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59 lines
3.3 KiB
Plaintext
59 lines
3.3 KiB
Plaintext
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SHINOBI
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Welcome to SHINOBI, where you will rely on mastery, might, magic, and
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disappointment throughout the game. Yes, SHINOBI is one of those games that
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looks great on the outside, and terrible on the inside. When I first received my
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review copy, I was thrilled with the screen shots on the back of the box; I
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thought the game was really going to be good, maybe even an ultimate classic.
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This is not the case. I promptly put the disk in the drive and started playing
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the worst arcade game I've seen in along time. Something must be wrong, I
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thought. I compared the back of the box to the screen. It doesn't even look like
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the same game. (This review is based on the IBM-PC version.)
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As far as I can tell, SHINOBI doesn't have much of a plot. You are Joe Musashi,
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Master Ninja, and you are trained in the ancient art of Shinobi. The evil Ring
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of Five has kidnapped the children of the world's leaders, and your job is to
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find them. What is the Ring of Five? I suppose they are five villains; don't ask
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me, the manual doesn't say. Whoops...that's my mistake: SHINOBI doesn't have a
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manual. It has a pamphlet. A very sparsely documented pamphlet.
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There are five missions in SHINOBI: Ken Oh, Black Turtle, Mandara, Lobster, and
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Masked Ninja. There's no description of what you do in these missions, and I
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can't find any mention of how they differ; maybe just in name. When you finally
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start playing SHINOBI, you come up against shooting thugs, frogmen, gunmen,
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green ninjas, and mongos. In each mission, there are several rounds -- I can't
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tell you exactly how many, because the pamphlet doesn't say.
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During play, your character bounces around sporadically, because the animation
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is very choppy. To fight back against the onslaught of thugs and vandals, you
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start out with ninja stars. You can also pick up other weapons throughout the
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game. I don't know what kinds of weapons, because there isn't a list.
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Your magic abilities are called Ninja Magic. Ninja Magic kills all the normal
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enemies onscreen, but only weakens the leaders of The Ring of Five. I can
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describe the graphics to you in one word: mediocre. And in a game of this
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quality, you'd expect the sound to be equal to the animation and graphics,
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right? Right: The sound is about as good as the graphics and animation. You you
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hear a nice "ping" when you throw a star and you can hear different "pings"
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throughout the game.
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The IBM-PC version of SHINOBI is packaged with the above-mentioned pamphlet and
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a 3-1/2" disk. I suppose you can obtain a 5-1/4" version somehow, but I couldn't
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find any information about it. SHINOBI requires 512K of RAM and MS-DOS 2.0 or
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higher to run on IBMs and compatibles. It is copy-protected. The program
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supports CGA/MCGA/EGA/VGA/Tandy graphics cards. You can use the joystick or
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keboard to control your characters' actions on the screen. The game doesn't
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display in true VGA mode, and I doubt that it supports true MCGA.
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SHINOBI is a poor game with so-so graphics, pitiful animation, and pathetic
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sound. There isn't much to the documentation, but this may be a plus to some of
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you. If you're a fan of ninja games and you want to try this one, you might
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consider waiting for a different version.
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SHINOBI is published and distributed by Mindscape.
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*****DOWNLOADED FROM P-80 SYSTEMS (304) 744-2253
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