Ninja Gaiden (Series) Archive

I’m almost completely done with making thumbnails for the 250+ games we have listed on the site. It was an easy matter of getting shots of the title screens for every game and editing them to be thumbnail size.

A few games caused problems, though. Like that arcade game called Download. It’s almost impossible to search for on the googs. And then there’s Ninja Gaiden X, which was a mobile phone game released in Japan in 2004 and it no longer exists. This is the only title screen I was able to find for it (yeah, that’s the biggest size too):

So I definitely had to remake it from scratch for the thumbnail. With my trusty drawing tablet and growing knowledge of Photoshop effects, I came up with this:

Ta-da! It would have taken too long to learn how to do a fire effect for a simple thumbnail that almost nobody will see, so I went with the glowy effect instead. I gained some experience points!

Thanks to the Ninja Gaiden Super Bowl, the House of Poemato can finally get excited about Super Bowl Sunday! Mato was doing all sorts of programming and testing the other day. Little Zuuly was disturbed by the sounds my phone was making.

My custom emulator sidebar hacky stuff (aka Wanderbar) that I developed about 8 months ago isn’t ready for public release yet, but I’ve recently picked it back up and started to incorporate it into an NES emulator. It’s not at the same level as the SNES Wanderbar but it’s pretty close.

To test everything out, I used Ninja Gaiden II and tried to re-create my old Ninja Gaiden II memory-watching-XNA-program that barely worked and wasn’t fully reliable. It was surprisingly easier to put together using my Wanderbar setup than before, which is a good sign.

(This stream screenshot is with the NES Wanderbar in action)

Speaking of which, our yearly Ninja Gaiden Super Bowl is this weekend! I’m gonna try to get further in Ninja Gaiden II than last year. I better practice up before then. You can catch the stream live here sometime on Sunday.