GameWTFs.com

This week I decided to check out a very early NES game called...

I'd seen a few pictures of it online, but hadn't heard much about how it actually works.

It turns out it has some neat ideas, but enemies often appear from the edge of the screen and kill you before you can react. However, it has an incredibly bizarre ace up its sleeve that would make Raid on Bungling Bay (and its famous creator) green with envy!

Well, to choose your next action-level, your ninja verrrry slowly walks around a map like the one below:

Notice how I said "LIKE the one below;" though Level 1's trees, forest and the two yellow buildings are in the same place each time, the location of the white Skull Temples changes every time you play...even the design (the little skulls/candles/doors/teeth on the white picture on the map) is different. Hmm.

Anyway, you walk around until you collide with a Skull Temple, then you're taken to one of four different kinds of levels, which I'll talk about later. With one exception, they're basically infinitely side-scrolling multi-tiered platform things, and your character looks a little something like this:

In each level, you have to gather/kill/ignite a set number of things. Periodically different weapons/power-ups appear at random, as do dozens of different point-icons.

Shockingly, not only do your extra weapons fire in addition to your basic shot, but you can carry as many extra weapons as you want. You can use the "select" button to switch between them (or choose to just use your basic shot) if you want to conserve ammo (which is an option that run-and-guns seldom gave you as late as 1996, let alone 1986!)

Anyway, once you've completed the level objective, you have your choice of two doors and you may or may not fight a miniboss (perhaps determined randomly by which door you pick?). Once that's over you're return to the map, which is now minus one Skull Castle:

Whenever you hit the "Yellow Birdhouse" building on the map, it checks if you've completed the "Can I fight the boss" conditions by picking up a Scroll in one of the skull castle levels.

...and you're allowed to enter the Yellow Skull Pagoda to fight the level boss:

Once again, Level 2's obstacles and yellow buildings are the same each time, but its skull castles are sprinkled around at random, just like the first level.

Evidently you keep going from level to level until you die...which happens pretty quickly: you get 3 lives and no continues.

Also enemies very frequently leap in from off-screen, firing the second they arrive. Your character is rather slow-moving and has trouble cornering or jumping quickly, so I often didn't have enough time to react to the new threat and suffered a lot of cheap deaths.

Well, I'm going to summarize them quickly (showing their title screen, an in-game picture, and then describing their victory condition). Then I'll go into more detail after (for reasons that will become apparent):

Well, you know how many games have palette swaps of enemies to make "new" enemies?

Ninja Kid goes in the opposite direction: each Level Type has two, three (or more?) different versions, with their own distinct backgrounds and mostly-different enemies!! Usually they behave the same as the enemies in the other levels of that type, but...well, let's just say this game's menagerie makes Monster Party look staid.

And it's not like "level 1 contains three Skull Castles, and they are of type A, B and C, with THIS background every time." No -- EVERY SINGLE SKULL CASTLE IS RANDOM. It's randomly determined at the time you enter the castle, too! I used emulator save-states to re-enter the same castle 6 times, and it wasn't the same thing twice: either the type of level was different, or the background style (thus monster sprites) were different.

I'm not sure why they even NEED a level two in this game -- you could just hit the reset button and re-play Level 1 over and over again (though because you have so few lives and no continues, you'll end up basically doing that anyway).

Well, there's nothing else for it: I'll just post a whole bunch of the variations of level background and monsters, broken out by Level Type.

Honestly, this one seems pretty rare. While I've seen another level type while playing (one where the platforms are all skulls), the only one I have a picture of now is the "purple-and-lumber" one, featuring this thing:

which appears to be a pudgy blue monster with bedraggled hair, whose torso is also his head, and who has a mouth-within-a-mouth type thing like H.R. Giger's xenomorph.

Oh, we haven't even gotten to the best part! The minibosses have the same "lots of different sprites, same basic behavior" design that the levels do!

Each miniboss fight goes a little something like this:

There's some variation (for example, some of their henchmen fly, some bosses have TWO eyes to shoot, some have a lid which protects their eye much of the time), but that's the general process.

You know the drill: henchmen on the left, Minibosses on the right:

I know I'm missing some stuff -- aside from the other Towering Blazing Inferno level, I've undoubtedly missed some variations of other stuff, and there's another a Miniboss whose henchman is Frankenstein's Monster, and who has a big lid which covers his eye most of the time...but I think we have enough information for Pitfall Harry to provide our closing argument: