About a week ago, I was on the phone talking with Reggie . No, I didn’t ask him if he knew Hutch had switched over to Vodafone!

He did throw a question that ostensibly came out of nowheres-ville: “Dude, have you every played Ninja Commando?” A quick and resonant “Yes” followed, and for moderately good reasons. That sucker along with many other arcade games from the late 80s till the early 90s, were carved into my mind like stone. For every passing day, I dropped a few quarters into these soul-sucking apparatuses with their half-working joysticks. Just a few quarters, and then maybe a few more. And if I ever ran out, hey no biggie, I’d come back tomorrow with a new stack. And then the next day. And then the next day. And then the next day. I didn’t have a lot of friends back then, what can I say.

Ninja Commando was released way back in 1992 (although I mostly likely played it roughly a year afterward) and later ported to SNK’s Neo-Geo/Neo-Geo CD console. Developed by the now defunct Alpha Denshi Corp (or ADK), they were also responsible for other relatively well-known games – World Heroes, a 2D Fighter, and Twinkle Star Sprites, shoot’ em up with puzzle elements and no less than three under-aged girls hiding underneath a grand sailor motif. But this isn’t the time to blabber about that, this is about ninjas going commando!

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