The Games of my Life

No, I haven’t forgotten the C64 - although I only had one quite late in its life, there were some unforgettable masterpieces for that little 1 MHz (!) beast. This, System 3’s The Last Ninja 2 is certainly one of them.

Oddly enough, I played the Spectrum version first, and one tends to get attached to the version he plays first. But the C64 version blew me away. One screen of this game has more atmosphere than many entire games. The music is hauntingly beautiful (all 13 tunes). There’s a sense of almost tangible despair, of being in a world where everyone tries to kill you, yet, everything is familiar - a park, city streets, sewers, an office building, and so on. And the environment is at least as dangerous an enemy as your human enemies. The whole game is hard and unforgiving - no “tutorials where you can’t do wrong”, or any kind of hand-holding here. But the feeling of finally passing a level (after hours or even days), and getting a beautifully drawn loading screen for the next one, complete with a new tune, and the suspense of not knowing what’s next…

Oh, and there’s an alligator in the sewers. I knew it all along.

If you’re not a graphics junkie (or even if you are, but can see games in the context of when they were released), get an emulator and the game, and try it for yourself. You’ll truly appreciate how sad it is that these days there are only first person shooters, sports games and MMORPGs.

Hint: even if you, at the time, finished the Spectrum version (or even another one, such as the Amiga or the PC ports), try the original C64 version. It’s the only one that really “got” it.