Look, I'm not expecting Shinobi III: just look at the parallax scrolling; the per-scanline water effect; the sampled gun clank sound; the way the water splashes are drawn; the sheer and absolute bad-assery of it all; and listen to the music! Written in 68k assembler, running on a platform with 64k of RAM, and stored on a 1 megabyte cartridge rom.

The whole experience is peak human art form creation: poetry for the eyes, and ears, and the hands. Made by geniuses. Timeless.

I don't think humans are capable of creating art like that anymore. I see no evidence to suggest that they can: quite the contrary, in fact. But even if I set the bar at half of that level-- no wait, a quarter-- or even one tenth-- the new Shinobi game is preposterously bad. I couldn't even stomach my way through the entire demo.

At least Streets of Rage 4 played fine, in spite of this writer's loathing of the game overall. The new Shinobi demo throws more mechanics at the player in the first five minutes than a training center for car repairmen! There's rolling, and combos, and dodging, and "executions", and equipment, and "skills", and air dashes, and it uses every freaking button on the controller.

Shinobi III uses two buttons buttons: jump and attack. Maybe one will hit "A" once to use ninjitsu on the final boss. But two buttons to create a masterpiece. Less is more.

It would be beating a dead horse to dwell on the Flash artwork, but I'll risk the wrath of PETA in this instance: the art is hideous. Yahoo Games, like grandma used to play. But an even worse offender are the menus and the intro sequence, which look like they were drawn and tossed into Adobe Illustrator in less time than it takes to order a cappuccino.

To say this new game feels like a cheap cargo-cultist, transparently pale imitation of the shadow of the three Mega Drive games is like saying this writer has two legs and barely any hair left on his head.