Ninja Spirit - TurboGrafx-16

Oh, now we're talking. This game opens with a guy falling over, then a wolf runs over and yelps at him or whatever. Initially I thought you were the wolf and you turned into a ninja to avenge his death - as you do - but no! It appears the wolf killed him, you're the dead guy's son and now you must avenge his death by wading through a bunch of (pretty large) horizontally and vertically scrolling levels, hacking and slashing at all and sundry. Ninjas, demons, ghost things, mutants....you'll run them all through by the time you're done.

The really interesting thing here is how you upgrade your weapons - as you go on, you gain weird "shadow" versions of yourself that perform all the same actions you do onscreen (two in total). As you might expect, this turns you into a whirling dervish of blades and death and stuff. One slight drawback is that your "real" character isn't distinctive enough from the two clones, so you'll end up getting hit because you were looking at the other guys. Whoops.

The graphics are great (with some really creepy looking bosses like the stone cube with bad guys....I don't know....stuck to the cube in some weird way. The music is good too, with an appropriately dismal melody that plays before each level begins.

Definitely one of the best games available for the system.

Score: 5/5