I’m sure most of you have seen this already, but if you haven’t take a look at this hack of Donkey Kong with the gender roles reversed.
Now we just need a hack of the Temple of Doom arcade machine where a small child with a whip rescues dozens of captured American archaeologists in fedoras.
“I’m going to beat up these ninjas, then I’m going to break-dance beside a really really big ghetto blaster!”
Discovering that games you’ve known for ages and been a bit dismissive of before are actually quite good, an occasional series.
This last couple of days I’ve really been enjoying playing Dragon Ninja (known in that America as Bad Dudes vs Dragonninja). I’ve been playing it for years and never really cared all that much for it thinking of it as a piece of nostalgic fluff but the other day something clicked and I got right into it.
I think the main secret of enjoying Dragon Ninja is really simple: play it using only the one coin and don’t use continues. When you aren’t able to just stick another credit in and play on it stops being so straightforward and actually becomes both challenging and highly enjoyable. For an ’80s coin-op game it’s also really fair on you, giving you plenty of opportunities to avoid the bad guys and get a swift kick in there before they do the same to you.
It’s also charmingly of it’s time, with its cheesy Reagan-referencing storyline and the “bad dudes” late-80s get-up (white jeans!). I also love the motorway-set second level (something very similar also appears in the Gameboy colour take on Shinobi) and the way that it’s basically similar bad guys all the way through. It really feels like you’re taking on a massive hoard of ninjas.
Still can’t get past the multiplying ninja-bloke at the end of stage 3, though.
"Rip my skirt off as I fall into the level, would you? Take THAT sexist 1980s programmers!"
Along with most of the population of Scotland I was sent home from work early today due to the storm which decided to pay us a visit (and which has been dubbed ‘Hurricane Bawbag‘) and as a result I ended up having to fill an afternoon with the wind battering at the windows. So I played some games, including the old, mildly-sexist arcade game Athena.
And here’s a thing – I’ve known about this game for years (in fact I first encountered it as a demo of the Spectrum version on a “sampler” tape given away free with CRASH magazine in late 1987 – that’s how old I am) and played it a good few times, but I never knew that the “lovely” Athena could grow to GIANT SIZE, a la Mario. Now I do.
Athena‘s quite good in a frustrating-as-fuck way; you should probably try and find a copy.
Matty on Games 