Ninja Gaiden II: The Dark Sword of Chaos - DOS (1991)
3So Ryu is red now. Whelp.
What bothers me most about this isn't that it's another crappy GemeTek DOS port of something far better elsewhere. It bothers me for two very specific reasons. You can probably identify several just from watching this. The hit boxes suuuuuuck, ninja magic randomly fires off on a regular attack, the music is fine but either glitches or is missing from stage 2, and there were other very obvious issues that I can't even remember now because it's drowned out under everything else, but the only two that really bother me are...
First, most NES games share the same DNA as an MSX. That means that the 1983 MSX micro could have had a non-scrolling version of this game easily. Almost a decade later, and a much beefier MS-DOS PC can't handle it? This happened way too often.
Second, it's that the game looks the part just fine. In a still frame, you'd be like "dude, that looks good! I'm getting it!" Then you actually type ninja.exe and it's all downhill from there. The game teases you that it's competent. Even the music is good. But then it's absolute garbage. Everything about it says it's a real, actual game. Whenever you think you might start to have fun, whenever the game shows what it's capable of, every time you try to start getting a groove....the game just goes "lol nope" and shows you how little it thinks of itself. It bothers me that this game put all this effort in to disguise itself as a proper game but still played like the obvious jank (i.e. Mega Man) that you could spot a mile away.