Uploaded August 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
A playthrough of Konami's 1993 license-based action game for the NES, Zen: Intergalactic Ninja.
Played on the normal difficulty.
Zen: Intergalactic Ninja is based on an indie comic that I'd never heard of when the game first released, and I doubt I would've ever known about had it not been for Konami's NES and Game Boy games.
Zen, a cyanotic alien/martial artist/telepathic bounty hunter/superhero, has been hired to protect Earth from Lord Contaminous, an eco-terrorist bent on destroying the environment. The way the game portrays him, he's Captain Planet after being injected with a healthy dose of 90s edginess to make him appeal to a slightly older crowd.
I don't know what led Konami to take on such a strange and obscure IP, but they didn't hold back in giving it the royal treatment. Zen: Intergalactic Ninja is one of the best looking, smoothest playing action games on the NES. It's like someone saw what Rare had done with youtu.be/HjatUdFaAf8 and went, "Hold my beer."
The stages are packed with variety. Some feature beat 'em up action with objective driven gameplay - in one area you're saving people from a burning factory, while another sees you juggling a boss fight in the clouds with reviving flowers that are being pelted with acid rain in the jungle below. The factory bombing raid is a faux-3D platforming gauntlet played from angled overhead perspective, while the minecart stage repurposes that view to ramp up the energy as boulders, flame jets, and robots fly toward you at breakneck speeds. It's a short game, but it's packed wall-to-wall with ideas that keep it feeling fresh til the end. It's the very definition of all killer, no filler.
The action flows well thanks to the number of moves you have at your disposal. You can whack an enemy with your stick for heavy damage, jab at them to knock them back, swing them around for crowd control, smash them into the floor, or fling them into walls, and the controls are snappy, responsive, and surprisingly intuitive for how many things you can do with the B button.
And the presentation is next-level stuff. Backgrounds scream by at speeds that would make Sonic jealous, and the level of detail in the graphics and animations make this look more like a 16-bit game than an 8-bit one. Check out how Zen grows like he's moving toward a camera when he jumps in the diagonal stages, or how the parallaxed background layers fade in and out when the perspective shifts during the minecart ride!
It might not be as well known as some of Konami's other late-gen NES showpieces, but Zen: Intergalactic Ninja is one slick piece of work. I give it two very enthusiastic thumbs up!
_____________
No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
NintendoComplete (nintendocomplete.com/) punches you in the face with in-depth reviews, screenshot archives, and music from classic 8-bit NES games!
A playthrough of Konami's 1993 license-based action game for the NES, Zen: Intergalactic Ninja.
Played on the normal difficulty.
Zen: Intergalactic Ninja is based on an indie comic that I'd never heard of when the game first released, and I doubt I would've ever known about had it not been for Konami's NES and Game Boy games.
Zen, a cyanotic alien/martial artist/telepathic bounty hunter/superhero, has been hired to protect Earth from Lord Contaminous, an eco-terrorist bent on destroying the environment. The way the game portrays him, he's Captain Planet after being injected with a healthy dose of 90s edginess to make him appeal to a slightly older crowd.
I don't know what led Konami to take on such a strange and obscure IP, but they didn't hold back in giving it the royal treatment. Zen: Intergalactic Ninja is one of the best looking, smoothest playing action games on the NES. It's like someone saw what Rare had done with youtu.be/HjatUdFaAf8 and went, "Hold my beer."
The stages are packed with variety. Some feature beat 'em up action with objective driven gameplay - in one area you're saving people from a burning factory, while another sees you juggling a boss fight in the clouds with reviving flowers that are being pelted with acid rain in the jungle below. The factory bombing raid is a faux-3D platforming gauntlet played from angled overhead perspective, while the minecart stage repurposes that view to ramp up the energy as boulders, flame jets, and robots fly toward you at breakneck speeds. It's a short game, but it's packed wall-to-wall with ideas that keep it feeling fresh til the end. It's the very definition of all killer, no filler.
The action flows well thanks to the number of moves you have at your disposal. You can whack an enemy with your stick for heavy damage, jab at them to knock them back, swing them around for crowd control, smash them into the floor, or fling them into walls, and the controls are snappy, responsive, and surprisingly intuitive for how many things you can do with the B button.
And the presentation is next-level stuff. Backgrounds scream by at speeds that would make Sonic jealous, and the level of detail in the graphics and animations make this look more like a 16-bit game than an 8-bit one. Check out how Zen grows like he's moving toward a camera when he jumps in the diagonal stages, or how the parallaxed background layers fade in and out when the perspective shifts during the minecart ride!
It might not be as well known as some of Konami's other late-gen NES showpieces, but Zen: Intergalactic Ninja is one slick piece of work. I give it two very enthusiastic thumbs up!
_____________
No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
NintendoComplete (nintendocomplete.com/) punches you in the face with in-depth reviews, screenshot archives, and music from classic 8-bit NES games!
![R-Type Complete CD (PC Engine CD) Playthrough [English]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/sRltIEP5PEY/mqdefault.jpg "R-Type Complete CD (PC Engine CD) Playthrough [English]
A playthrough of Irems 1991 shoot em up for the PC Engine Super CD-ROM², R-Type Complete CD.
Since this version of R-Type was only released in Japan, for this video, Ive translated the cutscenes and subtitled them in English.
R-Type, Irems 1987 arcade shoot em up phenom, was adapted for countless home platforms in the late 80s. Hudsons version, released in 1988 for the PC Engine, was the first and (by most accounts) the best of them. The graphics, though slightly downgraded, came amazingly close to matching the quality of the arcades, the music sounded much better without the grating twang of the original games FM synth, and the gameplay retained everything that made the arcade game such a success.
All of this came at cost, though: in 1988, the max capacity of a HuCard was smaller than the four megabits (512K) the game required, and without major cutbacks, R-Type simply could not fit on a smaller cartridge. Rather than reducing the quality of the graphics, Hudson opted to split the game across two releases. R-Type I contained the first four stages, and R-Type II (released three months later) had stages five through eight. The following year, improvements made to the HuCard format made larger games possible, and the 1989 North American release combined the two on a single card. The game wasnt reissued on a single card in Japan, but a CD version was instead released in late 1991.
R-Type Complete CD updates the game with a remixed Redbook soundtrack and fifteen minutes of animated, fully-voiced cutscenes. It wasnt as well-received as the original PC Engine released - the quality of the arrangements and the cutscenes was heavily criticized - but its a nifty package. The story does indeed feel tacked on and the art isnt great (those facial expressions!), but the cutscenes are entertaining in how unintentionally campy and over the top they are. I didnt have any problems with the music, either. The style is a bit inconsistent, not to mention strange (R-R-R-R, R-Type... wtf?🤣), but I dug its funkiness.
The game is the same as it was on HuCard, so its still a top-quality arcade port, and I appreciated the new cutscenes and the music. Late 80s arcade shooters packed with gotcha moments dont typically appeal to me, so Im not a big fan of the original R-Type, but R-Type Complete CDs extras drew me in.
Hope you enjoy the translation!
No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
NintendoComplete (http://www.nintendocomplete.com/) punches you in the face with in-depth reviews, screenshot archives, and music from classic 8-bit NES games!")
