Team Ninja, The iPod

What Are You Playing This Weekend?

The FedEx man and the UPS man stopped by not too long ago to drop off what I'll be playing this weekend. I'll be enduring my share of bums and corpses in Condemned 2 for the Xbox 360 for a good portion of the weekend, hoping to provide my thoughts on Monday. I've also got a copy of Ninja Gaiden Dragon Sword to try out, which means I'll have to bust out by old Nintendo DS. Still haven't shipped off the DS lite to be repaired.

That's all I'm signing myself up for. How about yourselves? What are you playing this weekend?

Ninja Gaiden Dragon Sword Boss Gameplay

For whatever reason, I've had very little interest in Ninja Gaiden Dragon Sword for DS. (Maybe it was because Itagaki laughed at me.) But this new gameplay footage, while not necessarily the most epic battle in history, looks both fun and technically impressive. Not to be a graphics whore, but man, look at those graphics! Not too shabby for a DS title!

Ninja Gaiden Dragon Sword Shipping in March

I kinda dug Ninja Gaiden Dragon Sword on the DS both when I checked it out on the Tokyo Game Show floor and was forced to play it at the Tecmo party later that night, with a duo of developers looking on. It's seems like a fun little game.

And now Tecmo's let us know that the game will be hitting the DS sometime in March and dropped this official box art on is. It's nice to see some solid timing showing up for games hitting early next year. I was beginning to think it was going to be a slow few months.

By Michael McWhertor

Team Ninja is known for their flash. Whether it's producer Tomonobu Itagaki's rockstar look, Ryu Hayabusa's penchant for decapitating everything in sight, or the cup sizes of every Dead or Alive female fighter, understated is usually not an adjective that appears in sentences describing Team Ninja. But the developer's offices are so bland, so utilitarian, so... office-y we wondered if we had been led into the wrong building. Soon, however, Itagaki emerged, a hint of tobacco and hard liquor on his breath.

We were lucky enough to have a private interview with the head of Team Ninja about their upcoming venture, Ninja Gaiden Dragon Sword, so we (as quickly as we could) got down to business.

The interview took place in what looked like the team's demo room. Nothing more than a couple couches, a big screen TV, an Xbox 360 and a pair of statues—Master Chief from Halo and Kasumi from Dead of Alive—adorned the room. Outside of a trio of low-key posters for DOA and Ninja Gaiden, you'd have a hard time placing the developer. But the katana on the display stands might have helped.

I was surprised how much I enjoyed Ninja Gaiden: Dragon Sword on the DS today. The game was on the show floor over in Tecmo's booth. If you played through the incredibly short demo level you were given a poster, which I promptly discarded.

The title was very much a stylus game. You move around, jump and attack by tapping and swiping your stylus on the bottom screen. That sounds like it might be a bit annoying, but it wasn't. It's done in a way that makes you feel like you're doing a bit more than just mashing away at a button. For instance, a standard attack is performed by slashing down on a target. You can throw knives at your target by tapping on it and you can do a super attack of sorts by swiping up twice to double jump and then down to plunge a sword down into your target.

The demo was far too short to get a solid feel for how much fun it might be once you really dig into it, but from what I played it was quite a bit of fun.

Ninja Gaiden DS TGS 07 Trailer

Clip: Ninja Gaiden DS Gameplay

Itagaki Says You'll Be Surprised At How Wonderful, Innovative Ninja Gaiden DS Is

First Look At Ninja Gaiden DS

Ninja Gaiden Comes To... DS