From the Memory Bank: My History with Video Games

Ninja Gaiden - Dealing with Emotions
How Ryu Hayabusa's reimagined adventure caused feelings of anger to respawn over and over again.

Oh what a difference a change of platform can make.

Though, before I can address that issue, I have to first take you back to 1987. That's the point in which my story with Ninja Gaiden begins.

It all started after I fell in love with Double Dragon and the genre that it helped to popularize. At time, there was yet a defining label for this genre, so, because I was intent on finding an easy way to explain to people how this new breed of action game was different from traditional action games, I simply came up with my own personally created label--one that was designed to put emphasis on the genre's most distinguishing characteristic ("mobs of people fighting"). So whenever I was talking with friends, I'd express my fondness for the "new 'big brawl' type of game." That's the name I gave to Double Dragon-style games, and it's one that I continued to use until years later, when finally someone informed me that games of their ilk had indeed earned their own classification; these games, I was told, were called "beat-'em-ups," and, apparently, they'd been around much longer than I thought.

But up until then, as I said, I called them "big brawl games," and I knew how to identify games of their type. I could confirm whether or not a game fit the description of "brawler" merely by gauging how its characters interacted: If its heroes were engaging with large groups of enemies and fighting them with flashy combo-style attacks and a considerable number of supplementary offensive maneuvers, then there was a good chance that it was a brawler. Basically, if it played anything like Double Dragon--if its action was as deep and as frenzied as Double Dragon's--then I saw it as "big brawl" game.

And whenever I'd come across a game of that type, I'd be sure to pop a quarter into its machine's coin slot and give it my full focus--give it total priority over all other types of action games. Quite simply, brawlers were my favorite type of game. I loved everything about them: their frenetic action, their viscerally pleasing fighting moves, their screen-filling gang onslaughts, and the deeply reverberant sound effects that were produced by their heroes' punches, kicks and ground-shaking slams.

There was also another big reason why I was drawn to brawlers: They weren't quite as unforgiving as standard action games, a lot of which were built around cruelly designed endurance-based challenges. I'm talkin' about the types of games that wanted to kill you off as quickly as possible--the ones that were intent on throwing at you more enemies than you could handle and draining all of your lives before you could even get a feel for the action. In so many of those games, the hero's repertoire was just way too limited to be effective against the stages' waves of enemy hordes. All I wanted was a fair chance--an opportunity to play as a hero who felt both highly equipped and very capable. And "big brawl games" were the only ones that could reliably provide me that opportunity.

That's one of the reasons why I was immediately drawn to Ninja Gaiden. I mean, what hero type is more capable than a ninja?!

More so than any other reason, though, Ninja Gaiden roused my interest because it was one of the most visually attractive games I'd ever seen. As someone who had a thing for alluring background work and game worlds that felt lived-in, I was deeply enamored with Ninja Gaiden's graphical presentation and particularly with its gloriously rendered, imagination-stirring backgrounds and textures. It was an artistically and stylistically gorgeous game and, really, just so much fun to look at and observe!

Immediately I was taken with the visuals that formed its first stage's starting segment: the distant cityscape with its beautifully drawn, gleaming silver-colored skyscrapers; the comfortingly familiar rooftops whose more-immediate positioning defined said distance and thus spoke of a comparatively quiet residential setting (like the one in which I lived!); and all of the richly detailed environments and objects that comprised the playing field and therein defined its character: the rundown buildings (among which were the always-appreciated specially named stores like "Silverink," "Sele" and "IceCeCrem"), the vending machines, the streetlights, the torn-up posters, the popcorn stand, and the silly signs that were protruding from most every surface.

And it was the same deal with every segment I traversed in following; each was comprised of wonderfully enchanting environments and many in the way of cool little visual touches.

I only spent about five minutes with Ninja Gaiden that day, but that was about all the time I needed to conclude that it was a top-tier brawler. I was completely blown away by it. And as was usually the case when I was awed by a newly released, amazing-looking arcade game, I couldn't think about anything else. I was wholly consumed by Ninja Gaiden, and I spent the next few days obsessively thinking about its every aspect--about its every sight, sound, and fighting move. I couldn't wait to get back to the arcade to play it a second time!

The mental images that formed in my mind during that period were so indelible that they'd stick with me forever. They'd be the first images that would pop into my head whenever anyone would speak of Ninja Gaiden. They were the images that would forever define what the game meant to me.

Everything Ninja Gaiden did was instantly memorable to me. Every aspect of it excited me in some way. Take, for example, its most recurrent enemy: the hockey-mask-wearing goon. Whenever I'd see him, I'd have fun thinking about the nature of his existence. For me, his very presence worked to produce a Friday the 13th vibe (perhaps as intended) that did well to express just how dangerous Ninja Gaiden's world truly was. Really, I couldn't think of a scenario more dire than a city being attacked by an army of Jason Voorhees clones; though, the game had me convinced that a sword-wielding ninja would in fact be the city's best hope of thwarting such an invasion.

Of course, I also loved how Ninja Gaiden played. I loved that its hero, Ryu Hayabusa, could interact with environments and enemies in so many ways. In particular, I thought it was incredibly cool that Ryu could hang from the jutting signs--whose designs were obviously intended to evoke images of the famous Pepsi and Coca-Cola logos--and while doing so swing about and execute a Jackie Chan-style swinging kick. This sign-hanging ability, to me, represented a whole new level of interactivity. No other game had anything as cool or as inventive--not Double Dragon or any of the rest.

Ryu also possessed one of my favorite beat-'em-up moves of all time: the flip-throw, which allowed him to grab onto enemies' heads while in mid-flip and toss them all the way across the screen and oftentimes send them crashing through signs, barrels, vending machines, phone booths, fruit carts and just about every other onscreen object. The resulting explosions didn't inflict extra damage, sadly, but they did make for some spectacular visuals (in video games, that always counts for something)! And because the flip-throw worked on even the largest of enemies and did so very reliably, it was just about the only move I'd ever use. It made no sense to engage an enemy with basic striking moves because said striking moves were interruptible and thus they provided the enemy a great opportunity to land the first blow (and a subsequent combo). That's not something I cared to do.

No--the only thing I was interested in doing was tossing fools across the screen and directly into death pits! There was nothing was more fun than that, I tell you!

Ninja Gaiden's enemy cast, overall, wasn't quite as interesting as Double Dragon's, no, but it was still memorable. There were still plenty of interesting things about it. For one thing, I liked that it shared the latter's sense of diversity (I can't explain why, but I just always found it to be a cool touch when a game included different-colored variations of its enemies). Ninja Gaiden contained white- and black-skinned versions of all of its enemy types, among which were creatively designed characters like the rotund log-swinging brutes who wore Darth Vader-like breathing masks; the bearded, headband-wearing thugs who wielded pairs of fighting sticks; the pilots whose rotorcrafts had string ladders that transported club-wielding maniacs; the fish-men who emerged from lakes and pulled you into the water; and plenty of other vicious-looking, bulky ruffians. And they all looked appropriately mean and nasty!

One thing was clear: Whoever designed the bosses was definitely a big wrestling fan. I thought as much because he or she modeled some of the bosses after specific wrestler types--namely sumo wrestlers and Road Warrior-lookin' grapplers. As someone who was a fan of pro-wrestling and games based on pro-wrestling, I appreciated that characters of their type were included. Because now I had the opportunity to engage in another one of gaming's greatest pleasures: throwing around big, brawny wrestlers! Few things were as empowering.

I had one problem with Ninja Gaiden, though: the way in which it handled difficulty progression. At around Round 4, the game started to introduce what was clearly artificial difficulty. The enemies didn't get faster, stronger or more durable no; rather, they simply gained a ridiculous amount of attack-priority. At that point, it became near-impossible to capably land striking combos, and the only way to effectively deal with enemies was to use cheap tactics like rapidly jumping between stages' upper and lower levels and striking pursuers while they were in their jumping and climbing animations and thus defenseless.

So basically Ninja Gaiden dropped the pretense of "fairness" and suddenly began to embrace some of the "big brawl" genre's most unfair values.

Though, the game's embracing of those values didn't sour me on it or anything, no. Even when Ninja Gaiden was giving me a rough time, I was still having the same amount of fun with it. I was still finding great joy in looking at and interacting with it. So what if its priority issues caused me to waste a couple of quarters? I wasn't going to let something as trivial as that diminish my enjoyment of one of the best brawlers around!

So that's how it was. Every time I'd go an arcade, I'd seek out Ninja Gaiden. And then, as usual, I'd spend a half hour or so thoroughly enjoying its satisfyingly impactful action and all of its amazingly cool visual elements. At times, I'd play it just for the purpose of taking in its wonderfully enchanting environments and scenery.

Those with which I was most enamored included Round 1's ninja-packed rail-climbing segment, whose background--a screen-filling red brick wall--had the giant likenesses of an unnamed man and woman spray-painted onto it (apparently they were Tecmo representatives). Round 2's very-familiar-feeling highway scene, in which you had to dodge the traffic moving between Brooklyn (which is where I happened to live) and Staten Island by jumping and swinging across road signs' metal poles (I loved how accurate this scene was--how it included those green-colored signs that looked just like the ones I'd see whenever we were driving on any New York highway). And Round 5's final segment, whose large sign displayed the Strong Team members' likenesses, except it turned out that it was actually them deceptively posing as their own likenesses; and, suddenly, surprisingly, they'd spring to life and join the action!

So yeah--I loved Ninja Gaiden for a lot of reasons. It was, quite simply, one of my favorite games of all time.

That's why, in 1989, I was stunned to learn that there was actually an NES version of the game.

"One of my all-time-favorite arcade games was released for my all-time-favorite console, and somehow this news never reached me?!" I said to myself while in a state of puzzlement.

It was still a fairly new release, sure, but still--Ninja Gaiden was a big-name game, and I usually knew about such games well before they were released. My friends would keep me informed of them; they'd always tell me about highly anticipated releases in advance. But this time, strangely, no one ever said a word--not even my friend Dominick, who was usually on top of these things.

Instead, I learned of NES Ninja Gaiden's existence by happenstance. I suddenly came across a copy of it while I was browsing the aisle of some random store with my mother (that is, I was poutingly following my mother around the store and hoping that this would be the last stop). And, like I said, I was shocked. "When, exactly, did this game come out?" I continued to wonder. "And how am I just now learning about it?"

The only thing I knew for sure was that I was very interested in owning it!

And so it came to pass: On that day, I got myself a copy of Ninja Gaiden (though, I don't recall the nature of the purchase; it was probably the case that I begged my mother to buy the game for me). And even though I was well aware of the possibility that I was buying a heavily-stripped-down version of the game--because, really, the NES wasn't known for its ability to replicate arcade games' impressive visuals or their large amount of of onscreen activity--I didn't see much risk in buying it. The NES was comparatively limited, yeah, but I still felt that it could do an at-least-adequate job of replicating the arcade original's fighting mechanics (and especially that flip-throw move!) and level design; and, really, that's all I needed it to do.

Also, I wasn't concerned about a potential lack of multiplayer action since I almost always played the arcade game solo. That's how I preferred to play it.

"So what could go wrong?" I thought.

When I got home, I ran upstairs, to my room, and excitedly popped the game into my NES. And I was prepared to have a fun time playing a straight port of one of my favorite arcade games!

At first, everything seemed legit: The opening stage's environments and scenery, while not as visually impressive as those seen in the arcade version, were quite faithful, which is to say that the action was taking place in an urban setting whose features included run-down buildings, specially named stores, jutting signposts (all of which displayed images that resembled the Coca-Cola logo), and streetlights. So it appeared as though NES Ninja Gaiden was indeed going to be true to the original!

But as I advanced past the first couple of screens and began to engage in some action, my heart started to sink. This happened because it had become really obvious to me that something was very much amiss--that NES Ninja Gaiden was not the game I thought it was. This game, it turned out, wasn't at all a faithful port of the arcade classic. Hell--it wasn't even a beat-'em-up! Rather, it was a straight action game, and thus its mechanics and level design were radically different from the arcade version's; it featured, instead, standard run-and-jump platforming, conventional fighting action, and garden-variety single-plane, obstacle-based stages. And absolutely none of it captured the arcade original's essence.

This was a completely different game! And I was not happy about it.

"What in the world have they changed my Ninja Gaiden into?!" I said in a moment of anger. "Why are the stages not multiplane?! Why can't I hang from the Coke signs?! Where are the hockey-mask guys, the log-swinging dudes, and the rest of the bulky brutes?! And where the hell is my flip-throw?! I mean, the wall-cling is a cool move and all, but it's no substitute for all of the arcade game's spectacular fighting moves!"

What Tecmo did with Ninja Gaiden was worse than a Double Dragoning. It was pure desecration.

I felt swindled.

Though, I continued to play on anyway, and I did so because I wanted to get a full grasp on Ninja Gaiden's action and insofar do whatever I could to justify spending $50 (of my mother's money, probably) on the game.

What kept me engaged during the appraisal process was the game's music, which I could only describe as "increasingly amazing." The opening stages (1-1 and 2-1) had two of the best musical themes--two of the most adrenaline-raising, headbangingly rockin' pieces of music--I'd ever heard in an 8-bit game, and it only got better from there.

The music was amazing not just because it was high in quality and incredibly lively but also because it did such a wonderful job of setting mood and tone and defining each environment's character and condition. And that was an important job because Ninja Gaiden had a lot to communicate; it contained so many uniquely rendered environments, and thus it had so many stories to tell.

Really, Ninja Gaiden never wanted to stay in one place; it was constantly jumping from one disparate location to the next--to the point where sometimes its progression felt strangely incoherent ("How does a prison lead out into a mountain range?" I'd always wonder)--and each new fantastical setting was accompanied by a spirited (and often divinely percussion-heavy) musical theme that told you all you needed to know about its level of danger and how you should feel about it.

I remember the exact moment when I truly fell in love with Ninja Gaiden's music. It was when I arrived at Stage 2-2, the ruinous castle exterior whose structures were gated by a surrounding mountain range. Its accompanying musical theme, whose reverberations seemed to fill my entire room, had such a strange energy to it. Somehow it was empowering and spine-tingling at the same time; it had two distinct strains, and the two combined together to form one of the most unusually harmonious pieces of music I'd ever heard.

Stage 2-2's theme was evocative in the same way most of Metroid's music was. That's to say that its wonderfully unique style of conveyance induced me to place the controller down at my side and then focus on listening to what the music was saying and figure out how I felt about its message. My conclusion was that the tune had both "positive energy" and a "creepy tone" and that it was simultaneously inspiriting and menacing. And that's how I've felt about it ever since.

So the piece succeeded in two ways: It was pleasing to the ear, and it did an excellent job of describing the atmosphere of the drab, ominous-feeling castle setting. And I have to say: It seemed appropriate that the area's most noteworthy occupant was a cross-tossing demon whose characteristics included an obscured face, a tattered robe, and unsightly green skin. "This is exactly the type of being I'd expect to meet in ruinous mountain castle," I'd think to myself whenever I'd see it. To me, no enemy had ever been as associative or as symbolic.

Every stage theme that I heard in following had that same power. Each served to masterfully define its associated environment--explain to me if its mood was urgent, uneasy, desperate, hopeful, etc.--and do so in the most rockin' of ways.

I was almost tempted to say that the music, on its own, was worth the price of admission.

If only I'd paid as much attention to the game's cinematics.

To tell you the truth, I didn't watch a single one of Ninja Gaiden's cut-scenes. In that first session and in each successive session, I happily skipped over them, since, at that point in my life, I just wasn't interested in games' non-manual narrative elements; I had no desire to waste any of my precious gaming time watching "boring" cut-scenes--particularly the type that interrupted the action for extended periods of time. And Ninja Gaiden appeared to have plenty of those.

"I get it: I'm a ninja fighting the 'bad guys,'" I'd say while mashing the Start button.

It would be years before I watched the game's cut-scenes in full.

So for the longest time, I had no sense that Ninja Gaiden was a pioneer in using "cinema-quality cut-scenes" (as game magazines described them) to tell complex, fully developed stories; and I knew nothing of the Ninja Gaiden's story beyond "blue ninja Ryu Hayabusa attempts to destroy the great evil!" I simply ignored the game's story aspect and did so while believing that I wasn't missing anything important.

I felt justified in ignoring the story element because I saw it as being at odds with the action's brisk pacing; it only served to slow the game down and break my rhythm. The game didn't need it, I thought.

The reality was that I was a hyperactive kid with a short attention span, and I hadn't yet learned how to take my time and in doing so extract maximum value from my games. Thankfully, though, those days are long, long over, and now--

Hey, look--Big Jon just logged on to Twitch!

But getting back to that very first session: I wasn't having a good time with Ninja Gaiden. No sir. Not at all. I was angry at the game, and as I advanced deeper into it, I only grew angrier and angrier until eventually I was pissed. I wasn't feeling that way because the game had abandoned everything that was good about its arcade progenitor, no; I'd since come to terms with the fact that NES Ninja Gaiden wanted nothing to do with the arcade game or the beat-'em-up genre in general. What was making me increasingly angry, rather, were its insanely large spikes in difficulty! Each new area, it seemed, was throwing an exponential amount of obnoxious enemies and nasty platforming challenges at me. And eventually it got a point in which it was simply too much--in which I could no longer handle any of it.

Suddenly Ninja Gaiden's was an extreme level of difficulty, and I couldn't make a lick of progress!

"What this game is asking me to do right now is absolutely ridiculous!" I shouted, feeling completely exasperated.

That's not how it was early on, no. Stages 1-1 and 2-1 were very manageable, and I saw them as being thoughtfully designed. And I had every reason to believe that this would be a continuing trend; and for a while, it looked like it was going to be. But then, once I made it to Act-III, something changed: All of a sudden, the level design took a sharp turn for the worse, and soon Ninja Gaiden became an absolute horror show. It was as if the opening stages were merely a facade meant to lure me in, and my having taken the bait led me directly into a trap. And now the game was ready to show me its true face. And that's what it did: It suddenly ripped off its mask and revealed the face of a sadistic cackling demon. And that's when the pain started.

Now, a mere two stages later, it was asking me to make pixel-perfect jumps onto the very edges of two-tile-long platforms that were occupied by thick, wide-hitboxed enemies that patrolled along at speedy paces. "This is absurd!" I shouted.

What was worse were the repeated instances in which I'd jump up or down to an apparently safe portion of the screen only to be promptly ambushed and thus completely overwhelmed by a flood of enemies whose partakers poured in from every direction and did so without any in the way or warning.

And then there was the game's enemy-spawning issue. My God--it was like nothing I'd ever seen. It could be chiefly attributed to the introduction of something that I didn't think was possible: stationary spawn points. It was only after testing it that I realized that I wasn't being bounced around by a group of enemies, no, but rather by one single enemy that wasn't continuously spawning in from the screen's corner at a time when the screen was standing still.

"This has to be a glitch of some sort," I thought, "because I've been playing games for 9 years, and I've never seen anything like it."

I couldn't imagine that a game designer would do something as sadistic as purposely program it to where enemies could continuously respawn and thus flood onto the screen even in moments when the action was at a standstill.

"This can't have been intentional," I thought. "I mean, no game designer is that cruel!"

Oh what I didn't know.

   

And as I surveyed Ninja Gaiden's enemy cast, I couldn't help but be puzzled by it. "What's up with these enemies?" I wondered as I surveyed them. "Why does it feel as though their collective has no cohesive, uniting theme to it?"

It just seemed to me that the enemy characters were ill-assorted. It was as if Tecmo couldn't find an enemy designer, so it simply plucked enemies from a number of different games and then threw them all together. There was no other way to explain a cast that included boxers, charging football players, machine-gun-firing army men, hopping-mad mutants, propeller-wearing ninjas, all kinds of weird projectile-tossing demons, and sword-wielding guys who came in flavors of Japanese, Indian, Arabian and, uh, piranha-plant-headed (because sure--why not?).

I was happy, though, that they brought back the hockey-mask-wearing guys (they started appearing in Stage 4-3). They were recast as merely-ordinary ground-patrolling axe-swingers, yeah, but their appearance did at least help to create some link to the arcade game.

Though, how the enemies looked didn't really matter because they were obviously of the function-over-form variety. They existed merely to crowd every structure of every stage and make the game's platforming aspect feel like pure hell. And they did that better than any other enemy cast I'd ever seen.

Oh, but then there was the worst of their kind. At the start of Act-III, Ninja Gaiden introduced them--the most fiendish, most ruthless, most-terror-inducing enemies I'd ever encountered in a video game.

Birds.

Not werewolves or zombies or ghosts or vampires or demons or aliens or killer robots or giant face-eating mutants, no.

Birds.

Birds that would spawn in the screen's upper portion and hover for a bit before swooping down at lightning speed and ramming into me, usually repeatedly. Birds that would dart across the screen and sideswipe me and do so well before I had the chance to see them and react. And birds that would fly in from out of nowhere while I was mid-jump and proceed to bump into me and cause me to fall helplessly into an abyss.

Imagine suffering 20 or 30 deaths in a row because you kept getting hit by a bird whose spawn point was placed near the midpoint of a long do-or-die jump whose target was a one-tile-wide platform that was occupied by a large, mobile sword-wielder. Now think of what it would be like if that same sequence of events repeated twice per area and five times per stage. That horrific scene you're visualizing right now--well, it's the single most accurate representation of the Ninja Gaiden experience. For certain, it's the single most accurate representation of my Ninja Gaiden experience.

The awful sounds of birds crashing into me and obnoxiously bouncing me around became so ingrained in my being that I'd hear them in my sleep.

*BOEARM-BOEARM-BOEARM-BOEARM-BOEARM-BOEARM*

Those sounds haunted me.

Those birds--those winged terrors--were the bane of my existence. They, more than any other game element, were responsible for the anger and frustration I was feeling. They, alone, were the reason I considered never going anywhere near the game again.

For some reason, though, I continued to play it. I don't know if it was because I was delusional enough to think I could actually beat it or because I was simply a glutton for punishment, but I wouldn't allow myself to quit. So I just continued to willingly subject myself to Ninja Gaiden's unique brand of torture.

"And what, exactly, did your persistence produce?" you ask as you fold your hands and lean closer to your monitor.

Well, nothing positive, I'm sad to say. Only more and more pain.

Now let me tell you: I'd been deeply aggravated before. I'd gotten upset enough to throw an impassioned tantrum. I'd overreacted to a game's nastiness by angrily throwing a controller. And many times, I'd been so pissed that I wanted to strangle a game developer.

But what Ninja Gaiden was doing to me was way beyond any of that. What it was making me feel was an emotion I'd never before felt in my life: rage.

It triggered during Stage 6-2, which I was traversing for the very first time. Going in, I was of the mindset that I had Ninja Gaiden figured out. The key was to tank your way through stages. That's what I'd been doing; that's how I got here. So I had no reason to believe that the same strategy wouldn't breed success here, too.

About a minute later, I came to a segment that featured a number of platforms separated by wide expanses. The last platform-to-platform jump I had to make looked to be a challenging one because it required that I clear a large gap and land on the edge of a 2-tile-wide platform and do so while dealing with a back-spawning football player, the cross-tossing robed demon that was occupying the targeted platform, and a bird that kept flying in from below.

Though, I had a read on the situation, and I knew exactly what I needed to do. So I cleared some space, charged forward, and made my jump. Right then, while I was in mid-jump, I was walloped and consequently knocked into a pit by something I never saw coming: a second bird; it had suddenly spawned in near the screen's top-center portion, right on top of me. "That's ridiculous!" I said while making a "What the hell?" hand gesture.

But I understood, now, that I was required to do one additional thing: slash my sword at the point in which my jump was at its apex so that I could take out the bird right as it was spawning. Though, because I overestimated my ability to understand the game's hit-detection, it didn't work like I thought it would; I slashed my sword at what I thought was the correct moment, but the strike didn't register, and so the bird knocked me into a pit a second time. The same thing happened in my next attempt and in the one after that. And it kept on happening. Sub-weapons, I learned, were of no use here, since you couldn't use them while jumping; all they could do was help me to remove the cross-tossing demon from the equation, which meant nothing. It was all about that damn bird.

No matter what I did--no matter what tactic I used--the scene would always end the same way--with me plunging into the abyss below.

With each successive failure, I grew angrier and angrier. And it went on like this until eventually the anger boiled over and caused me to crack. Now enraged, I pounded on the Start button and then furiously threw the controller to the ground; subsequently I tightly gripped the sides of my yellow swivel-rocker lounge chair (which used to belong to my grandfather, by the way) and began to scream at the TV screen through clenched teeth, trying to mute myself as much as possible in order to avoid giving neighboring family members the impression that I'd gone insane. In following, I began to fiercely stomp about my room and hatefully threaten the game, itself, and its creators. I'm telling you, man: I was ready to rip someone's face off!

In the process, I turned completely red and began to feel a heaviness in my chest. Soon it hurt to breathe. It was honestly pretty scary.

Having never experienced this type of discomfort before, I didn't know how to handle the situation. The only thing I could think to do was suppress the anger; I hoped that by doing so, I could stop it from intensifying any further. Moments later, I settled back into my chair and tried to get a hold of myself.

And this is what I had allowed a video game to reduce me to.

Even when my actions were more performative--when I was in the process of violently ripping the game from the NES, damning its existence, and slamming it back into my game rack--they were still causing me pain, and I knew that if I didn't calm soon, I'd wind up causing myself some real injury. I don't remember how long it took me to regain my composure, no, but I remember what happened after I finally did: I thought to myself, "I never again want to experience that horrible, terrible emotion."

And since then, I haven't. I've refused to let myself get that angry. I've made it a point to never let anything in life push me that far. Because I don't ever again want to feel that kind of pain.

After the incident, I stayed away from Ninja Gaiden for about a year. Every time I felt tempted to return to it, I'd recall the pain it inflicted upon me and promptly reject the urge. "What would happen if I were to give in and play this game again?" I'd wonder. "Would it once again cause me to experience feelings of exasperation and uncontrollable anger?"

"Chances are that it would," I'd always conclude, "so it isn't worth the risk."

Still, I was the type of person who didn't like to leave things unfinished; and I especially hated the idea of letting some dumb video game get the best of me. So even though I was kinda repulsed by the idea of returning to Ninja Gaiden, I still had a strong inclination to want to beat it; and that desire, which had been bubbling for so long, eventually hit a crescendo, and thus the feeling was now so intense that I no longer had the power to suppress it. And it was at that moment that I became determined to bravely challenge Ninja Gaiden, the game that had tormented me so, and finally finish it.

To give you some context: This was a time before the Internet and cable TV--a time when there were very few entertainment options and thus a limited amount of ways for a kid to occupy him- or herself on a boring summer afternoon. Days were long, time moved slowly, and you always had to find new and interesting ways to keep yourself busy.

So if my parents were out for the day; my friends were unavailable; and my brother, James, was over at Stuyvesant, hanging out with his buddies, then I'd have plenty of hours of alone time to devote to whatever unproductive activity I could think up.

And during one particular week in the summer of 1990, the only interesting-sounding "unproductive activity" I could think up at was "beat Ninja Gaiden."

So I decided that if I was going to do this, I'd need to block off an entire day and devote it wholly to the mission of beating Ninja Gaiden. I chose a quiet Saturday--a day when the house was empty and a feeling of calmness filled the air.

"Certainly this is the perfect day to play through and finish this damn game!" I told myself.

And on that day, I was indeed able to complete Ninja Gaiden. It was one of the most taxing things I'd ever done. I endured extreme stress, acute physical pain, and mental fatigue on the way to clearing what was the single most difficult game I'd ever played. All told, it must have taken me six-eight hours and a hundred-plus lives to reach the game's endpoint and thereafter figure out how to evade Jaquio's fireball attack and successfully land my own strikes. And though I had great reason to wilt, I never did. And believe me: I absolutely had every reason in the world to flip out when I died to the final boss, and the game, for some awful reason, sent me all the way back to 6-1 (and I'm sure that this happened to me several times). But I didn't; somehow I was able to hold myself together and (for the most part) prevent my anger from boiling over.

Though, the moment in which I inflicted the killing blow on the final boss--that hideous skeletal chimera demon whose name I couldn't care to guess--wasn't at all a cathartic, satisfying or joyous one, no; the only feeling I experienced, rather, was great relief. It was a feeling that said, "Thank God this is over and I never have to see this game again!"

Now, yeah, I realized that engaging with video games in this manner--that playing them while consumed with feelings of hostility and consequently suffering through them--was a bad thing to do, and it was causing me to miss the point, which was to derive enjoyment from my gaming experiences. But with Ninja Gaiden, that's the approach I had to take. It's what the game demanded. It didn't want to provide me any enjoyment, no; it wanted to engage in psychological warfare. And I obliged because I didn't want to lose that battle. That was the nature of our relationship: Ninja Gaiden liked to emotionally abuse me, and I liked to respond by treating it with enmity. And in the end, my enmity won.

It wasn't really the end, of course. In the years that followed, I returned to Ninja Gaiden more than a few times.

I did so initially for reasons that had nothing to do with actually playing the game. Rather, I returned to it because I was quite fond of its other aspects--because I found great enjoyment in listening to its rockin' soundtrack and examining each of its impressively detailed, tonally distinct stage environments. I loved to think about the stories that its visuals and music were telling; I loved to just stand there and soak in the strangely wondrous atmosphere the two of them were working together to create.

These were the areas in which Ninja Gaiden truly shined, I believed.

And since Ninja Gaiden's artists had put so much effort into creating the game's cut-scenes, I felt that I owed it to them to watch said cut-scenes at least once and then make an honest assessment. My opinion was that the cinematics were impressively produced and that they represented some of the best visual design ever seen on the NES (or on any console, for that matter), but the story that they told (vengeful ninja gets caught up in a shady CIA operation and reluctantly helps the organization to combat a great evil) was cliched, goofy and plodding.

So basically I found the story to be really boring, and for that reason, I almost never watched the cut-scenes (I'd watch them maybe once every five years--just as a refresher).

Still, I did come to have an appreciation for how Ninja Gaiden's manga-styled cinematics influenced narrative design in video games. I could admit that games like Double Dragon II: The Revenge, Batman and Vice: Project Doom ;really benefitted from the inclusion of Ninja Gaiden-style cut-scenes (even if I was apt to skip them), which worked to make said games feel grander both in terms of production value and story scope; theirs was some all-important flavoring.

In time--and the 1990 version of me would have never believed that such a thing could ever happen--I also came to have a better appreciation of Ninja Gaiden's gameplay, which, I learned, became more manageable when you moved with a certain flow and rhythm. That's how the level designer intended for you to approach the action. It was all planned; every obstacle and every enemy was specially placed so that a constantly-in-motion Ryu could cleanly cut through it simply by jumping, slashing or tossing a sub-weapon at the right time. If you tried to tank your way through the game, instead, you'd get bounced around like a pinball and experience nothing but pain. It was all about rhythm and timing. And that's how I've been approaching the game ever since.

Now, I'm still not prepared to say that Ninja Gaiden is an amazingly-well-designed game, no. It simply has too many flaws: It has major hit-detection issues (the sword's hitbox is indiscernible, so there will be many instances in which your seemingly-well-timed slash will inexplicably miss, and the targeted enemy will simply pass through your blade and inflict contact-damage). It uses the same cheap trick over and over again (having enemies suddenly spawn in at the screen's edge, at times when you're likely to be in mid-jump), to an infuriating degree. Its enemies, obnoxiously, can respawn in their original positions even when the screen is still. And it provides you no invincibility frames, which means that you're going to spend a lot of time being helplessly bounced around by the game's relentless enemies. And these flaws can cause your Ninja Gaiden experience to be a nightmarish one.

So the game's only "fun" if you know where all of the spawn points are and you're somehow able to discern the sword's hitbox. If you don't possess knowledge, though, you're going to have a rough time of it.

But me, though? I know how to handle Ninja Gaiden. I've been capably beating it for decades now. I admit that I'm not amazing at it and that sometimes I become filled with feelings of fear and dread when I think about playing it (particularly its later stages), but still I'm always ready to take on its challenge. It might beat me down a bit and emotionally abuse me at times, sure, but one thing it won't do--not now or ever again--is get the best of me.

Its sequels, though? Oh boy. Talk about tales of struggle.

I'll tell you about those experiences some other time.

So there you have it: The story of how Tecmo took an addictively fun, easy-to-play beat-'em-up and transformed it into a brutally tough, incredibly unforgiving twitch-based side-scroller that managed to destroy my spirit and almost reduce me to a lifeless shell. A name that I originally associated with feelings of happiness and joy had become one that I associated more with feelings of anger and frustration. For the longest time, I considered Ninja Gaiden to be the paragon of "NES-hard" games, and I resented Tecmo for turning it into that.

These days, though, I have mostly positive feelings for NES Ninja Gaiden. I like playing it. As I always have, I enjoy listening to its music and thinking about its world. And I have a whole lot of nostalgia for it. Also, I can tell you that I'm now glad that Tecmo took the route it did--that it chose to reimagine arcade Ninja Gaiden on the NES rather than toss out a dumbed-down port of the game. What we got out of it was ideal: the existence of not one but two fully realized variations of a single idea--two wonderfully unique action games bearing the name "Ninja Gaiden."

As were Rygar and Bionic Commando (two of my favorite series), Ninja Gaiden was successfully split into two separate classics, and the gaming world is a better place as a result.

So let's raise our swords for the two Ninja Gaidens--for two classic games that are as wonderfully divergent as the platforms that host them. It's siblings like them that make the gaming world such a fascinating place.