It's all about the charge attacks.

I've been playing this a fair bit, think I'm on stage 4 or 5. The game has many many problems. Not least a lack of clarity between the enemies and Ryu, that coupled with the dodgy camera nearly breaks it completely.

Perhaps I'm being overly harsh. The list of available moves is long, but as you say it's all block dodge, block dodge, charge go mental, block dodge, ranged attack to keep the combo going etc. etc. etc. I certainly prefer it to the original, which I just didn't get at all.

Hi, quirky guy from the Internet is back for his yearly post!

(I had to register anew as I forgot my old password and previous e-mail is no longer in service.)

I've been playing Ninja 2 recently and I thought it was a bit better balanced than the previous version - you no longer have the super Izuna drop spam that kills anything and rolls will not evade everything anymore. No, it's a more offensive affair than before and you should take down enemies as quickly as possible instead, they are really coming at you in this. Like Madbury says, the camera picks anything but an ideal angle many times so that's something to keep in mind (as well as the odd puzzle solving).

Not sure about heroness in this but it's frantic and gets my adrenaline going, I had a good time.

I don't think there's much Heroness(TM) on offer here. The 'test' missions are pretty decent though where it drops you into an area and you just get overrun by enemies. They're generally more challenging and since the area is nice and open you can goof around a bit more.

I've not played this in a while though. I think going back to it now will be difficult.

Interesting to see that this is getting an enhanced remake on PS3. A more balanced difficulty and better camera are promised and there's going to be an online co-op mode, which is long overdue for this style of game in my opinion.

It's not all good news though as it seems they're removing the gore, due to complaints from certain circles.

Yes, I think mission mode is essential, too. It's an exercise in reflexes, but of course there isn't much in this category that comes close to God Hand's complexity.

Not sure what to say about the toned down gore but my beastly instincts are not in agreement. I wouldn't mind if they replaced it with something equally ridiculous like vivid rainbows for blood and bodyparts with unicorns.

Perhaps, but I'm not overly convinced that shoving a co-op mode into a game that has been specifically designed as a single player experience is going to work. I mean you'd have to redo all the levels, enemy placements and pretty much everything to rebalance the game.

Co-op seems to work well if you can engineer it so there's an advantage in players adopting a role within the game. Gears of War does this really well with its cover and crossfire mechanics, but then that was always a squad based game from the off, so co-op was integral to the gameplay.

If you look at older 90s arcade games where co-op was pretty common then these work as both a co-op and single player experience, but that's usually down to the fact that you're both working towards the same overall objective, whilst trying to amass more points or powerups than your partner. I don't see how you could push that model into Ninja Gaiden II as the whole reward system is built around comboing hits and enemies together. The interaction of a second player will no doubt lead to frustrating combo breakage.

The best example I can come up with is Psyvariar, which is fundamentally broken as a 2 player co-op game, but works brilliantly single player. In short I think co-op needs to be an upfront design choice for it to work properly.

...yeah...

Co-op into an existing game, that doesn't even have the notion of Co-op is a bit crazy.

I mean there is alot of exciting potential for balletic teaming up combat... but for my cynical head, slapping co-op into an already dubiously engineered game seems a bit desperate?

I never got on with the Xbox Ninja Gaiden because it wasn't the right kind of difficult for me to enjoy it, it was just self flagellation difficult. Didn't seem to have an arc to get into.

But hey, if it doesn't have four wheels and can't drift I tend to lose interest quite quickly.

A DMC style cooperative game with all the magic that you could get, getting two folk to ice skate through enemies would be tops... they kinda dropped that ball with one of the Viewtiful Joes I didn't play right?

Even Viewtiful Joe's system broke down when a 2nd player was introduced. The whole point of DMC or VJ is limelight hoggery, you can't share the action, the only way to make it work it to dilute what each player can do. You can't have it both ways - you can either have a system that works brilliantly for a single player or you can design a game where you can bring a friend along from the ground up.

This smells like what Capcom did with RE5; instead of concentrating on building upon what they achieved with RE4 and expanding on it, they instead shoehorned in a checklist of western game design features which wrecked the system. I fucking hate Ninja Gaiden with a passion anyway, they can cram in a first person mode and carjacking for all I care.

A lot of developers are starting to use co-op as a separate mode outside of the story - with its own levels, goals and scoring system. That's probably the sensible thing to do in my opinion.

Edit: Power of the edit button, I love it!

This strikes me as something I would enjoy with off the hook ninjas, action and exotic environments.

Ryu can do some really slick moves but it's spoilt by a platforming element which acts more like an obstacle than an opportunity to do amazing things. He prefers to move in straight lines so it can be quite easy to mess up a jump, typically I stop or tweak the camera for the best angle but this breaks the flow. It would probably be better if this aspect was less pronounced and woven together with the combat much like Bayonetta's intro. It could perhaps even take cues from the better Shinobi games. Where Ryu is left helpless ascending a ladder Musashi climbs walls and throws incendiary shurikens!

It feels good whenever you have a combo going but I'm not exactly sure how it works mechanically. You can evade and block, counter on block and dismember enemies if a certain condition is met. The latter is how most enemies are disposed of and you are invincible during these frames. Combos are a bit X X Y X, the system hasn't really explained itself well to me.

Tehcnically it's very inconsistent, quite a few framedrops and it has a tendancy to freeze every now and then.