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

While writing my recent Love/Hate posts about the Halo franchise, I was stunned when I realized the amount of effort that had to be put in for the developers to release four mainline Halo games during the Xbox 360 era. Like… these are Halo games, even a smaller title like ODST would have take a ton of work and creativity to complete. This achievement was even more impressive to me compared to today, where most Read More

And with that, we have completed another Love/Hate series here on IC2S! I’m so glad that I managed to finally get through the Halo games – like I said at the start, I’ve had a lot of enthusiasm for this series, long before I got a chance to play them for myself. As you can see with my Top 100 Video Games of All-Time list, Halo 3 was such a well-crafted shooter that it made Read More

Welcome back to the Halo love/hate series! In this entry we’ll be going over the most recent game in the franchise Halo Infinite. After all the shit 343 Industries had put the fanbase through, expectations were really low for this game, and then got even worse when people saw the reveal trailer, which necessitated a delay to polish the game up for launch. Since then, I’m aware that the game has been through some major Read More

Welcome back to the Halo love/hate series! In this entry we’ll be going over Halo 5: Guardians. I’ve been well aware of this game’s reputation long before I played it: stories about the marketing being deceptive, the game being full of repetitive boss fights, being downed constantly in co-op, and a despised story. Honestly though, I didn’t dislike Halo 4 as much as some people, so I’m going into this with an open mind. Maybe Read More

Welcome back to the Halo love/hate series! In this entry we’ll be going over Halo 4, the first new entry in the series by 343 Industries! I’ve heard really mixed things about this game over the years. On launch, it was lauded, but with the disappointment surrounding subsequent entries, it has retroactively been considered to be shit by Halo fans. Then again, ODST and Reach are loved by Halo fans, and I found them to Read More