Ninja Gaiden for DOS: rated M for "mistake"

The NES version is one of the greatest titles of all time. The DOS version? Decidedly not.

It starts like a bait-and-switch. You see the name Ninja Gaiden—and your brain lights up with nostalgia: the cinematic cutscenes, the frantic wall-jumping, that savage, surgical difficulty.

But this? This is something else entirely. A freak of nature. A shadow of a shadow. Like someone described the original game to a committee over a bad phone connection, and the committee was made up of interns with insomnia and a shared allergy to fun.

Made by Hi-Tech Expressions—a company whose entire business model seemed to be "take beloved franchises and make them worse for DOS"—this port wasn’t so much developed as it was extruded. They didn’t craft games. They manufactured obligations. And what they slapped together here was less a port than a low-rent hallucination of the arcade version, which itself was already the dumber cousin of the NES masterpiece. So now what we’ve got is a port of a knockoff of a spin-off of a legend. A Xerox of a Xerox with ketchup on it.

You’re Ryu Hayabusa, allegedly.

You shuffle from left to right like you're late for work in a pool full of molasses. Your enemies? Identical mime-goons in red jackets, looking like rejected extras from a community theatre production of West Side Story. The punch button makes a noise. Not a satisfying thud—just the PC speaker trying its best to simulate impact and accidentally triggering your fight-or-flight reflex. You’ve got a life bar, but really it’s more of a countdown to when you give up.

Technically, it has graphics. EGA support, sure, if you’re feeling brave. But everything is drawn in migraine-vision. Sprites blend into the background like camouflage designed by a prankster. Choppy scrolling turns the act of walking into an act of protest. The cutscenes? Redrawn from scratch, probably by someone who only heard about the NES cinematics second-hand and thought, “Eh, I’ll just wing it.”

Audio is a crime scene. The entire soundtrack is piped through the PC speaker, which is like asking a kazoo to perform Beethoven. Every track is a remix in the same way banging two forks together is a remix of jazz. Worse still, the wrong songs often play in the wrong places.

Compatibility is its own boss fight. The game only runs properly on a CPU slower than time itself—an 8086. Try it on anything faster, and it plays at hyperspeed like someone sat on the fast-forward button. Unless you’re lucky enough to own a Tandy 1000—and if you are, bless your vintage heart—you’ll spend more time configuring slowdown utilities than actually playing. Assuming you even get that far.

Even the disks were garbage. Cheap floppies that degraded like bread in the sun. The physical media was actively trying to forget it existed.

Yes, they included environmental interaction. Throw an enemy into a phone booth and it explodes. Because... why not? But the animations are stiffer than taxidermy. You can’t tell if that pixel smear is a dude, a trash can, or your own disappointment rendered in 16 colors.

Critics tried to be diplomatic. Players didn’t. One called it “a slap in the face.” Another said “avoid it like the plague”—which is putting it gently. This isn’t just a bad game. It’s an experiment in how low expectations can go before they punch through the floor. It’s a warning label masquerading as software. Proof that even iconic franchises can be fed through a woodchipper if you give the license to the wrong team.

It belongs in a museum, sure. But only in the kind of museum that’s attached to a condemned strip mall. With a flickering light. And carpet that smells like old ketchup.

This is not Ninja Gaiden.

This is Ninja Gaiden’t.