cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/48084188

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/48084185

We talked with the designer behind games such as The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, A Mind Forever Voyaging and Leather Goddesses of Phobos.

Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z is, at the very least, ambitious.

Is it good? Debateable.

It suffers from what I like to call Poochie syndrome. If you don’t know what that is, it’s when a franchise tries so hard to be cool and edgy that it ends up alienating everyone. Poochie was a character on The Simpsons added to The Itchy & Scratchy Show to make it more “youth-oriented.” It backfired. Spectacularly.

This game is the Poochie of Ninja Gaiden.

You play as Yaiba Kamikaze—an undead ninja who got sliced in half by Ryu Hayabusa, then resurrected as a cyborg with a robot arm and unresolved anger issues. The story? He wants revenge. Also, zombies exist now.

So yeah. Not your typical Ninja Gaiden.

This isn’t a tight, serious action game like the NES classics or the 2004 reboot. This is a loud, cel-shaded beat-’em-up where you chain combos, dismember clown zombies, and occasionally say things like “BOOM, baby” while swinging from grappling hooks.

It’s ridiculous by design.

But weirdly, it’s not that far off from the original arcade Ninja Gaiden, which was more of a side-scrolling brawler than a precision platformer. In that sense, Yaiba feels like a spiritual detour—not a betrayal, just a case of missed execution.

And to say this game wasn’t received well is an understatement.

Critics hated it. Players hated it. Metacritic slapped it with a “generally unfavorable” rating. Polygon gave it a 3. The most common complaints? Repetitive gameplay, terrible camera, sloppy controls, and painfully unfunny writing. Fair.

But I’m going to make the case that Yaiba isn’t as bad as people say. It’s just weird. And weird games don’t always land, especially when they carry a legacy name.

Spark Unlimited handled the development. They weren’t exactly industry royalty. Team Ninja helped out. So did Keiji Inafune—yes, that Inafune, the guy behind Mighty No. 9. He designed Yaiba and pitched the whole zombie-cyborg-ninja concept. The idea was East-meets-West. Japanese combat with American humor. The problem is: it leaned too hard into the West part.

The visuals are the one thing that really works. The cel-shaded “living comic book” look still holds up. Blood flies in huge red arcs. Enemies explode into color-coded gore. Yaiba himself looks like a pissed-off character from a graphic novel you’d find in a Hot Topic clearance bin. I mean that as a compliment.

Unfortunately, once the game starts, the wheels start coming off.

Combat is fast but shallow. You get a sword, a cybernetic punch, and a few environmental executions. There’s a rage mode called Bloodlust that lets you tear through enemies, but it takes forever to charge and burns out too quickly. Enemies come in waves. Then more waves. Then more. It doesn’t evolve.

There’s an elemental system layered on top—some zombies explode, some zap, some poison. If you get two types near each other, you can cause secondary effects like electric tornadoes or poison crystallization. It sounds cool but plays like a checklist. The game doesn’t reward experimentation. It just wants you to solve the puzzle its way.

Boss fights are worse. Giant sponges. They kill you in three hits, and you fight them in arenas where the camera actively works against you.

Speaking of: the camera. It’s fixed. You can’t control it. It’s bad. It hides enemies behind geometry and cuts off parts of the screen during fights. No lock-on. No recentering. Just vibes.

Also, the platforming. There isn’t any. You don’t jump. Seriously—there’s no jump button. Movement sequences are QTEs. That’s it. No room for improvisation, no exploration, just press A when prompted.

PC performance is another mess. The game is hard-capped at 62 FPS, and if you try to lift that cap by editing the config files, the game starts breaking. Physics glitches. Soft locks. Entire levels stop working. The framerate is literally tied to game logic. You’d think someone would’ve caught that.

Controls aren’t much better. Dodge is mapped weird. Block is inconsistent. Inputs sometimes just don’t register. It feels like you’re fighting the engine more than the enemies.

There’s a skill tree, but it’s shallow. You unlock new combos and passive buffs, but nothing that dramatically changes the way you play. Some users even reported skill points not saving properly unless you exit the menu a certain way.

And then there’s the humor. The writing aims for B-movie irreverence and lands somewhere between 2007 YouTube and straight-to-DVD energy drink ad. It’s all juvenile innuendo, “cool guy” one-liners, and grotesque slapstick. One scene has a truck fly through a pair of giant mannequin legs. Another has you beating zombies to death with their own intestines. And Yaiba himself? He never shuts up. It gets old fast.

But I’ll give the game this—it commits.

It doesn’t half-ass the tone. It full-asses it. The voice acting is bad on purpose. The plot makes no sense. And every single thing feels like it was made by someone yelling “more awesome!” into a headset. That kind of confidence, even when misplaced, is rare.

Length-wise, it’s short. Maybe 6 hours. Eight if you’re bad. It doesn’t overstay its welcome, which is honestly a blessing.

There are bugs. Tons of them. Cutscenes sometimes run at 30 FPS even if gameplay is smooth. Loading screens are long and repetitive. Collectibles bug out and vanish. Some levels don’t load properly if you die in the wrong spot. There’s a DLC where you can play as Beck from Mighty No. 9. It adds nothing.

So yeah. Yaiba is janky, shallow, crude, and annoying.

But also: kinda fun.

It’s not a good Ninja Gaiden game. But it’s not trying to be. The problem is it shares the name. If this had just been called Yaiba: Zombie Slayer 2099 or something, I don’t think anyone would’ve cared. The expectations wouldn’t have crushed it.

What you get here is a loud, dumb, cartoonish splatterfest with a lot of rough edges and a couple moments of actual brilliance—mostly in its visuals and sense of identity. When it’s not glitching out or annoying the hell out of you, it can be strangely entertaining.

Buy it on sale. Don’t take it seriously. And absolutely don’t go in expecting Ninja Gaiden.

It’s not good. But it’s definitely not boring.

The NES version is one of the greatest titles of all time. The DOS version? Decidedly not.

It starts like a bait-and-switch. You see the name Ninja Gaiden—and your brain lights up with nostalgia: the cinematic cutscenes, the frantic wall-jumping, that savage, surgical difficulty.

But this? This is something else entirely. A freak of nature. A shadow of a shadow. Like someone described the original game to a committee over a bad phone connection, and the committee was made up of interns with insomnia and a shared allergy to fun.

Made by Hi-Tech Expressions—a company whose entire business model seemed to be "take beloved franchises and make them worse for DOS"—this port wasn’t so much developed as it was extruded. They didn’t craft games. They manufactured obligations. And what they slapped together here was less a port than a low-rent hallucination of the arcade version, which itself was already the dumber cousin of the NES masterpiece. So now what we’ve got is a port of a knockoff of a spin-off of a legend. A Xerox of a Xerox with ketchup on it.

You’re Ryu Hayabusa, allegedly.

You shuffle from left to right like you're late for work in a pool full of molasses. Your enemies? Identical mime-goons in red jackets, looking like rejected extras from a community theatre production of West Side Story. The punch button makes a noise. Not a satisfying thud—just the PC speaker trying its best to simulate impact and accidentally triggering your fight-or-flight reflex. You’ve got a life bar, but really it’s more of a countdown to when you give up.

Technically, it has graphics. EGA support, sure, if you’re feeling brave. But everything is drawn in migraine-vision. Sprites blend into the background like camouflage designed by a prankster. Choppy scrolling turns the act of walking into an act of protest. The cutscenes? Redrawn from scratch, probably by someone who only heard about the NES cinematics second-hand and thought, “Eh, I’ll just wing it.”

Audio is a crime scene. The entire soundtrack is piped through the PC speaker, which is like asking a kazoo to perform Beethoven. Every track is a remix in the same way banging two forks together is a remix of jazz. Worse still, the wrong songs often play in the wrong places.

Compatibility is its own boss fight. The game only runs properly on a CPU slower than time itself—an 8086. Try it on anything faster, and it plays at hyperspeed like someone sat on the fast-forward button. Unless you’re lucky enough to own a Tandy 1000—and if you are, bless your vintage heart—you’ll spend more time configuring slowdown utilities than actually playing. Assuming you even get that far.

Even the disks were garbage. Cheap floppies that degraded like bread in the sun. The physical media was actively trying to forget it existed.

Yes, they included environmental interaction. Throw an enemy into a phone booth and it explodes. Because... why not? But the animations are stiffer than taxidermy. You can’t tell if that pixel smear is a dude, a trash can, or your own disappointment rendered in 16 colors.

Critics tried to be diplomatic. Players didn’t. One called it “a slap in the face.” Another said “avoid it like the plague”—which is putting it gently. This isn’t just a bad game. It’s an experiment in how low expectations can go before they punch through the floor. It’s a warning label masquerading as software. Proof that even iconic franchises can be fed through a woodchipper if you give the license to the wrong team.

It belongs in a museum, sure. But only in the kind of museum that’s attached to a condemned strip mall. With a flickering light. And carpet that smells like old ketchup.

This is not Ninja Gaiden.

This is Ninja Gaiden’t.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/47972282

We spoke with one of the designers behind the legendary Day of the Tentacle.

We spoke with Fate of Atlantis designer Hal Barwood about how he got into the games industry, and his most famous game.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/47907658

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/47907489

Brøderbund might not have been among the most productive game publishers in the eighties and nineties, but you could bet any game they did publish was of a high quality. The American company released games like Lode Runner, Choplifter, Karateka, Prince of Persia, Wings of Fury, SimCity, Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego and Myst, and with gems like these they had a big influence on computer and video games as a whole.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/47917526

We spoke with historian Andrea Contato about The Sumerian Game from 1964.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/47905188

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/47904753

We spoke with Boulder Dash creator Peter Liepa about his classic action-/puzzle game.

It's a pretty popular romhack for Super Mario World that was released in 2021. I recently discovered that the dev made a full walkthrough with commentary about a year ago. It was really interesting for me to watch :) Link to the hack.

I’ve been watching his videos for years. I didn’t even know he was a quadruple amputee when I first found his channel.

He was a consistent content creator that made a ton of vids exploring the history of games and would go through all the platform releases one by one. He was also pretty funny and had a wicked sense of humor.

RIP PatMan QC - you will be missed

“Boom shakalaka”

Demonlisher is awesome.

Forget the Steam reviews. Most of them are bitter because this isn’t the game those folks wanted.

It’s basically a Pac-Man clone from 2004, but one of the most unique I’ve played. Better way to put it: Demonlisher is what you get if Hexen became Pac-Man.

You’re a wizard running through different dungeons, collecting souls to save. Meanwhile, demon hordes chase you down, and you have to kill them.

It has all the usual maze-game stuff: power-ups, bonuses. But also a bunch of clever traps.

Not everyone likes the graphics. I do. I spent a ton of my youth playing low-poly 3D shareware from random corners of the web (anyone remember TuCows?). Demonlisher feels like that genuine old-school deal.

I wish more games like this worked on modern PCs and showed up on Steam.

Yeah, Demonlisher is awesome. Sometimes Steam reviews just get it wrong.

I think Super Mario Bros might have been the first. Might depend on what counts as a "platformer" or a "water level".

My kids wanted to do a little "challenge" of trying to see which one of them would be able to finish the original Sonic game the fastest, so I set up a stream that showed both their streams at the same time and broadcasted it onto Twitch.tv.

After the stream was done I was checking the video and got a message part of my video got muted because it contained "copyrighted content owned or controlled by a third party". It muted a minute before the coprighted part and a minute after, too.

Apparantly someone made a song that uses the Robotnik theme, meaning no one will be able to stream this game anymore without getting this part muted?

Here is the "song" that supposedly counts as the copyrighted original

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CCE-QFs0e4

It's 3 years old and has 100 views.

The actual original (by Masato Nakamura):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAK1pnfod7A

Full message on my video:

"Audio for portions of this video has been muted as it appears to contain copyrighted content owned or controlled by a third party."

Here are the appeal options:

I'm not sure how to appeal this, but I'm not sure if I could appeal this (or under what reason). What do you think?

Civ 2 was such an improvement over the first one. I remember both playing and baking mods for it after I exhausted the base game. My second favorite in the series.

Not mine, but I always enjoy seeing these monstrosities.

cross-posted from: https://swg-empire.de/post/3724500

This is frickin' awesome! It doesn't feel like alpha software at all, more like a beta. The Linux version froze a few times for me but the Windows version through Proton is super stable so far. Only bug I had with that was that mouse input stopped working once so I couldn't click anything.

It looks gorgeous with the HD assets. But you also have the option of using the old graphics. It plays just how I remember it. Though I did rebind the gamepad bindings to be closer to the Squadrons settings. That's how I play X-Wing Alliance as well.

Rambo III for DOS genuinely surprised me.

I’d previously played the Commodore 64 version—a predictable top-down shooter with decent graphics for the old brown breadbox, but nothing remarkable.

The DOS version, released in 1989, really stands out. It supports VGA graphics and AdLib sound, delivering crisp colors and catchy music that were impressive for the time.

What blew me away, though, was the control options. Not only does it support keyboard and joystick, but you can also move and shoot using the mouse—a rarity for the platform back then. Even better, it actually works pretty well by the standards of the day.

Rambo III came out in many versions: arcade, Master System, Genesis. The computer versions are mostly similar, each carrying quirks unique to their platforms—you could find it on Atari ST, Amiga, MSX, C64, Amstrad CPC, and even ZX Spectrum.

The DOS release covers CGA, EGA, and VGA graphics modes plus a variety of sound options, offering a surprisingly eclectic experience. While critics favored the Genesis version, I think the DOS port holds its own. It’s more than playable and can deliver some solid fun.

Silverfall delivers exactly what you'd expect from a hack-'n-slash CRPG—nothing groundbreaking, but if you’re like me, those low-poly visuals are a serious charm.

What sets it apart, though, is its difficulty. Unlike Fate or Dungeon Siege, dying here means losing whatever gear you had equipped. That forces you to either hold back on using your best loot or grind to replace it, adding a tense layer of risk and reward.

So if you’ve already beaten the usual hack-'n-slash suspects and crave a tougher challenge, Silverfall might just be worth your time.