     | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Ninjas, eh? They
blimming well get everywhere!
And not least into compilation
boxes calling themselves Fists Of Fury and
featuring 4 chestnut beat-'em-ups like
Shinobi and Double Dragon 2. So let's strap
on our shurikens and first say hello to...
Dynamite Dux You play a boxing duck and bash cute meanie menials like puppies and moles in order to rescue your kidnapped sweetheart. Along the horizontally-scrolling way you get to grab extra weapons (including a water cannon and guided missiles) but watch out for the big boss baddies! Not to mention the overdetailed backgrounds and jerky scrolling, which help to kill off the fun (and point) of the original. DD's less of a conversion, more a disappointing imitation - a sort of Lazarus And Dingwall to the arcade's Police Squad. (Eh? Ed) '91 Verdict: 59° Shinobi A Sega shuriken-'em-up, this challenges you to free a load of baby ninjas (as if there weren't enough around already) from the clutches of a notorious villain and part-time sneeze called Bwah Foo. Face the legions of Oriental minions hurling boomerangs, shurikens and sometimes even themselves at you, and battle through to pick off the end-of-level bosses. Add colourful 4-way scrolling and sprites that are more poorly animated than a Saturday morning cartoon and you might think that Shinobi's a bit of a recipe for blandness. It is however jolly addictive and playable. There's quite a funky little smart bomb that pops up once a level, the long levels mean you're getting your multiload's worth, and there's always a little surprise hiding round the corner (or on the wall, or in the water, or behind that crate...). Tastier than my Nan's sponge cakes and the prize of the pack. '91 Verdict: 85° The Ninja Warriors A horizontally-scrolling multiload which not only boasts all the beat-'em-up genre's standard features but also has quite a nice line in rather average gameplay. The nicely-shaded graphics, 2-player option and choice of weapons (poke people with your sword and throw a few ubiquitous shurikens around) contribute to solid, enjoyable play, but what could have been "oh wow!" is just "oh well". '91 Verdict: 67° Double Dragon 2 Grab a pal and repeat more or less exactly the same kind of stuff you did in the first Double Dragon. Use a wide range of moves in conjunction with a load of stolen weapons and climb up onto the scenery to drop down on top of the opposition. All this is depicted in very attractive graphics but, sadly, these suffer from fatal clutter-clash. Also, the gameplay's pretty similar throughout, there's a very irritating multiload and the most radically different 48/128 versions I've seen since Road Blasters. It's only a short time before words like 'that' 'not', 'that' and 'good' start coming to mind. '91 Rating: 65° So, all told, it's a surprisingly weak compilation from Virgin (especially after Edition One).
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ||||||||||
| LOOKING FOR EX-YS WRITERS! Do you know where any are? | ||||||||||
| READERS NOTE: The original YS articles on this site were written many many years ago, and should provide no indication WHATSOEVER of the author's present writing style. Judge these people on their current work, not articles they wrote decades ago. | ||||||||||
| All original YS text is still copyright to their original owners, including BOTH publishers and authors. Permission has been granted to reproduce these articles by a few of these owners - if you see your work on here and would like it to be taken down, e-mail me and I'll do it straightaway. All other pages have similar restrictions - email me for more details. None of the pages on this website may be reproduced in any way, nor sold to the general public (i.e. put onto a CD-ROM) without the consent of Nick Humphries and the author of each article. If you want to include any of these articles on a site or a CD, contact me for more instructions. |
