GRAPHICS SOUND CONTROL FRUSTRATION FUN FACTOR OVERALL

NES 2 Player Action As you might or might not know, ninja games and the Nes go hand in hand. Companies scrambled to release ninja game after ninja game. Amidst all the clutter, was a release by a little known company called American Sammy. Ninja Crusaders is exactly how most of the other ninja games ended up being.... mediocre. The plot is a blink-and-you-miss-it kind of thing, but it's that way for a reason since it really doesn't matter in this game. What happened is an unknown force started attacking the earth and began to take over. Not even the most powerful defenses could stop it. In Japan the force drove out all the ninjas from their homeland. Finally, two ninjas by the name of Talon and Blade were sent out to stop it, and that's where the story begins (and pretty much ends for that matter). Graphics: The graphics are exactly what you would expect from an average game - average. Nothing really sticks out and grabs your attention. For the most part, everything is pretty grainy. The ledges in the game can be difficult to determine sometimes, but most of them are pretty set out there. The enemies are varied, without any of them repeating too often. Also, all the levels have different designs as not to get too repetitive. I must give the programmers props for making the alien bosses so strange. They really don't resemble anything I've ever seen before. Sound: I have absolutely no problem with the music in this game. It's not good, it's not bad, but hey at least it's there. You will at no point in time find yourself even noticing the music. Which can be taken as a good thing or a bad thing depending on how you look at it. It doesn't at all match the magnificence of the Ninja Gaiden soundtrack, but it gets the job done and that happens to be enough for me. As for the sound effects, they might as well be non-existent. I didn't pay any attention to them throughout the game, but then again, who does? Gameplay: Ninja Crusaders uses what most genre knockoff games use to draw in the consumer - a gimmick. The gimmick in Ninja Crusaders is actually its best feature. It gives you the ability to morph into an animal depending on what weapon you're carrying. Just hold the attack button in, and voila you're an animal. There are 4 animals you can morph into: a tiger, who is the fastest and can jump the highest but has the shortest range; a falcon, who has the ability to fly above everything but has no weapon at all; a scorpion, who for some strange reason can swim better than all the rest but moves very slowly on land; and finally a dragon, who can fly, is invincible, and kills everything in one hit...but you can only use him for a limited amount of time (there's always a catch :D). This gimmick actually rests nicely with the game's design, and helps out a whole bunch in making the playing experience seem almost worthwhile. As for the enemy design, it's lackluster at best. Most of the attacks the enemies do are the same, so the developers relied on their unpredictability to kill you off. They fire the same shots over and over, but with extreme quickness leaving you little to time to react to what they just did. The bosses (except for the last one) don't do much at all, and take little time to beat. They're basically just fillers inbetween the levels. As for the control, it's exactly as it should be. It's not top-notch, but doesn't take long to get used to. Replay: Ninja Crusaders starts off fairly easy, with the first few levels kind of testing your abilities and letting you play around bit. Then around level 3-2 the game starts to get ridiculously difficult. Not challenging, but difficult. The enemy's speed and unpredictability is what leads to the game's biggest downfall: level memorization. This can be good in some games, but Ninja Crusaders basically forces it on you. You do get infinite continues, which only makes it all the more frustrating when you keep dying on the same part over and over again due to the fact that one hit and you're a goner. The two player option really doesn't do all that much to lower the difficulty. The last level is extremely hard, not to mention the last boss. The game does however only have 5 levels (not counting the sublevels), and most of the levels are short. Trust me though; the frustration is due to the enemy's traits. If the game moved slower it would be ten times easier (as with most sidescrollers, but Ninja Crusaders would get exceptionally easier). You most likely won't find yourself coming back to this game to give it another whirl. ......BOTTOM LINE: Ninja Crusaders got lost for a reason, and you probably shouldn't deny the fact that it's lost in the first place. It had some, well actually one, good idea that might have amounted to something, but just couldn't hold the game up on it's own. If you thought Ninja Gaiden was a frustrating game, you're not going to be surprised when you play Ninja Crusaders. Overall, it's a lost Nes sidescroller that, just like the rest of them, is mediocre at best. -lynx561