This might be the last update for a while as burn-out is kicking in again. The problem with reviewing Mega Drive games is that they often take just a couple of hours to play through and then I spent an entire day or two writing and coding the review page which gets exhausting fast ahaha. See you all when inspiration next hits!

I love Shinobi! Shinobi X is the game I used to test my saturn with the OSSC

@cartridgeconfidential I'm intending to play through the entire series for Overclockworked up to Shinobi X and I'm really excited to get to that one. The cutscenes are so fun, I don't even consider them "so bad they're good", they're just fun.

Also yes, playing the entire series up to Shinobi X also includes the weird Master System exclusive titles, Alex Kidd in Shinobi World, the Game Gear Shinobi games, and hell, probably also the Amiga conversions. Ninjas are cool, they're worth it.

Alex Kidd in Shinobi world is so good!

I feel like I know so much about Joe Mushashi now. Also unsolicitied advice: I had a go with some of your gifs and if you're willing to sacrifice a little quality, the easiest reduction was to half the size on ezgif and then optimise (use the default setting but bump it up to 50) and they go from 6mb to 1mb. Then we can enjoy 6x more of your gifs!

@p7uen If I can have the gifs be 50% size but then get scaled up by the html code on the website, that would likely work! I'll have to try it out later

Art is being stifled over here smh

583MB is actually the best amount of MB to have.

Don't stop the signal! I use https://ezgif.com/video-to-gif as a really quick and dirty way to resize and reduce quality and file size.

Host your images somewhere else. I've been sing imgbb. Back in the day anytime I ran out of space on geocities I would just register a new account. Alternatively I think you could get away with using archive.org to host images for free. I use archive.org to host a ton of mp3 files for my purposes.

If you want an offline option for GIF optimisation (might be hard to do since it's footage), I recommend gifsicle. For editing the video before turning it into a GIF (like reducing the frame rate or something else) ffmpeg can do that (also offline). Also as jerryscoolpage mentioned, you can host videos on another platform and link to them (YouTube, PeerTube, somewhere else)

Thanks for suggestions everyone! I'm hesitant to host elsewhere since I don't want to run into issues if the image hosting platform goes down or changes hotlinking policies, but I'lll see what options are available if it comes to that. I actually use ezgif already @p7uen!

Thank you! I really appreciate that!

I don't know how this happened but I always thought I knew what Cave Story was, it turns out I was thinking of a game called Knytt this whole time. Great review!

Knytt is very much of that same era of freeware indies, so makes sense! It's something I need to play through myself some time.

Casually changing contact damage for an entire game seems like a crazy decision to make.

@p7uen Yeah, that summarises why Master System Shinobi feels so odd to me. Level design and enemy design clearly tailored for mechanics that this version of the game doesn't have feels... odd.

woah, I haven't explored much of the Master System, this game looks great

I would hazard a guess that the rice paddies were removed because they were too unfamiliar for western audiences, especially in those days.