Game #3: Zen: Intergalactic Ninja (1993)

Note: Some games have little or no memories attached whatsoever. For those, I will still write something, such as gameplay style, a short review perhaps. This is all still new to me.

That said, the reviews will likely be bad because I somehow feel like I have played everything that’s good.

After devouring every issue of Justin’s “Nintendo Fun Club” magazine, my parents were so taken with the novelty of my having a magazine subscription at the age of four that they signed me up for the legendary “Nintendo Power.” Even as a kid, thumbing through the pages, there are some games that, no matter how hard they get pushed, no matter how fancy the illustrations are, you know they’re going to flop.

“Zen: Intergalactic Ninja” came out at the end of the Nintendo’s lifespan in 1993. By that time, the game was featured in the waning Nintendo coverage in the magazine that bore its namesake. The title of the game itself read like a what’s-what of stuff that little kids would find cool. “Zen,” ok, we’d learned that from early-90s ninja culture, though we weren’t sure what it meant; and WHOA, a space ninja? This is what Konami wanted us to think. By this time, years after TMNT had run its course, us kids, we were smart enough to see through this ploy. To top it off, Zen was fighting to stop environmental polluters. This game seemed engineered from the ground up by a bunch of stuffy old people that thought they knew what us cool kids liked, but wanted to send a "positive message." Look guys, we're young kids. We want to see fighting and things blowing up.

Of course, now that the Internet is around, those that give enough of a shit about “Zen: Intergalactic Ninja” to look it up (or even remember it) are mildly surprised to find out that Zen is a comic book character with non-environmentalist roots that reach back prior to the creation of the game.

As far as gameplay goes, I truly believe that Konami could have really been onto something with some minor tweaks and a non-PSA-esque storyline. Basically, the game plays like “Castlevania” meets “Ninja Gaiden.” On its own, this sounds really awesome, and it certainly looks like a winner; the graphics are pretty good, Zen has more than one move and the animation is fluid. The only problem is that the controls feel really sluggish, almost to the point of complete ruination. Some people might find that endearing though, maybe those that can’t handle the frantic gameplay of “Ninja Gaiden.”

One thing’s for sure though, if any of the video stores in my town had carried this game, I’d probably have played it a lot. Alone, though, because I wouldn’t want my friends to feel like I was tricking them into playing some goofy hippie game.