The Master System conversion of Sega‘s 1987 arcade game, Shinobi, is arguably the best of its type on the console. The developers have obviously taken care to make the game play well and look as good as possible on Sega‘s 8-bit system.
Thankfully, Shinobi on the Master System is a little easier to play than the original arcade game, which is notorious for its difficulty. Instead of one-hit kills, you now have a health bar that allows you to take a certain amount of damage before losing a life. Touching an enemy will also cause damage, though.
Rescuing hostages is now optional in this version of the game, but if you want to upgrade your long and short-range weapons – and your health bar – then you do still need to rescue those kidnapped kids.
The game still has the boss fights and shuriken-throwing bonus stages of the arcade game, and they’re both still extremely challenging. Shinobi is still a difficult game on the Master System, although it is very playable and well-presented.
Shinobi for the Master System was first released by Sega in 1988.
More: Shinobi on Wikipedia
The King of Grabs 
I don’t know a single person who don’t like this game! I mean, the Shinobi “franchise”. Everybody loves Shinobi!
About the Master System port I never had a chance to immersively play it back then. Few friends in my home town had Master Systems, and was tough to find rental shops for MS games.
Even when, on a later time, when SEGA was big through the TecToy brazilian company (who got license from Japan to sell official material down here) MS was losing the race to the many many many NES clones and a huge NES pirate market.
And when the advent of emulation started, my choice of play was the original Shinobi on MAME. Waaah! Great memories.
And Tengen’s Shinobi on NES? Any thoughts? This one we had in the bigger rental store in my hometown, but this game was really difficult. And some sort of a bad port of the arcade. Don’t know… never had the guts to face it with courage!
LikeLiked by 1 person
NES Shinobi is still on my list of games to add. I haven’t played it yet. I’m gradually planning to add every Shinobi game and make a full list for a Shinobi special. There’s more Shinobi coming this week – and beyond! 🙂
LikeLike