Starting with the first game in this muscular package, Ninja Gaiden has aged extraordinarily well. Regardless of such tweaks to the base formula of the first two Ninja Gaiden titles, the fact remains that each offers up a bounty up of hyper-responsive, hyper-kinetic third person action that is rarely seen these days.

So you can see why, back in the day at least, a fair sized chunk of gamers who already made their bones on the original versions of Ninja Gaiden and its sequel, would find these changes a little bit jarring to say the least. Thankfully, such painfully thirsty ‘functionality’ is not present in the Master Collection version of Ninja Gaiden 2. Back in the day, Ninja Gaiden 2 Sigma had a ‘special function’ whereby the motion control aspects PlayStation 3’s Sixaxis pad can be used to make the boobs of guest character Rachel jiggle depending on the severity of the movement. While that all seems like good stuff, where the Sigma variants (so to speak) have rubbed OG veterans up the wrong way, is in the implementation of new ‘Ninpo’ powers, which allow protagonist Ryu Hayabusa to build up reserves of Ki and target enemies with a blast of magic that essentially kills them outright.

Right off the bat, the Sigma versions of the first two games include a bunch of additional enemy types, extra save points and weapons not present in the original Xbox versions, additional Mission Modes and unlockable characters. If however, you’ve recently hopped over the fence from Xbox Land (hi there!), you might be surprised to discover that Ninja Gaiden 1 and 2 are both somewhat different from what you may have previously experienced on the Xbox and Xbox 360 accordingly. Now, if you’ve only ever known the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita versions of the first two Ninja Gaiden games, nothing will seem different.

Ninja gaiden master collection