Hi, Mr. Sega Lord X. I own this game for almost 30 years and despite its bad reputation, more specifically for the really REALLY slow game pace I actually like this one. Have played and finished countless times. It does have nice visuals, the enemy assets can be repetitive but its decent enough and the ending soundtrack got stucked in my mind for ages. For me it's an awsome game with its own merits. Not the best Shinobi ever but a decent one.
I can respect that. I think when we were kids we could play anything long enough to find the good in it. Kinda like coffee and beer. Drink enough of it and you acquire a taste for it.
@@thewingedavenger1007 I lived in Brazil for several years ( also in the 90's) and there always were all gaming options available, just like anywhere in the world. The games were released by tec toy nearly at the same time they were in JP and US.
Bought this game when it first came out as a kid, thought it was terrible even back then. But its one of those games I suspect was originally a completely diffrent title that had the Shinobi license slapped on to wrangle a few extra sales. Like Contra Force, Cyborg Hunter and Alex Kidd in Shinobi World.
Yeah it has most of the haul marks of a euro designed game and not that of Sega. I would not be surprised if it was another game slapped with the Shinobi title. Throw in some colour crash and it could have been on the Speccy.
@@AnthonyFlack Yeah it just has that feel to it. Not saying every speccy game was trash as thats not true, but when you get a bad one you know it instantly.
My thoughts exactly. The music is just ok but the sound effects are completely awful! And the scrolling is like a fairly early DOS game programmed by a single person.
Your voice narration is awsome. Every time i hear your intro also for a few seconds i flash back in time for a moment and remember how excited and alured i felt when chillin with me myself and Sega.😎 SEGA!!!
I'm a Master System vet and knew this was a turd at the time. It's almost as if the game doesn't use sprites and is all pure background graphics, similar to Golden Axe SMS - only running with 60% active screen area and at a even lower, choppier frame rate. It probably had an exceptionally short development cycle even by typical in-house Sega SMS standards.
It's definitely not all BG tiles, but it's certainly using that method to some degree, which would explain the choppy performance and why the status area is so huge in order to save memory. The stationary gunmen and the bosses are definitely BG tiles, and they look really ugly with the color boxes around them, such as the cat boss in front of the waterfall. I basically watched this whole review trying to figure out what things were actually the sprite layer. Definitely, some of the enemies are, and you can see the sprite flicker to prove it.
It seems like the programmers instead of sprites used background tiles like in Golden Axe. That's why is so choppy and it doesn't have sprite flickering. That explains the background behind bosses that moves with them
I bought this game after watching this vid in 2022 because I’m discovering games I missed in the 80’s & 90’s. SLX review is spot on but for whatever reason I can’t stop playing this game. Its definitely a conversation pice and I’m happy to have it in my collection. Thx for bringing this game to light SLX!
Its choppy because its coded in tiles instead of sprites. Same type as golden axe and shadow dancer.... every tile coded game on master system is choppy as hell. The idea was to kill sprite flicker.
@@SegaLordX - some things like Golden Axe or Space Harrier probably were never going to happen any other way. It's just a bad fit for the hardware. But European audiences at the time had a higher tolerance for choppiness because they were used to playing games on underpowered 8 bit computers. Japanese developers seemed to work out early on to always prioritise framerate, bless them.
@@SegaLordX - another thing to consider I suppose is how important static screenshots were for selling games at the time. Games that looked good in box shots and magazines were easier to market than games whose selling point was fluid motion. The more important screenshots became for selling games, the more framerates suffered.
@@SegaLordXThe tile method worked for certain games like Space Harrier. The problem is making the player tiles rather than sprites means moving only 8 pixels at a time which makes the camera awful without smooth scrolling, and the player unresponsive. Just using a sprite for the player would made a huge difference even it would save it from the other problems.
I love this game because its different than the other ones and for a 8 bit system it has great graphics and music. Shame many don't see that way. Its not perfect but its decent enough to play.
Well hell, I like this game. It's very sluggish, but the soundtrack is awesome and the ninjitsu looks cool (you showed just one? Hmph). Stages are varied as are the bosses. Love the strategic android placement. You could've dropped the last 4 minutes of this review. It's just reiterating the same point over and over. Yeah, you don't like it, we get it.
I had the game growing up and while it hasn’t aged well at all, at the time I really enjoyed it - probably because it was part of the Shinobi universe, and I could smash through it in no time. I would have loved to see Sega take a shot at rebuilding this for the Genesis/Mega Drive… with better hit detection, stage design, graphics and sound. While it’s supposed to be a direct sequel to Shinobi, I treat it as a side story - preferring Revenge and III as true successors.
They could've named this game anything. Calling it SHINOBI 2 was a mistake. Also, he swings his sword like the main character of an older arcade game called KEN-GO
After the Atari 5200, the Master System was the 2nd console my brother and I were gifted. I have never heard nor seen this particular game as many others you have covered on the channel. SLX thank you for what you do. You have opened my eyes, and I appreciate now what I once took for granted. What I had thought was second rate to the NES, is absolutely not. Thank you good sir another great video and a job well done! You are much appreciated! PC gamer yeah, but there is always a place in my heart for retro/console. No one does it quite like you. 👍😎
As a die hard Sega fan, and a Shinobi fan I've never heard of this game! I guess I wouldn't if it was only released in PAL in regions! I thought the only "bad" Shinobi game was Shinobi Legions for Sega Saturn. But to me this game makes Shinobi Legions look good. Wow. I never thought I'd say that. Lol! Great video man! Loved it! -Brendan
Liking crappy games was part of being a kid. You rarely had control over the games you had back then and had to play the stuff you got until you liked it.
Thanks for taking the shuriken for us so we didn't have to play through this. I'm still interested in that Alex Kidd in Shinobi World. I keep hearing good things about it.
This is the most common issue game shopping before seeing the game in action. I remember too many times where graphics on back of box would look nice, only to get home and it runs like ass. Thanks 🙏 Sega Lord for giving us retro dudes a heads up!
There was a tradition back then of Japanese dev teams not sharing engines, even at the same company. The idea was that management wanted them to be competing internally to outdo one another. Whether that was the case here I can't say, but it would certainly explain why they couldn't just re-use the same engine.
I absolutely love the series. Shinobi III is one the best games on Genesis, while Shinobi and Nightshade were great 3D era titles on PS2. But THIS hunk of scrap isn't even worthy of being labeled garbage.
There is some flicker in spots that's easy to miss. It's most noticeable when he's using the crouch kicks. So it seems it's not entirely BG tiles, but it's definitely leaning on that trick a lot, such as the stationary gunmen and the bosses. In the cases when you can see the boxes around the objects, they're using BG tiles obviously. I think they wanted it to look more 16-bit with larger characters which would really eat into the horizontal sprite limit and used a lot of BG tiles for much of the game, and sprites where they needed things to animate more.
This one has been sitting on my shelf unplayed for about 28 years. I never read the manual, so didn't know how canon this one actually was... my gosh it looks bad!
I hired this game quite afew times in 1989/90 and it's okay in small intervals before the later levels can sometimes get on your nerves. The game did receive an unfair amount of flak when being compared to the original Shinobi and maybe even Shadow Dancer?! It was that bad but I really hated the jumping mechanics where you really had to press the horizontal control in the exact upper corners just to make it to a platform. Some levels were better than others, my fav was the 2nd level (harbour port) with the background building lights and the music.
Despite being a modern hardware than the nes, it's astounishing how far behind the master system was even in the hands of their company owners. Sega's Cyber Shinobi was a 1990 game with problems in all fronts, yet pristine nes action scrollers like Ninja Gaiden II were released a year sooner, and III a mere year later. Sega's arcade division is like another company in comparison to their console counterparts.
It's weird, I see all of these criticisms as valid but I just can't hate the game. Most certainly that's partly due to nostalgia; this was one of the last MS games I owned (kind of) before I moved to the Mega Drive a process which was a story in itself. I think the main reason I still like this game is I can see what it was aiming for. The music's tinny but the compositions are actually pretty good, the backgrounds are sparse but with a few suggestive details we can see what it's 'supposed' to be. Definitely not a classic but thanks to the low difficulty it's not terrible either =)
I actually got a bit of fun out of this one, took a stage or two getting used to the funky design and dodgy frame rate. I wouldn’t say it’s good but it’s one I’ll keep in my collection.
I know I’m only wearing nostalgia goggles here, but man... I loved this game as a kid! Also the music, wonderful! I’ve even recorded the intro tune on a cassette tape! 😂 Thanks for the video! I still have my copy, not sure if I’m gonna replay it though... don’t wanna ruin the memories! 😅
I've had similar experiences having the Commodore 64 as a kid. When I went back to play a lot of the games I spent hours playing on an emulator, I found most of them to be pretty awful. There are only a couple that were actually still fun to play (for example, Bruce Lee).
Im a serious fan of yours and wholeheartedly appreciate what you do for the retogaming community as a whole, but I must say that I feel that you were unfairly critiqued Cyber Shinobi, It seems like because its not on the same level as the original Shinobi that you feel it has no place among the rest of the series, but with it being only the second game in the line I can see the developers wanted to try and give fans a new experience then just rehashing the elements of the original, the sprites look great for an 8 bit game and the way they incorporated the power levels and made your melee attacks your primary defence showed that they wanted to try something different and yes some of it may be hit or miss but the fact they tried to move the series foward without knowing exactly how to do that should be commended, its exactly like comparing castlevania with Simon's quest. Are they on the same level or fun and replayability no Castlevaina was an 8 bit masterpiece as was the original Shinobi but you can at least see how they tried to do something original and compared to the literal 100s of 8 bit titles that were blantant cashgrabs, I dont count Cyber Shinobi among them I don't know if you will ever see my comment but thats my take on the game and please keep doing what you're doing
When reviewing a game, you do indeed have to take into account the small victories a game may succeed in, even when a mountain of bad sits on top of it. The Cyber Shinobi did try some new gameplay elements, but I felt the gameplay was just so poor, none of it mattered. I won't argue that you may have felt it was a decent game. We all find fun in different things, after all. But for me, The Cyber Shinobi wasn't just a bad Shinobi title, it was a bad experience by any metric.
Was always curious about this one as I found cheap copies of it from Europe. I wanted to pull the trigger on it but opted for the better titles since I only started playing the master system a few years ago. This and gamesack are my favorite gaming channels bar none. Been watching a couple years and started subbin' shortly after. Look forward to every video 👌
shinobi sega ages just came out on nintendo switch eshop. you can play in ages mode and also reverse time for 5 seconds. EXCELLENT arcade emulation with stage select to boot! i love this game!
Best thing about this game 8s the box art, weirdly the in-game sprite isn't even remotely similar. That stumpy sword attack is ridiculous as is the animation. It could of been awesome.
It looks like an Atari ST game made by Tiertex. I'm actually surprised it was developed by SEGA themselves, I thought it was like one of those odd Master System ports whose development was licensed to some UK company (eg: Strider, Mercs..).
Is this game from around the same era of ESWAT? I’ve heard about it but never seen this game, there are many parts that made me think a bit about ESWAT (Genesis), like the helicopter (ESWAT first boss), the 2 guys in the green suit on each side of the screen (ESWAT 2nd boss, even the background looks familiar), that mecha boss (ESWAT 4th boss if I recall correctly)... the twin lasers in a vertical rail (like in the prison stage in ESWAT). Even the guys shooting, they look like the guys from ESWAT more than the guys shooting in the other Shinobi games.
was real excited when this got released. Me and my brother were all like "wow now its CYBER shinobi!" Though for some reason that game never reached our local stores and we eventually moved to the 16 bit era and forgot about it
Thanks for even attempting this one. I've tried so many times over the years to get past that 3rd level but the boredom is strong with this one. Its woeful to control and full respect for getting to the end, now relegate it to the shelf and never play it again!
It's probably a blessing for the series that the Master System wasn't so successful in NA and Japan. There was less risk of them killing the Shinobi series with a bad entry in that case. As others have said, it looks like this one is using BG tiles for a lot more than intended, much like Golden Axe and Altered Beast. That also explains the giant status bar to save video memory. Still, you can find sprite flicker here and there, so it's not quite all BG tiles. But with characters that big, you'd be at the horizontal sprite limit pretty easily, so a lot of things are BG tiles, which is hideously obvious in some cases.. I wouldn't be surprised if they were trying to make this look more like a 16-bit game with such large characters. That's easy to do in screen shots which can't portray how the game actually runs and where they can hide the rough edges. Still, nice to see your take on this game to get a better impression of what this was about. I certainly wasn't planning to play it.
I drew a name of a game from a hat a few months ago out of 300+ games that I have and the Shinobi series is what came out. I'm playing Mafia 3 pn PS4 as I've been on a Mafia Marathon for the past 2 months but the Shinobi series is next on my list.
I honestly thing the graphics are pretty good for something that was competing against the NES. The gameplay looks a mess, but that robot guarding the brain had a crotch laser, so 11/10
What's with that standing sword swing that looks like the character either can't get it out of the sheath completely or is in such a great hurry to put it back in that he only gets the tip out for a single second? That can just barely be considered a sword draw, much less a sword swing. It's funny because the jump slash, while still short, can actually be considered a complete sword swing, but the standing attack looks like he's trying to tickle enemies with the tip of his sword (or hit them with the hilt). Someone clearly forgot to add transparency to the background for boss and enemy sprites. (and for a number of the stage hazards too).
I haven't played this game. I wonder if it was made by Westerners. It's difficult to believe that the Japanese made it. I used to buy that Euro mag, Mean Machines. They had a star reviewer named Julian Rignall who was a very skilled player. I didn't buy Akumajo Dracula or Turtles In Time for my Super Famicom because he said they were too easy. They were big gaming regrets. Fortunately, I found them eventually. I stay away from all reviews these days though it looks like the review in this case was correct. My all-time favourite game (Ridge Racer 7) got about 75% in a review. Street Fighter III W Impact for Dreamcast got a score in the late 40's (''...games like this have no place on the Dreamcast'').
Someone might have already mentioned it but i understand that this one renders using the same technique as golden axe on the sms. Basically not using sprites at all but instead writing it all down to the background layer. That would explain the choppyness and might show itself in the fact you have some large bosses AND have a background present. Think back to other large bosses on sms and they have to keep the sprite layer for character/projectiles and then put the boss on the BG layer surrounded by a black void. Im sure this could be proven with an emulator to split the render layers.
This is one of the only Shinobi games I never see people talking about and, uh, I guess I know why. The big question, to me, is why not just port GG Shinobi to the Master System? It's a solid title, and it probably would have been more cost effective to boot
Seems as though background tiles were used for many, if not all of the game characters... That would explain their large size, choppiness, and shoddy hit detection...
I have no idea who Sega farmed this out to develop but it has Tiertex written all over it. Reminds me of their strider 2 master system port....abysmal.
Hahaha! Thank you for covering this! I hate this game SO much. I felt so deceived by the screenshots. It looks great in still pictures, but holy crap! If you ever want to see "bad framerate" in an 8-bit game, here you go. Also his sword attack WTF!?!? It looks like he's throwing salt from his crotch or something. Worst. Shinobi. Ever. A turd.
I remember when my parents got me this for Christmas when I was a kid. Was really excited after playing the first Shinobi only to end up disappointed when I started to play the game. Your review sums it up in one. It was awful. Would love you to do a review of Alien 3 for the Sega Genesis or Master System as had that on both consoles and loved it.
It looks like it's using the master system game engine that heavily relies on redrawing the background tiles in real time to mimic large sprites instead of using real sprites. Despite the poor frame rate, I always found it really interested since 8 bit systems were never been able to produce that many and large sprites on screen.
Such a shame. There are plenty of bad ports of the two arcade Shinobi games for various platforms but SEGA making a bad Shinobi game internally, for their own hardware, is a tough pill to swallow. I love both arcade games, all three Genesis games, both Game Gear games, the Saturn game, both PS2 games, and the 3DS game. On Master System the port of Shinobi 1 was fantastic but the port of Shadow Dancer was just too much for the hardware. There really aren't any great ports of arcade Shadow Dancer; the Genesis version is an original game and all the other ports fall well short. The Amiga and Atari ST versions came the closest. Alex Kidd in Shinobi World was really good but needed to be about twice as long as it ended up. Cyber Shinobi is an unmitigated disaster, though.
This doesnt look too good. I had a NES when I was a kid and one birthday I got hokuto no ken / fist of the north star as a gift. Well... I feel bad for anyone who was stuck with Cyber Shinobi as a kid. I can relate to the pain!
It almost feels like this might have been rushed out the door on some arbitrary deadline like movie tie-in games usually were. Or like it started off as a totally different game, but later had the Shinobi name tacked on in hoping it would sell. It might be interesting to track down someone who worked on the game to get their thoughts, and ask the WTF Happened!
Looks like alot of the sprites are actual backgrounds.A missed opportunity.I wonder if anybody will try tomconvert GG shinobi into a mastersystem rom?Now that would be an awesome project.
The graphics remind me of something from the Amstrad CPC or the Amiga, they have that blobby undefined look. Now i'm having flashbacks of so many shitty 2D platformers on those platforms.
Wow that is some terribly choppy player movement and screen scrolling; in the early nineties and with the Genesis (and Turbografx-16) all new and shiny a SMS game like this could not afford to be anything less than stellar and pushing the console to the max. A few select SMS games reached their peak during the early nineties (Standouts that I wish could have been representative of the system a couple of years prior since most people would miss them) and it was an uphill battle for even those to be noticed so this dud stood absolutely no chance even with the Shinobi branding.
