Developer - Sega   Catalogue No. - G-4019

Type - Platform Action

One of the all time classic Mega Drive games and also the 2nd Mega Drive game I ever played (The first being Altered Beast).  The Super Shinobi or The Revenge of Shinobi is the semi follow up to the original arcade hit, Shinobi.  This Mega Drive game takes you from Japanese temples to ocean based hide outs.  This game has it all.  Action is intense with good level design.  In fact it's still as fresh today as it ever was!  Our hero Joe has to rescue his woman back from the evil NeoZeed (as always) so off he goes armed to the teeth with shurikens and his trust katana.  Not only that but Joe also has the ability to call upon the ninja forces to enable him to performs some pretty neat trick such as blowing himself up yet living to tell the tale or summoning a fire dragon.

Graphically The Super Shinobi is very nice.  The detail that has gone in to the characters, backgrounds and even animation is far better than some of the stuff released near the end of the Mega Drive's life.  Music is also fantastic thanks to the works of Yuzo Koshiro, who you may know did the music to the Bare Knuckle games.

There are a few versions of Super Shinobi as well.  The original version featured a Godzilla with spines down it's back, Batman, Spiderman, Rambo and a Terminator look alike.  Apparently this version was never actually released.  The very first released version featured all of the above apart from Godzilla's spines being removed.  The 2nd revision of the game had Godzilla changed to a dinosaur skeleton plus Batman changed to a bat like creature.  The 3rd version had a copyright screen for Yuzop Koshiro's music and Spiderman at the beginning of the game.  Rambo had also been changed to look less like Rambo and as for the Terminator look alike, well, I can't remember if that changed or not.  So as you can see, the best version to own is the very first Japanese released version.  The problem is that all the Japanese versions (all different renditions that is) all have the same catalogue number !  The only way to tell is by looking at the pictures in the instruction book.