12/8/2023 0 Comments Shinobi ps2 reviewIf you kill all the enemies in an area within a certain space of time, you get a vaguely stylish cut-scene where Hotsuma pauses, waves his sword around in a poncy fashion, and then all the enemies around him fall apart at once. In true ninja style, this doesn't happen as soon as you kill the enemy - they remain standing, frozen in position, and then slide apart a few seconds later. Some enemies have a few different death animations (most don't), all of which consist of the enemy being split in half by your sword and the two halves sliding to the ground. OK, we fully accept that any game of this type will involve being attacked by hordes of identical enemies, but the lack of variety here is mind numbing. Tokyo, city of a million identical samurai dogs Being able to scoot along walls is a bit of fun. It's not even that it looks like a first-generation PS2 title (horrific jaggies and all) it's actually very close to a step back from that. Each level is made up of pre-fabricated chunks, so you find yourself running through sets of identical rooms and corridors in each stage, and aside from a certain crispness to the textures, there's very little here that couldn't have been done on the PSone. Hotsuma is beautifully animated, from the balletic grace with which he moves about to the red scarf which flows around behind him, but the environments he prances through are uniformly bland and repetitive, with dull texturing and lighting. The first thing to note is that the graphics are bad - really, really bad. Unfortunately, once you get past the fine window dressing, everything starts to fall apart. There's a stunning bit of rendered intro movie, featuring a breathtakingly cool ninja stunt, and then there's the lead character himself, Hotsuma, who not only bounces around like a ballistic bunny rabbit, but also does a fine line in Tortured Hero Dialogue and posing dramatically at appropriate moments in combat. There's a hokum plot about a clan of ninjas, a golden palace appearing in the middle of Tokyo, some Evil Ninja Blokes and more undead ghoul-type creatures than you can shake a katana at. Any update of such a formula into a modern game would need quite a bit of a rethink to make it work after all, even though it's fun to go back and play through the original Shinobi now on an emulator, you'd hardly pay £40 for it.Īt first glance, it appears that Sega have done almost exactly what's required with Shinobi, and the game is initially very promising. There wasn't a lot of complexity or depth there for the most part, levels were defeated by a combination of lightning-fast reflexes and learning off the positions of enemies by heart. Those who remember the original Shinobi titles will recall that they were entertaining, hugely unforgiving and often bastard hard but ultimately very satisfying games to play. The first level boss will teach you that the sword is mightier than the Apache Longbow. Perhaps unsurprisingly, our optimism was once again misplaced. Therefore, when Sega announced that Shinobi was in line for a major facelift, our reaction was definitely veering towards the "ooh cool" end of the scale rather than the "drop the 3D engine and step away from the old franchise with your hands where I can see them" end. Somehow, though, the idea of our favourite games of yesteryear being given a new lease of life always gets us excited, and we manage to cast aside memories like Frogger and Daytona USA in favour of unbridled optimism. In fact, we're scraping the bottom of the barrel just to think of any arcade classics which have turned into enjoyable games once passed through the modern Make-It-3D TM development process Defender, anyone? We didn't think so. Resurrecting arcade legends and bringing them up to date is a great idea on paper, but it never seems to work out all that well in the real world.
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