This is Part 15 of ‘Gaming Myself Happy’, a blog/journal/review series where I attempt to play the 500 Best Video-Games Of All Time, whilst taking a look at my own mental health and working on getting better. You don’t have to read them all in order, but the full intro and Part 1 can be found HERE.
Game #32: Ninja Gaiden
RELEASED: 1989
PLATFORM: NES
REVIEW: “[an] unfair display of intentional cheapness” — 1up.com
Now here’s a series that I’ve been aware of since I was a kid, but have never played; and considering it’s one of the foundational examples of super-hard 2D platform games (a genre that I REALLY bloody love), it’s kind of surprising that I never dipped into it. Well, that’s all about to change!
Ninja Gaiden is one of the games that inspired the phrase ‘Nintendo Hard’, used to describe the extreme difficulty of a bunch of Nintendo games back in the late 80’s / early 90’s, including famously difficult titles like Contra and Battletoads (oh god please don’t let that be on this list).
My first impression is that Ninja Gaiden is absolutely class! It controls REALLY nicely, even 30 years on; it’s way more precise than Aladdin was, for example. There’s a surprising amount you can do too, with heaps of stylish ninja moves and even a wall-jumping mechanic that feels forward-thinking and easy to pull off.
My second impression is that the bats are awful. Yes, bats, as in the flying rodents of the night. Bats are officially the worst part of every single video game they have ever been in: they were annoying in Aladdin, they’re a pain in The Lion King, they’re irritating in Tomb Raider and they’re pure evil in Ninja Gaiden. They’re fast, tiny, and constantly knock you off high platforms before you have a chance to fight back; they are the most pointless, hard-to-hit video game baddie in history, and they should all be made illegal from now on.
Even with the bat problems, I manage to get through the first couple of levels without much fuss; but I think this lulled me into a false sense of security, because now I’m getting wiped out in Stage 2–2 by some soldiers, and I just found out (the hard way) that there’s a time-limit for each level.
Okay, very good, you got me that time Ninja Gaiden. Luckily a Game Over just resets you to the start of the level and not the entire game, and after a few more attempts I make it through to Stage 3.
There’s actually a surprisingly decent story here, with some fantastic cutscenes between each stage that are beautifully detailed for a game this old:
At this point, I’m loving the experience. It’s been challenging but satisfying, and I’m feeling pretty confident. I thought it was supposed to be legendarily hard, but it’s honestly not too bad. I can probably complete it in an hour and be done in time for tea. My heart is filled with optimistic confidence!
Oh, poor innocent Jon. It doesn’t take much longer for that confidence to shatter into a million pieces.
EDITORS NOTE: Remember back in Part 11 when we discussed the meaning of BULLSHIT in video games? Well, Ninja Gaiden is the first serious offender of the project, and you’re about to see why. If you’re sensitive to angry emotions and bad language, please feel free to scroll down to Timesplitters 2 and enjoy the rest of your pleasant, rage-free day!
Okay, so I found an enemy even worse than bats: birds. If bats are annoying, fucking BIRDS are the SPAWN OF THE DEVIL. They just appear from off-screen and bump into you at the WORST possible moment, like when you’re halfway through an irreversible jump over a pit of death, and the little flying wankers knock you unavoidably backwards into that death-pit, sending you right back to the last checkpoint.
This happens over, and over, and over again.
A few minutes later I run into another huge frustration: there’s no checkpoint before boss battles! So wait, I have to do the entire bird-infested stage ALL OVER AGAIN??? Are you kidding me, 1989? The more old games I play on this list, the more I realise they were actually more ‘unfair’ than ‘hard’. Forcing you to repeat the same aggravating area a hundred times, even when you’ve already beaten it, isn’t really difficult, it’s just annoying and time-consuming.
My enthusiasm bounces back for a moment, when I realise that HELL YEAH you can slice bullets with your sword! This is exactly the kind of learn-by-playing I enjoyed in Metroid 2: those ‘epiphany’ moments that old games can sometimes cultivate, by not explaining a single fucking thing and letting you discover everything for yourself.
The birds are still wankers though. Yes, I know I already mentioned them, but SERIOUSLY just look: here is the perfect example of video game BULLSHIT, where the designers have placed one of those asshole birds right at the top of a very high ladder, just after a long and challenging section of level (you can see my falling ninja about to die at the bottom-left of the screen):
This bird is extremely hard to dodge when you’re slowly ladder-climbing, and when you fall off (which you will) you get an instant death. I can almost see the game designers pointing and laughing at me from the past.
Another relic of these old bullshit games is fucking impossible boss fights. The Stage 5 boss (the appropriately named Bloody Malth) is an absolute freaking joke, who constantly fires off lightning-fast bolts of fire that are almost undodgeable and shoot right through you. This ‘fight’ is at the end of an already difficult level, that you have to play all over again if you die to Malth, which will happen after about five seconds because you don’t have time to practise actually getting good before your health bar gets torn to shit.
Just like the final crappy boss of Metroid 2, I had to Google search a solution; and the main strategy suggested against Bloody Malth is to run right up to him and stab him as fast as you can, taking damage the entire time, draining his life bar just moments before he is able to drain yours. No tactics, no skill, just straight up button mashing.
This is a dumb-ass, 1989-grade boss fight that officially sucks. It’s also the point where I start using Save States to create my own checkpoints, because otherwise I’m never going to beat this bloody thing.
If that Malth fight wasn’t bad enough, the final levels of Ninja Gaiden really take the bullshit factor up another level. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve died because an enemy (usually a bird) appeared on-screen after I made a jump, collided with me and sent me flying backwards into a pit. It’s SO MOTHERFLIPPING FRUSTRATINGGGGGGRHARAHDFJAHDFJAHJFHAD
FUCKING FUCK YOU FUCKING FUCK SHIT BIRDS!!!!!!
Argh.
Seriously, the final level of this game has sucked all the enjoyment out of my heart, rubbed it around in the dirt, pissed all over it and smushed it back in my face. I’m legitimately getting a bit crazy about this right now. It doesn’t feel challenging in a fair way; it just feels cheap and frustrating and stupid.
The final fight is even more evil than the others: if you die to either of the two last bosses, you’re sent back THREE WHOLE LEVELS to the start of 6–1. I mean, this is frustratingly hard for me in the 21st Century, with the ability to save anywhere I want; how the hell did any child ever beat this game in the 1980’s?
It’s now 1am and I’m getting legitimately stressed. I think the mature choice would be to turn the game off and get some sleep, which is actually a pretty positive step for me to take at this stage in my life. In fact, let me get my Mental Health Achievement List out…
Once again, whether in Ninja Gaiden or life in general, it’s important to recognise even the smallest signs of progress.
It doesn’t take me long to finish off the game this morning (with the help of about a million save-states along the way), but holy shit on a dick that was TOUGH (and extremely profanity-inducing). But I made it, and I can now officially say that I am a person who has completed Ninja Gaiden.
I’m not sure where to rank it on my personal list to be honest; it was a potent mixture of retro enjoyment and intense frustration. Sadly, the extreme bullshit factor has knocked it down from a potential Top 10 to a more mid-range ranking. I’m totally up for games that are hard, but I feel like a better descriptor than ’Nintendo Hard’ would be ‘Nintendo Totally Unfair & Cruel’. Still, I’d be happy to play another in this series later in the list.
EDITORS NOTE: Spoiler Alert, I will soon play another Ninja Gaiden game, and I definitely WON’T be happy.
See you next, Ninja Gaiden!
Game #33: Timesplitters 2
RELEASED: 2002
PLATFORM: PS2
REVIEW: “may very well be the best split-screen multiplayer-focused first-person shooter ever created” — GameSpot
Timesplitters 2 is one of my all-time favourite video games, and for a few years around the early 00’s, I must have logged hundreds of hours with it.
It’s one of those games that takes me back to a very specific time of life, bringing back a flood of feelings and memories: doing all-night multiplayer marathons with my brother, playing the intense Virus mode against a horde of monkeys, karate chopping zombie heads off with my friend after school, finally beating Co-op Mode on the hardest difficulty, and playing the secret two-player ‘Snake’ game for hours on end. I even used the in-built level designer to painstakingly create brand new missions for my brother to play. I loved everything about it.
It was essentially the next generation version of Goldeneye (another legendary game that provided us with hundreds of hours of fun), with a similar structure and focus on multiplayer fun, and the game means a lot to me personally. I haven’t touched it in over thirteen years, so I’m VERY curious how I’ll feel about it now.
And hot damn, this game holds up great! The old magic starts rushing back as soon as I hear the familiar menu music, and when I load into the first Story mission, the Siberian dam, I’m completely at home.
This opening level is one of my favourites: it’s a great callback to the first stage of Goldeneye (a game that many Timesplitters 2 developers were part of creating), as you’re tasked with infiltrating a dam, blowing up a communications dish, taking out security cameras and snipers, and eventually fighting off a horde of zombies in the secret underground research lab.
Okay, maybe that last part wasn’t in Goldeneye.
EDITORS NOTE: In fact, I just learned that the Timesplitters 2 team spent HALF of the entire 23-month development period just working on this opening level, making it as strong as they could while honing every aspect of the gameplay, and it really shows. Even today the level feels incredibly tight and well-designed, showing off a whole range of mechanics from environmental destruction to the ability to snipe enemies from the ENTIRE OTHER SIDE OF THE DAM! It’s an absolute classic.
This is the great thing about Timesplitters: the wild variety from level to level, and the complete unseriousness of it all. One moment you could be caught up in an alien war on Planet X, the next you could be avoiding monkeys that throw exploding water-melons in an ancient Aztec temple, or spying on hackers in a brilliant Blade Runner-esque futuristic mega-city.
For example, take the third mission, another one of my personal favourites: it’s set in Notre Dame in 1895, and starts with you rescuing French maidens from zombies in the basement; then you fight off pistol-wielding undead priests in the main cathedral nave, before teaming up with the Hunchback to defeat waves of enemies; later on there’s a boss battle on the balcony with a gigantic portal-demon, before the whole level climaxes in a rooftop firefight with the crazy Jacques de la Morte. It’s constantly moving and it’s always good dumb fun.
The weapons are fantastic too: every time I get a new one, I’m like ‘OH YEAH, I remember you!’ There are tommy guns and flamethrowers, electricity-beams and homing-rocket launchers, crossbows and plasma rifles, and the brilliant Sci-Fi Handgun that sends a hail of bullets bouncing all over the room. Just like the levels, there’s so much variety and pure joy to be found here.
I’m flooded with nostalgia, as I remember that feeling of finally reaching the End Portal of an intense level with just the tiniest slice of health left. This was a time before the regenerating health-bar, a time where levels had ONE checkpoint and that’s all you’re gonna get, dammit! The game gets pretty tricky, and when I race past the final wave of enemies, JUST reaching the safety of escape before the last bullet hits the back of my neck, it’s still a total rush.
This is especially true of Robot Factory, the penultimate Story level, and one that gives me vivid flashbacks of teenage frustration. To be honest, it gets a bit close to hitting the Ninja Gaiden BULLSHIT alarm: at one point the game just repeatedly spawns a bunch of super-robots armed with homing rockets, so that the only way I can get through is to hide, pop out and shoot for a couple seconds, and then hide again over and over for about five minutes until the room is cleared; and this is on the ‘Normal’ difficulty level.
Still, the burst of pleasure-chemicals when I finally succeed makes the effort totally worth it.
I haven’t even talked about the Arcade mode yet, a set of challenges based around the maps and features of Multiplayer, which becomes a nice trip down memory lane for me; or the excellent Challenge mode, that gives you a variety of tasks like lobbing bricks through glass windows as fast as you can, or playing as Jojo the monkey and collecting bananas.
There are absolutely heaps of extras to unlock as you play: a huge package of characters, levels, modes and cheats, and all of them included right on the disk with no extra downloads or micro-transactions necessary! Who could imagine such a thing?
But perhaps there’s nothing more quintessentially Timesplitters than the ‘Behead The Undead’ mode. You’re placed in a constricted area, and have to fight off increasingly large waves of the zombie horde by punching their heads right off their bodies; and all my old muscle memory comes rushing back to me, as I send undead skulls and limbs flying in a hurricane of zombie-maiming joy.
I had a freaking GREAT time with Timesplitters 2 today: it’s fast arcade-y fun fun FUN FUN!!!, and it makes this whole 500-video-game project feel like the easiest thing in the world. I only have one question: where’s the modern reboot? I think the world is ready for a new Timesplitters game, and I want it now.
