Ninja Gaiden

Ninja Gaiden was released for the Atari Lynx in 1991, and despite the identical name, it is not the famous platformer series for the NES, but a port of Tecmo's arcade brawler in which the player fights through crowds of enemies alongside a woman named Kaeda. In terms of gameplay, it's a classic side-scrolling beat-'em-up — the character attacks with punches, kicks, and weapons picked up from defeated foes, dodges attacks, and progresses screen by screen toward the next of several bosses encountered along the way.

On the Lynx, the game benefits from the handheld's colorful, high-contrast display, which keeps the characters and backgrounds readable even in faster fights, and from button controls that offer plenty of room for attack combinations and quick switching between opponents. Compared to the arcade original, the pace is somewhat slowed down and the levels a bit shorter, so the conversion matches the shorter play sessions typical of a handheld console and doesn't drain the batteries too quickly during longer play. Development was handled by Bethesda Softworks, which was preparing a whole series of similar conversions of arcade titles for the Lynx at the time, including other action and sports games.

The result is a decently playable action brawler that has practically nothing in common with the NES Ninja Gaiden series beyond the name, but as a fast handheld beat-'em-up it still holds up today and ranks among the more solid action titles in the Lynx library, even though few players outside collector circles know it now. This confusing naming still trips up even experienced collectors today, who mistakenly look for it on shelves next to Tecmo's platformer entries. The Lynx generally did well with conversions of arcade and coin-op games, since its hardware could offer a color palette and performance comparable to the arcade machines of the time, and Ninja Gaiden is one example of how well such a port could work even for a title that wasn't one of the biggest names on the market. For Lynx owners, it was a welcome alternative to the platformers and puzzle games that otherwise dominated the console at the time.

Why play it: It offers a brisk arcade brawler that shows the Lynx could handle a solid beat-'em-up too.