Rail-sliding wearing only sandals? Now that’s Real Ultimate Power!

If there’s one thing I keep confirming year after year, iteration after iteration, it’s that Splinter Cell is virtually unplayable during daylight hours. It’s a game that thrives on the dark in much the same way Doom or Silent Hill do and playing it in contrary conditions is robbing yourself of the heart of the experience (not to mention causing permanent eye damage squinting trying to make out what that dark blob is in the shadows behind the sun glare). Time to switch gears and get hopping on I-Ninja, a game I started this past summer down the Cape. Garnering all of my knowledge solely from videogames, the true ninja is faced with a profound choice of paths….the “Gaiden” road of the lithe, lethal, and brutally efficent assassin, or the “I” road of smack talk, overcaffeination, and hamsterball rolling.

Make no mistake…this is an action-platformer that refuses to take itself seriously. Using a mission hub design, you travel from area to area accepting missions (reluctantly) from your dead sensei (you killed him) in order to grab the grade at the end of each stage. There’s actually a ton of variety in the missions, as some will require killing, some stealth, some hamsterball rolling, some traditional platforming, some timed, some coin-grabbing…you get the idea. Although you can proceed to another, that same mission will now be unlocked with different objectives in order to acheive another grade. It’s left up to you whether you just want to go through and beat the missions and bosses sequentially or stick around in an area until you’ve pounded it to completion, which is no easy feat.

So far the best part has to be the use of genre conventions. One boss battle has you manning a giant robot so that you can fight it out Ultraman-style with another giant robot (evil, of course). Another has you helming a sub to blast away at a giant robot fish, and the usual platformer pattern analysis applies. Even better is the mini-boss battles that have you both leap up into the air and have at it in “Manga Space”, a mid-air fight with the appropriate streaking blue background. The folks who made this game did their homework, to say the least.

One final note to be made is the excellent voice-work for Ninja done by Billy West (he of Stimpy, Fry, and Red M&M fame). He infuses the caricature with so much energy and personality that you can help but smile as you’re hacking away at a group of enemies in the simplistic but efficient sword combat (again…Ninja Gaiden this ain’t) while he screams, “YOU LIKE THAT? YOU WANT SOME MORE?!? HOW ABOUT A LITTLE MORE!?!?”. This is one punkass ninja, but then again aren’t they all?

More to come.