3 Ninjas Kick Back

"Colt, Rocky, and Tum Tum are back for bigger kicks in an all new adventure."

And by that of course, they mean their only video game adventure (thank god)

Release:  June 1, 1994
Genre:  Side-scrolling platformer/ beat em' up
What the Internet says its worth (avg.): $15.00
The most you should pay for it: $3.00
Should you play it: Probably not
Best part:  Squealing butt-rock guitar at the beginning of each stage
Worst part:  Unnecessarily difficult bosses

Overall:  D-

It's not that 3 Ninjas Kick Back is a bad game, its just that...ummm, well... hmmmm...  Let me start over.  

This game is a total piece of shit.  I'm only one game into my attempt to play all the SNES games, and I'm already regretting it.  

This game is obviously a licensed game based on the movie, and by "based on" they mean it has no connection beyond the purported 3 Ninjas and loose plot elements involving some dagger.  I saw this movie when I was like 9 years old, and thought it was amazing.  I don't remember anything about it beyond that the previously mentioned 3 Ninjas beat up dudes 5 times their size, Tum-Tum finds his ding-dongs, and one of the other dudes uses his sweet ninja skills to do Catwoman back flips to win at the game of baseball (everyone knows doing flips is way faster than running).  The game starts out with some promise from the moment you select your character. 

everyone knows Tum-Tum is the best!!!  

After you pick your character you get an awesome 16 bit recording of my boy Tum-Tum saying "Let's murderlize them!!".  Not only is he a master of comedy when it comes to referencing hostess snacks, but he also has an excellent grasp on the English language.  After Tum-Tum's hilarious use of vocabulary, we get an informative intertitle cutscene featuring a fake Mr. Miyagi.

Once Mr. Miyagi finishes his life story, we finally get to start the game.  At the beginning of each level, we are treated to a totally righteous 4 second buttrock guitar riff that sounds like Zakk Wylde busting out sweet pinch harmonics while raping a cougar.

And that's about most fun you will have in the entire game, I'm not joking.  The first level begins with your character in a jungle, running toward and away from giant boulders.  They may as well have called this game Ninjas of the Lost Ark, because you will spend a disproportionate amount of time trying to escape boulders in the jungle and various creepy underground cave settings.

"RUN TUM-TUM!!  RUN!!"

  The levels have absolutely no pacing, with some being way too long, and others ending in less than a minute, such as the second level where you fall down a hill for approximately 25 seconds straight into the end of the level.  The enemies are pretty run-of-the-mill, ranging from black ninjas, to orange ninjas, to yellow ninjas.  Throw in a couple samurais, invulnerable stoners, and the occasional dragon and you get the picture.  The controls are pretty so-so.  Movement is solid, and the jumping seems to work; however, there were plenty of times when my video game intuition said "dude, there's no way you can jump that, it's way too far", and eventually after trying all other avenues figured out that I could indeed make the jumps.  However everything beyond basic movement ranges from frustrating to infuriating, with jump being the same button used to grab onto ledges and ropes.  Remember how easy it was to jump from rope to rope in the Donkey Kong Country series? Well fucking forget that, because now you have to actively grab the rope after each jump and if you don't time it just right you're going into the spikes/water/ninjas below you.  Character movement is relatively smooth, but any time there's a jumping puzzle the whole experience falls apart.  If you can manage to make it through the first four godawful levels, and avoid being crushed by countless boulders, you will find yourself at "grandpa's" cabin.  This is when the game really takes off by introducing "the grungers".  I don't know what the hell a grunger is, I assume its someone who grunges, or is so into grunge rock that they practice it as a verb.  However, these enemies look less like they're into plaid, heroin, and sadness and more like they're into hair-metal, t-top cars, and AC-DC.  In either case, they're total pricks, and you have to smack them in the balls with your ninja weapon like 10 times before they fall down, stunned.  You can't kill them.  Did I mention that ninjas explode into a ball of fire from one hit?  Apparently ninjas are the larval stage of grungers, and they haven't reached their adult stage yet. While beating on the nigh invulnerable grungers, you are tasked with finding stuff for grandpa.  He only asks for his dagger, but in order to progress you have to get backpacks, which he conveniently stores in vulture/ninja infested trees above his roof and in his attic.  The game pretty much goes on like this for the next few levels with a boss fight here and a boss fight there.   The next stage takes place in a hospital in Japan, full of sexy nurses.  But wait, they're not sexy nurses, they're grungers!  Instead of just walking into the hospital and using their ultimate grunger powers to kill grandpa, they dress like the nurses from the criminally underrated porno "Genital Hospital 7:  Creampie Colonic", and throw food carts at you, while you free hostages.  Once all of the hostages are free, you get to fight some big ugly nurse named Shibuya, who happens to actually be a woman. 

and what a woman!

After that you end up in a Japanese garden, which is basically the jungle with more platforms and asshole dragons, that eventually leads to a dojo with a naked sumo wrestler at the top.

This guy is a total douche nozzle. 

 Not only does he hundred hand slap you like E.Honda, he takes at least fifty hits to kill (the max health your character can have is 5 bars).  After killing him, you end up in another cave level that is way too long, and full of boulders. Eventually, you will make your way to the final boss.  This guy also has to be hit by like 50 times, and once defeated you come to the final level, where you, RUN FROM ANOTHER GODDAMNED BOULDER.  Luckily, this game's pacing issues come to your rescue and this only lasts for like 30 seconds. 

 Thanks Mr. Miyagi, but when do I graduate to grunger?

And with that, this nightmare comes to an end.  The only reasons I didn't give this game an F were that it had some interesting backgrounds in a few levels, and the few fleeting moments of happiness it gave me while I laughed at it.

Skip this one.

...and so it begins

I have a problem, no wait, an addiction.  I love video games, specifically classic video games, and even more specifically classic Nintendo games.  While everyone else is cumming all over the place about the PS4 and the Xbox One (which is a confusing name for the third iteration of the Xbox), I'm busy perusing local garage sales and Craigslist in search of grey, rectangular pieces of plastic.  That, and bitching about Nintendo's sloth-like pace in releasing games for the Wii U Virtual Console (seriously, those guys are moving slower than a Koala all strung out on Eucalyptus).

                                                              Nature's junkies

But that's a different story entirely (you really don't want to get me started).

  My obsession with old Nintendo games has taken me for quite a ride and has greatly influenced the person I am today, to the point where it has alienated me from the casual, contemporary gamer and turned me into this jaded, bitter, angry old man living in a tower of pretension, heaping scorn on the younger generation for their ignorance in the world of gaming, and for their love of games like Modern Warfare:  Tokyo Drift, or whatever the hell the "kids" are playing these days.

Hey dumbasses!  Activision keeps selling you the same game!  Seriously, how many times can you reach prestige ten before you realize no one in the real world gives a shit?  Did Activision start including "forget-me-nows" as a bonus for pre-ordering?

Reflecting on my aforementioned pretentiousness and elitism in regards to the world of gaming, I've come to realize I don't really have a leg to stand on.  For how much I aggressively parade around like a drunken peacock on bathsalts, vomiting my opinions at whoever is unfortunate enough to be within earshot, I really don't have the experience or credentials to qualify me to do so.  I didn't own a NES or SNES when they were "current generation" consoles.  My experience with these games was either at friends or family members' houses.  I actually didn't own a video game console until the Nintendo 64 was well into its third year of existence.  Granted, I (re)discovered the true classic games later in life, but when I look at the catalogue of games that were released for the NES and SNES, it becomes all too clear that I've only played a small fraction of the games available, and beaten an even more miniscule amount of them.   I am essentially the video game equivalent of a white suburban hipster who tries to convince modern hip-hop fans that The Chronic really was the pinnacle of hip-hop, even though he wasn't actually "there" when Dr. Dre and Snoop were "creepin' while ya sleepin".
 Instead of doing what a normal, decent human being would do upon realizing their worldview was narrow and that their opinions had no definitive supporting evidence, I have decided to seek out the education that will qualify me to shit all over the modern world of gaming/gamers and prove to myself, and any other poor soul that I come into contact with, that I do indeed, know what the hell I'm talking about.

So I decided I was going to play every NES game, in alphabetical order, and write a little something about it to prove that I had done it.  Aaaaand, someone already beat me to that, and is doing an excellent job: (http://www.questicle.net/ )  Slightly heartbroken (since NES is my favorite console), I resigned myself to doing the same thing, but for the SNES.  And once again (curse you internet!), multiple people started doing the same thing years ago. (http://everygame.wordpress.com/) & (http://everysnes.blogspot.com/  )  But, after thoroughly reading their reviews through teary eyes of disappointment, I realized that they had FAILED.  They had given up, they didn't make it to the end, and the torch has now passed to me.  Something else I realized upon reading their posts, is that their reviews were based upon a cursory playing and rudimentary understanding.  It became very clear to me that they played these games until the mental anguish became too much to bear, and moved onto the next game on the list.  And to that, I cry foul!  You wouldn't trust a review of a movie from someone who only watched the first twenty minutes would you?   I certainly wouldn't, and that's when I came up with the worst/best/worst (non-sexual) idea of my lifetime:  I am going to not only play every SNES game, I'm going to beat them, and give them a proper review.

So before I officially start, I think it's important to understand the magnitude of this endeavor.  There were 784 official SNES games released in the United States and Europe (not doing the japanese exclusives for so many reasons, but most importanly I don't speak Japanese!).  When I apply a little bit of the mathematics I've learned over the years (thanks Donkey Kong Jr!), things start looking pretty overwhelming.  Based upon my previous years of gaming, beating a game in a week seems like a pretty reasonable estimate.  So at a game a week, and 52 weeks in a year, its pretty obvious at that rate I would beat 52 games a year.  With some quick math (784/52 = 15.08) we can see that this would take me 15.08 years!!  And that's not including the time it would take to write reviews.  I don't think even Marco Polo signed up for a 15 year journey.  So it has become very clear to me that I'm going to need to step up my game (haha, puns are funny).  I originally thought a more feasible time frame would be 5 years, which puts my goal at beating and reviewing approximately 3 games a week (give or take a couple of "off" weeks for things like Ramadan, Yom Kippur, and Festivus).  But even that seems unrealistic considering the sheer volume of RPG's released for the SNES that easily clock in at 30 hours.  Therefore, I have decided not to put an official clock on this endeavor, and instead just make it a lifelong goal.  Unofficially, I would like to beat every game by December 31st, 2019 at 11:59 pm.  6.5 years sounds reasonable to the point where I will have to work hard to get through all of these games, but I will be able to take time to enjoy the games and live my life as a functioning human being.

As for beating the games, I'm going to do so in the most simplistic of ways.  I didn't say I was going to complete them, basically I'm going to beat the final boss and play any necessary bonus stages, and then I will move on.  I don't have the time or interest to get 100% completion on any of these games, as my true intent with all of this is to get a good understanding of the games, and write/cry/bitch/gush about them.  Also, I may gloss over redundant compilations like "Super Mario All-Stars", and "Super Mario All-Stars + Super Mario World".

And now, you may be saying to yourself "Dude, that sounds like a terrible idea..."  and I will agree with you completely.  But you know what, I have a disease, and diseases are pretty goddamn terrible.  And this disease is terminal, that's right I have:

SNESticular Cancer!