Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Wow, I am late on this....

It took me a while to write this last entry on Ninja Gaiden, and Metroid. That was mostly because the two games were hard as hell, to the point of me NEVER in my life finishing them (unlike all the other previous entries.) And each shared so many aspects with the previous NES classics that I ran out of things to talk about. So I finally decided to consolidate the two and discuss highlights of each.

Ninja Gaiden was side scrolling beat em up. Its notorious difficulty was born from having to beat not only bad guys and bosses, but also the map and the timer. Precision jumps were the key, and coupled with the Castlevania “flinch” if you were off or got touched by an enemy, you were tossed backwards.

Ninja Gaiden was unique in the NES days for having cinematic story telling, with crudely animated cut scenes between major acts of the game. Taken for granted today, where such events are not only common but often rendered in the games engine, these comic book style graphics were a progressive leap forward, and possibly the first of its kind.

Musically the game was nothing special, and graphically it was hit or miss. While the backgrounds were rendered in stunning detail, you often looked at foes that were more a jumbled mess of pixels then anything else.

in the modern Era Ninja Gaiden has retained its nigh impossible difficulty, and romps through the demon world are little more literal then cult like. the problem is that modern games in the series are pretty forgettable, particularly since the developer at Namco "Team Ninja" seems to have a VERY unhealthy fascination with breasts.

Metroid was another beast. Where as Zelda had you explore what seemed like a large and expansive world, Metroid downsized it to a large alien base. Game play focused on exploration above EVERYTHING else, with power ups scattered far and wide, and your list of objectives was quite narrow.

1) Destroy the two bosses
2) After 1) destroy the bases main computer

Simple until you realized that you started off with none of the tools needed to do that task, and you had all of THIS to contend with. These aliens were not fucking around were they?

It is amazing in Metroid to see that the titular creature usually does not show up in it’s own game till the end. Much like the legend of Zelda before it, I assumed the main character you played was named Metroid, rather then the space jellyfish that the franchise centers around.

The Metroid franchise however is known for more then dungeon crawls, and exploration through upgrades. It can be argued that the Metroid series was the first video game series to have a female protagonist. Furthermore, the nature of Samaus Aran’s appearance belies and refutes any chance to sexualize her as a woman, providing a strong female (though I argue not feminine) character. For that, Metroid will always be remembered while Ninja Gaiden will be tossed aside in the Jiggle Physics bin.

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