Shadow Warriors (Ninja Gaiden)

STORY / GAMEPLAY
Ninja Gaiden is a side-scrolling beat'em up where you play the role of a ninja hero that travels to the US, to find his father. As you roam the streets of the cities you have to fight with plenty of baddies that await to get a piece of you, but luckily you are a well trained ninjitsu fighter and you can eliminate them using your deadly standard punches and kicks. It's strange that the game's intro shows a ninja carrying a katana sword and almost never uses it inside the game! Apart from fighting and beating up the foes, you can also jump onto several platforms to avoid contact or to grab extra power ups that will help you with your quest.
Although there are plenty of better beat 'em up games around, the game remains fun to play plus that it is quite popular.

GRAPHICS / SOUND
The ST port is doing pretty well on resembling the original (arcade) graphics, although offfering up to 16 colors on screen. The stages are nicely detailed, altough smaller in size, and the sprites are quite large while enemy sprite variation follows to the most possible way the original. In terms of gameplay, there some slowdowns when the screen is occupied by several sprites though. In general, stage details try to keep as much as possible to the original here, but limited to the default ST's color palette.
The sound is also fine, offering the original intro and in-game tunes along with a few (rather simplistic) sound effects.