Welcome back to the Ninja Gaiden Love/Hate series! In this entry, we’ll be looking at Ninja Gaiden 3 and its revised version, Ninja Gaiden 3: Razor’s Edge. This was the first entry in the modern series without the involvement of Tomonobu Itagaki, who left Tecmo-Koei due to contract disputes. Ninja Gaiden 3 game was reviled on release and, while Razor’s Edge was generally considered a big improvement, it still was not looked on very fondly Read More

Welcome back to the Ninja Gaiden Love/Hate series! In this entry, we’ll be looking at Ninja Gaiden II, which was originally released in 2008 on the Xbox 360. This was the first Ninja Gaiden game I played, which means that, in addition to getting me into this franchise, it was also the catalyst for my obsession with the Dead or Alive movie and games. I liked it at the time, but does the game hold Read More

Welcome back to the Ninja Gaiden Love/Hate series on IC2S! In this entry, we’ll be looking at Ninja Gaiden: Dragon Sword, a curious little interquel released on the Nintendo DS. This game was very experimental, using the DS in unconventional ways to play the entire experience with the stylus rather than a traditional button layout. I’ve played enough gimmicky handheld experiences to be pretty leery about such experiments: would Dragon Sword turn out any better? Read More

Welcome back to the Ninja Gaiden Love/Hate series on IC2S! It’s finally time for the entry you’ve all been waiting for: the 2004 reboot of Ninja Gaiden! This game was actually the second Ninja Gaiden game I had played, but I absolutely adored it, to the point where it made the top 25 of my all-time favourite games list. It has been more than a decade since I last played it and, in the time Read More

Man, when I started this blog thirteen years ago, I never would have expected that I’d manage to reach four hundred posts! I had started a couple blogs prior to this one and those struggled to continue after the first couple posts, so having this monument to my writing, thoughts, and their evolution over time is just… well, it’s difficult to quantify, really. Knowing that I was approaching this milestone, I knew that I had Read More

Welcome back to the Ninja Gaiden Love/Hate series! In this entry, we’ll be looking at Ninja Gaiden for the Sega Master System! Once again, this is an entirely new entry in the franchise, despite sharing a name with (by this point) three other games released in a four year timespan. I was not too keen on the previous Sega-exclusive Ninja Gaiden game, would this attempt on the Master System fair any better? Read on to Read More

Welcome back to the Ninja Gaiden Love/Hate series! In this entry, we’ll be looking at Ninja Gaiden for the Sega Game Gear! Despite what its title would suggest, this is not a port of the NES Ninja Gaiden, nor is it a port of the arcade game, but an entirely new game that just happens to have the same name as the others (get used to this, this isn’t even the last game called Ninja Read More

Welcome back to the Ninja Gaiden Love/Hate series! In this entry, we’ll be looking at Ninja Gaiden Shadow, a prequel to the NES trilogy released for the Game Boy! I’m always super leery about Game Boy spin-offs of console games: the handheld was extremely under-powered, so the idea of playing an ultra-precise and difficult Ninja Gaiden game on one sounds like a nightmare. That said, how does Ninja Gaiden Shadow actually play in practice? Read Read More

Welcome back to the Ninja Gaiden Love/Hate series! In this entry, we’ll be looking at the final entry in the NES trilogy, Ninja Gaiden III: The Ancient Ship of Doom! With the NES era coming to a close, Tecmo wanted to get one last Ninja Gaiden game out. This game would have a different creative team who wanted to make changes to the formula and attempt to tell a different sort of story than its Read More

Welcome back to the Ninja Gaiden Love/Hate series! In this entry, we’ll be looking at Ninja Gaiden II: The Dark Sword of Chaos, the direct sequel to the NES Ninja Gaiden! With the revolutionary success of the NES Ninja Gaiden, Tecmo set about making a grander and even more ambitious follow-up to try to eclipse it. Could they achieve this lofty goal, or would familiarity and aging hardware result in diminishing returns? Read on to Read More

Welcome back to the Ninja Gaiden Love/Hate series! In this entry, we’ll be going back to the “true” beginning of this franchise: the other 1988 Ninja Gaiden game released on the NES! Despite sharing a name, publisher, and a release year, the two games share nothing in common. While the arcade game was a side-scrolling beat ’em up in the vein of Double Dragon, this NES game was a side-scrolling action-platformer in the vein of Read More

It’s time for the long-awaited Ninja Gaiden Love/Hate series here on IC2S! This series has been a long time coming, largely down to me being an obsessive psycho: it wasn’t enough to play nearly every version of the modern Ninja Gaiden games, I had to go back to play the originals for the first time too! As a result, we’re kicking this series off with the 1988 arcade game, Ninja Gaiden (which is going to Read More

The Switch 2 was recently shown off… and all the news we’ve been getting about it is making me more and more secure in my decision to use the money I was saving to get a Steam Deck instead. The discourse surrounding this has been interesting to see and take part in, but there was one sentiment I keep seeing that resonated with me: “I miss the days when gaming was an affordable hobby”. This Read More

I recently replayed Bioshock and, having now familiarized myself with Ayn Rand and her ideology, it made for a much richer experience as I was now able to appreciate its critique of objectivism. It takes Atlas Shrugged‘s premise (John Galt goes off and creates his own secret utopia of the world’s greatest minds unshackled from the rules and regulations of society), and says “okay, this is what would happen next”. I love how the game Read More