I’ve never been very interested in collecting pirated games for any of my retro consoles. I have always preferred original games, however lately I’ve accidentally come by a few pirated Famciom games. Like the Super Mario IV Armadillo hack, which is basically just the Armadillo game changed to have Mario as the main character, and Caveman Games, which is a NES release ported on a cart for the Famicom.
I know there’s a lot of people that prefer pursuing those rare pirated games, and lately I’ve begun to understand why that is. It’s quite charming, it’s a game just like all the other games I’m collecting, and somebody made it, made an effort to re-code an existing game to their liking, and it’s always intriguing since you never know what to expect form a pirate game. The pirated games are more rare as well, and usually unique, since they weren’t mass produced like many other original releases.
The Last Ninja was a game I saw on Ebay and it intrigued me since I wasn’t completely sure which game it was and also, my best friend NinjaBrite loves Ninjas! So I bought it hoping that she would enjoy trying it ^_^
So I cleaned the game up a bit and tried it briefly to make sure it worked and it worked perfectly on the first try ^_^ I looked it up as well and found out that The Last Ninja was actually released for the NES by Jaleco however the game was also firstly released on the Commodore 64 but it was called The Last Ninja 2.
I compared some screenshots from this version and the version on C64. It is lacking a lot of the details from the C64 version. Here’s the comparison of sceneries: (click to enlarge)
If only the C64 didn’t have such darn long loading sequences then I would probably be playing that more often than the 8bit systems! >_<
Retro Video Gaming 