I’m sure I’ve said this before, but Youtube is largely a wasteland when it comes to game opinion, criticism and history media. Generally, if it has to do with games, you have to sift through a whole lot of crap to get to the good stuff.
The gold standards in this wretched field are Dr Sparkle’s Chrontendo and spinoff serieses, which seek to review every NES and Famicom game in a decade-plus quest, and Jeremy Parish’s NES Works and its own spinoffs. Our post’s topic today has to do with one of those spinoffs, SMS Works, which has at last come to one of the Sega Master System’s defining titles: Shinobi.
One of the best things about Jeremy’s videos is the context they bring. They try hard to mention other games that came out around the same time, and how ideas would be bandied about between the different developers, repeated and refined. His videos are the only source I know of that would realize, that could realize, that Shinobi was heavily influenced by Namco’s spies-vs-tokusatsu-creeps arcade game Rolling Thunder.
So then, at 15 minutes long, here is that video.
SMS Works: Shinobi (Youtube, 15 minutes)
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