Ninja Five-O Steam Charts & Stats

Finally a hidden gem is given the attention it deserves. It's not revolutionary in the slightest, and there are quite a few shortcomings (it would be nice if there were more musical variation, for example), but this is a very solid and underappreciated action platformer in the Shinobi/Shadow Dancer mould. The grappling hook mechanic is very finely tuned and requires mastery if you're going to get anywhere in the Hard or Time Trial modes. The price is a bit steep, but it's a bargain compared to trying to source an original copy on the second-hand market. Well worth it for retro action fans.

Finally, my favorite GBA game comes to steam, and i dont have to pay thousands for a copy

Man, it pains me to put a negative review for this game. So the developers remastered this game's banger soundtrack for this port, which I would like to believe was to compensate for the GBA's audio hardware limitations. The problem is that they did a really. really bad job at it, and they broke the game along the way. First, the treble is now so loud that it completely drowns out the rest of the music, and the softer instrumentation for the main melody aggravates the problem. All you can hear is a rapid and irritating "CHIKA-CHIKA-CHIKA-CHIKA-CHIKA-CHIKA-CHIKA-CHIKA" almost all the time while playing. It doesn't matter if you set High Quality Sound to On or Off, you're stuck with it, with Off being the least worst offender. What baffles me is that you can literally listen to both the original and remastered soundtrack in the game's menu. Why isn't there an option to actually use said original music in-game as well? But somehow that's not even the worst part with this remastered soundtrack. The worst part is that sometimes it just... stops. No reason. It just stops. All you have left of the audio are the sound effects. I'm pretty sure that's not an issue in the original game. You can find reports and video evidence about this specific problem in this thread: https://steamcommunity.com/app/2728200/discussions/0/594016333228706906/ By the way, this port is a whopping 1.3 GB! What's taking the bulk of that precious space? That's right - the music! More than 945 MB of it in fact! Meanwhile, the entire original game fits in just 4 MB. Yeah that new remix on the title screen is pretty cool, but did it really needed to be stored in an uncompressed WAV file of all things? Yes storage space nowadays is relatively cheap, but it's not infinite either! What about extracting the bundled ROMs from this port and playing them in a separate emulator as a workaround for all of this mess? Well it's possible and it does solve the music problems, but the file in which the ROMs are stored is password-protected. I ended up dumping them from RAM while the game was running to retrieve them, so good luck if you're not a hacker. (It's worth noting that the ROMs don't match the original GBA releases, although the only apparent difference is that a few Nintendo references have been scrubbed. Similar edits were done for the included manual as well.) Because of this, I can't really recommend this port in good conscience until these issues are fixed except for the most diehard of gamers.