Dr. Ludos is a game developer with a deep love and respect for all things retro and likes to make games for systems that are well past their sell-by date, so for me, he is an awesome dude. I have already looked at one of his games here on B3, DMG deals Damage for the Gameboy, which was a little area shooter, pitting a Gameboy against more contemporary devices. And rather fun it was too. Check it out here (link) He also has a variety of games for the Atari, NES, and other retro systems. Also do look at the Catskull website, for chiptune albums, and retro midi hardware!
But we are here to talk about a new game he has released, YoYo Shuriken, this time, made for the Super Nintendo. Once again, it’s a kind of arena shooter, with you on this occasion taking control of a little cute ninja, fighting the robot horde and various enemies. The difference this time, is your weapon of choice. You have the titular yoyo shuriken. This peculiar little weapon works on the systems of both things mashed together. You press Y to throw your shuriken at the enemies, and press it again to bring it back to you.
But in that is where a little bit of strategy comes into it. Every time the shuriken hits an enemy, it stops dead. As it matters not from which direction the shuriken hits the enemies, you can drag it into an enemy, relocate the character, then drag it into another one. Using this, you can clock up some big combos before the shuriken gets back to you and really helps for the multi-hit enemies, enabling you to almost take them out in one go, if positioned correctly. This technique seems to be the key to success, as the room can get swarmed very quickly, and it will happen whether you want it to or not, so may as well make it work for you.
The enemies drop coins when defeated, but these disappear in time, so make sure you pick them up. Each one is worth a whole one point, and is the only thing that increases your score in this game. Trying to get bigger and bigger scores is the main goal of this game. Could easily set up a tournament event for you and your friends. The game can also be played on a two-player mode, and this can get very intense very quickly, due to an increase in enemies You cannot hit your teammate in this mode, so just go for broke, and get more of those juicy coins than your buddy.
A single hit will kill you, and with only three lives it gets pretty tense as you work your way through the seven levels, each with a number of waves of increasingly harder enemies and the various bosses.
Just keep moving, you are a ninja after all.
You can find YoYo Shuriken on Itch.io.
