In Ninja Gaiden 2, You play as Ryu Hyabasa. There's not much story: you must rescue the captured woman from the evil king of darkness. Classic rescue scenario. The game starts on the rooftops of a town and then moves to the typical moving train level which, with part 1 and 2 combined, it's quite big.
There are quite a few enemies: guys in hockey masks wielding machetes; will 'o' the wisps; enemy ninjas; many monsters and thugs; and a first level boss who looks a cross between a body builder and a lion!
The gameplay is fun, with lots of different special attacks to pick-up (Fireballs, Shuriken,etc.), and the first level is more like a tutorial to help you learn the controls. The bosses are quite good; one of the best parts of the game, in fact. With multiple parts to each level it's a great game, but it has some drawbacks. Like the fact that if you press the up arrow while jumping left or right you'll stop moving and sometimes you won't grab onto the wall you're jumping at, both of which can be very annoying.
Other than bugs, the first part of the third level is very annoying, being almost completely blacked out, exept for the ocasional flash of lightning, and there are a lot of unfair deaths, like having an enemy hit you while trying to jump over a pit.
But even with these drawbacks it's still a great game.
Levels: Big, very big, and most are well made.
Controls: You can pick them at start-up.
Music: Sort of tinny, but still quite good.
Sound effects: Not many, but they do their part.
Gameplay: Ahhh, this is good, very fun.
Overall: This game gets a 4 out of 5 in my books.
The following issues have been encountered. Note that there were trouble with some games under DosBox v0.61 that vanished after switching to v0.63, and so they are not listed here.
Some of the colors are displayed wrong during the intro sequence (this error seems to have something else then just DosBox at its root, for the same thing occurs when ran under XP - I don't remember encountering it on a DOS-running 486 machine, though). Sometimes the game slows down heavily for no apparent reason (music does slow down as well these times) and quickly resumes normal speed afterwards. Graphic glitches occur every once in awhile; fortunately, none of them are distracting. Sometimes the game does not generate powerup holders when entering some levels, but this issue is a bug in the sourcecode, for it has already been encountered by me when running NGII on a normal 486 machine.
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