gaming world..

 

 

This C64 gamer never heard of this game until reading this thread earlier today. Hmmmm....

 

--Timster--

 

I too never understood the fascination with Last Ninja. I tried it both on my real C64 and on WinVICE, I also tried the PC (MS-DOS) version, and yes I've read the instructions, but it's just... The controls are complicated and the game ist unfair. Why do I say unfair? Okay for once even the first enemy you meet is like impossible to defeat. Second, if you want to pick up or use something, you've to do this move and you've to line up the tip of the hand of your player character exactly with the item of interest, which is really frustrating.

 

It even had a sequel but surprisingly none of these issues were resolved, it's rather like a "mission pack sequel". However, the PC version had actual improvements: While the first Last Ninja had some bugs in the controls, Last Ninja 2 fixed this, so the controls were on-par with the C64 version.

Edited July 13, 2009 by Herbarius