Ninja Gaiden II

First of all what is the deal with the camera? I know this this is kind of a dead horse issue but still, I mean, come on! There are times when it frames the action quite nicely, but when you move into a tight space the camera sucks. If you are fighting enemies that are surrounding you on all sides the camera sucks. When the game decides that in order to make things more difficult it needs to make the enemies larger so they are constantly out of frame the camera sucks. When the game decides for some reason that there should be flying enemies (and bosses!!! - yeah three exclamations on that one bitches) the camera - as you may have guessed - sucks.

Now I don't want to just bitch and moan here, so let’s gush about something wonderful. Blood. There is so fucking much of it, and that makes me really happy, because when I play a video game about a ninja who fights demon ninjas I want some fucking blood, and there is definitely no shortage of that. Did someone mention limb severing? No? Well that is there as well. You’re a ninja, you fight some other ninjas, and when they come at you guns ablazin’ you just go up in there and slice off their fucking arm! Yeah! Take that suckas! Then they get all mad and come after you all kamikaze-like and blow you up - and that hurts, but then you just go off and slice off some more limbs and you feel better again.

Also pretty awesome is the ultimate techniques. Just charge it up and go. Soon you too can be enjoying a multi-hit limb-severing flame-bursting ninja-style combo that leaves your enemies bathing in a pool of blood. This game does look good, and the controls are superb. There is never a time when I felt the the mechanics of the game were the cause of my sucking - just the fact that I sucked (that and that damn camera.)

Such brutality comes in handy when the game decides that four or five enemies at once is just too easy, so they decide to throw twenty of them at you at a time. There is even once instance in the game when they throw a hundred ninjas at you at a time which causes some major slowdown. Slowdown in a fast faced action game? Why that sounds absurd, but it happens - and it happens on several occasions. Not cool.

Boss fights range from the ridiculously easy- was I really just in a boss fight type to the holy crap I am going to throw my controller at the screen and break it and the controller; and then the Three Sixty will likely crap out on me and a lot of money will have just been wasted all because of some stupid video game- hard. There will be many a times where it will be necessary and essential that you look at a FAQ or strategy guide.

Usually when you make a sequel to a game there should be a concerted effort to fix the problems with the previous one. That is not done, outrageous and unbalanced difficulty and broken camera system are back with full force, but strangely the aspect that I thought didn’t need much improvement, the combat, has a wealth of added flourishes and some bitchin’ new weapons to boot that almost make the game totally worth it, but sadly it’s not.

Did I mention that there is an item that you find early on that lets you do “hidden challenges” to earn points and necessary items, but if you pass it by you are shit out of luck? No, because that is also in there. There is also some sort of story and women with large breasts.