Retro Weekends Episode 65: Blue Shadow/Shadow of the Ninja

"This game does everything an action game is meant to do and it does it well. The combat system is excellent, its quite dynamic but it still encourages you to be careful as if you don't take any hits you'll keep your power-ups and fly through the levels. There's even some strategy in holding back on your secondary weapons until they're needed. Musically its nice and its also fine graphically for its time as well, there's a lot of enemy types and variations which keep things interesting. The game is also 2-player and any game that has 2-player and implements it this well is always a big plus in my book. A very enjoyable game "

"This is a great example of this sort of action game from this era, the NES has piles of really polished examples of these types of games but Blue Shadow still manages to hold its own. This is a game that is fast and responsive and its got a reasonable power up system too (the way you lose power-ups as you take damage makes it rewarding to master as you gain more power). Whilst perhaps not anything we haven't seen before the level design is also quite reasonable, including lots of different layouts with conveyer belts and cogs and such. Graphically the NES was starting to show its age by this stage but its still not bad, and, in fact the background animation in the game is still fantastic for the time. The 2-player mode raises it above the average and it works well as a 2-player game, incorporating a lot of elements that benefit from coordination. An all round polished game."