Every once in a while someone comes up with a combination of two totally distinct items that is so blindingly brilliant that you wonder why no one came up with it before–peanut butter and jelly, Eminem and Elton John, kittens and anything. It happens in video games too–who can forget the first time seeing Mario ride a dinosaur, or being able to steal a taxi at gunpoint and use it for the good of the public in the same game? But out of all of the great juxtapositions that have been made in video-game history, none have required the sheer psychedelics-induced imagination or produced as much irrational glee as the one that involves ninjas playing golf. Unfortunately (and rather ironically), Ninja Golf was released only for the Atari 7800, a system most assuredly not known for original ideas, or much of anything else. Hence, not many people know about it or have played it, and that’s a shame.
The concept of Ninja Golf is simple. You have trained for many long years to become a full member of your ninja clan, and now all you have left in front of you is the final test, the nature of which is a secret to all but the members of the clan. You find out that the test is not to assassinate a powerful warlord or to steal an important artifact, but to play through nine holes of a golf course. But it’s not just any golf course–it’s the most dangerous golf course in the world.
The golfing portion of Ninja Golf is also simple. Each shot you make is executed simply by aiming a cursor where you want the ball to go and hitting the button when the cursor (moving back and forth between you and a point some distance away) is in the desired spot. There’s no wind, no club selection, no chance to hook or slice, and the terrain and hazards don’t affect the maximum range of your shot much. All of the holes are also the same size, so you won’t have much problem getting to all of the greens in two shots each.
Where the challenge of Ninja Golf comes in is mostly due to a rule it shares with the PGA–players must walk to where they hit their balls. In this case, there are a lot of obstacles in the way of you making it to your ball alive. To start with, you have to deal with a constant stream of red-clad ninjas determined to make you prove your worth. Each of the five types of terrain (fairway, rough, forest, sand, water) also has a different type of animal trying to drive you off of its territory, from rock-throwing gophers to hungry sharks. On top of all this, in later holes you’ll have to deal with more ninjas, including camouflaged ones that blend in with their surroundings. None of these threats are much cause for concern by themselves, but they’re deadly in groups, and things just get more and more crowded as you play on. To help you make it through, in addition to your lethal ninja kick, you also have a limited number of shurikens that allow for a long-range attack. You can replenish your supply by finding them lying around on the course, along with items that replenish your health and make you invincible for a short amount of time.
You’ll need all the help you can get to prepare you for the hardest part of each hole. Apparently your ninja is a master at putting, and thus doesn’t need your assistance at all to hole out once you reach the green. However, the greens are guarded by flying Chinese dragons that do massive damage with their fire breath. Your view changes to an over-the-shoulder perspective as the dragon floats back and forth in front of you, and you have to throw your shurikens and hit the dragon’s head several times to drive it off, a la the bonus stage in Shinobi. Fortunately, this doesn’t draw from your shuriken supply, but that’s the only advantage you have; the dragon gets faster with each hole until timing your shots while dodging fireballs is a nearly fruitless endeavor.
Even on the easiest of the four difficulty levels, Ninja Golf is brutal. While the normal enemies don’t take off a lot of health by themselves, they can kill you fairly quickly by numbers, and restorative items are few and far between. The only way to get extra lives is to find them, and they are also rare. Your health doesn’t get replenished between holes, which makes the boss battles especially chancy. Worst of all, if you lose all of your lives, you’ll have to start over from the beginning. All of this put together means that you’ll probably have to cheat to get to the end of the game.
If you look at everything in Ninja Golf in isolation, it’s an average game at best. The golfing is even more simplistic than your everyday mini-putt game, and the action is excessively hard and, while the graphics are relatively nice, the controls are a little sketchy. But Ninja Golf is one of those games where the whole is definitely greater than the sum of its parts. It’s like steak and potatoes or death and taxes or the Captain and Tennille. Ninjas playing golf–what more do you really need?
