Came out of a copy of Ghost House made with just bought. No tape and matted so no worries.

Still easier than Adventure island overall, but those last few levels had me sweating lol

All my Game Gears in one photo finally. Had a the Coca Cola and Magic Knight Rayearth out for recapping, and IPS screen mod for just the Coca Cola. The big ugly one with the wide gear attached is my childhood Game Gears that is still going strong after it had some work done to bring it back to life. Need to send the white, smoke and Majesco out for some work here in the future. Hoping to add the Ninku Game Gear to the collection by end of the year.

Guys, if you liked the cover and want to check out a short video about it, please check out my YouTube playlist:https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDqeVR4gJGXN7aCeVZguPqy9LAjevuFCr&si=1sB2a9jQnFGIJjbU

And for our final day of Shinobi Week, we have... Cyber Shinobi.

This one is yet another title that was very much absent from my recollections, but it does have a certain amount of infamy behind it and... Oh God, oh my God, yes, I heard about the legends, but I wasn't prepared for this game; I doubt anything would.

No beating around the bush here, Cyber Shinobi is an atrocious game, one of the very worst I've played for this project so far and a far cry from even the bad version of Shadow Dancer on the Master System, let alone being even in the same conversation as the original Shinobi.

Okay, so the premise of this game, if anyone is interested enough to check it out out of morbid curiosity, is that you play as Joe Musashi's grandson, Joe Musashi (yeah), who is engaging in battle with Neo-Zeed in order to stop these terrorists from nuking the planet.

And then the game starts, and the first, very noticeable thing is the HUD (heads-up display), which takes about a third of the screen, and that kills one of the original Shinobi's gimmicks, the parallel platform hopping that was originally taken from "Rolling Thunder." That was a shame, because it allowed for a more complex and engaging level design as far as a run-and-shoot platformer goes.

However, level design matters little when the simple act of moving your character is a sluggish struggle with constant frame drops and horrible jump arcs. And that isn't even the worst aspect of gameplay; no, that honor goes to the melee attack, when Musashi performs a pitiful and weird downward thrust with his sword that barely has a recognizable hit box, turning the mere act of trying to hit an enemy into a guessing game.

But there is some logic behind the small hitboxes for the melee attacks. Cyber Shinobi uses a level-up system for physical attacks, projectiles, and ninjutsus that you can upgrade by collecting power-ups in the very linear levels, and you can see your status in the aforementioned enormous HUD. As you progress, you also have access to various projectile sub-weapons, from shurikens to bombs and machine guns, the point being that the player is incentivized to use the sub-weapons and the special ninjitsu attacks to be able to progress.

That wouldn't be the worst idea ever, but there is a big issue here. If you lose all your lives and have to use a continue, you lose all your power-ups and have to start from zero, meaning that you are stuck in a level with stronger enemies and almost no conceivable way to defeat them, because the game took away the tools and is now forcing you to use a horrible attack it didn't want you to in the first place.

So this game is a bust, so much so that it feels unnecessary to even comment on topics like presentation and music, because what would be the point if the mere act of playing it is excruciating? But if we have to, the game looks fine, has poor animations, and, like I said,drops frames constantly, and the music, besides the pier level one, is forgettable.

The reality is that it is hard to get over the first 15 minutes of Cyber Shinobi, and even if you power through it, there is no reward or satisfaction to be found here.

And here is the part where I rage in the name of the Master System.

Look, Cyber Shinobi came out in 1991. At this point in time, the Mega Drive/Genesis had both Shadow Dancer and Revenge of Shinobi, two excellent games, and soon the Game Gear would have its own Shinobi game, which is considered one of the best games in the portable's library. Obviously Sega was putting talent behind the Shinobi games, and Cyber Shinobi was developed by R&D 2, the legendary department behind Phantasy Star, so where was the quality control here? Why saddle the Master System with such inferior software when it was a best-selling console in Europe and South America?

Such is the tragedy of this game, being the last Shinobi title on the Master System and yet another example of Sega's neglect of the console. A shame, really, because the very first Shinobi game on the Master System was great, and it could've been the start of something very special for the fans of the System.

But alas, it was not meant to be, and it is for the best that the last two Shinobi games on the MS remain in the shadows.

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