1001 Games To Play Before You Die: #0150 Shinobi

Wednesday, August 9, 2017

#0150 Shinobi

Game number 150! Woo-hoo! I'm Officially 3/20ths of the way through the entire book!

For my sesquicentennial game I played Shinobi, a 1987 arcade Beat-em-up by those guys from Sega.

The game is a clone of Rolling Thunder, which in turn was a clone of Green Beret. You play as probably the whitest ninja you'll ever see. (It's actually kinda funny how pasty this guy looks). Your goal is to rescue hostages from the bad ninjas. And that's about it. You ~~shoot~~ throw shuriken at them to kill them, and do sick karate moves when they get too close.

The game is fine. Mostly. Remember my Rolling Thunder game from 1986? Yeah it's pretty much that. Mostly.

the controls are fluid, killing things is easy and satisfying, i enjoyed the boss fights a lot.I also will say they really tuned the difficulty here. It's still punishing, but not so much so that I couldn't get past the first level, moving to the right once you know the layout of the level is a lot of fun actually as you know where to shoot, where enemies are going to be, it's really easy to memorize. That made for a better overall game.

Shame my 150th game had to be something so underwhelming. Oh well, I'm sure there's an audience for it, it just didn't really grab me personally.

Next up: Xybots

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Why I'm taking this challenge

So! I’ve spent nearly my entire life as a Nintendo Fanboy. A rabid fanboy to the point where when my family got a brand new Playstation 2 back in ‘02 (One of the best consoles ever). I refused to play it. I refused to have anything to do with the company that stole my beloved Nintendo’s thunder! This fanboyism ran rampant in my gaming life through high school and even when I moved out to live with the woman who would one day become my wife. I still didn’t play anything but Nintendo consoles. In fact, it wasn’t until we were gifted an Xbox 360 did I FINALLY play a game on a different console. That was Bioshock, it was also the first shooter I had ever played.It became one of my favorite games of all time. The rest is history, I’ve been playing games on any console I want now.

That’s all well and good, but this means that there is an entire other gaming WORLD that I’ve never played. Never experienced in my life. I love shooters, but with the exception of the half-life series, and System shock 2, every shooter from Doom all the way up until Bioshock, I’ve never played. Not Quake, not CoD, not battlefield.

So, since I’ve missed out on nearly 30 years of gaming, I decided to take a challenge. My lovely wife got me a book called 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die I am going to play through every game in this book. Starting with Oregon Trail (1971) and finish with Bioshock Infinite (2013) I plan to do at least one generation per year. At least. And to help me keep track of what I've done, I started doing small reviews of every game.

At first I wrote these in the starment.net forums, but eventually they became too lengthy to only be posted there, so I created this blog to not only help keep me organized, but so others can follow along as well. It won't be easy, but I think it's worth it to play games that I may otherwise never have played.