External Links

ninja.zip *
MS-DOS Application
ninja.exe
MS-DOS Application
ninja.txt
documentation
VMC10​_073D.zip *
Contains VMC10.exe
Type CLOAD & hit ENTER. Select NINJA.​C10 in the JimG subdirectory of the Cassette directory. Type RUN...
Windows Application (Windows XP and later)
* Compressed with ZIP. Free Unzip tools are available for most systems at www.info-zip.org.

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Ninja

by Paul Allen Panks

Part of Ninja series by Paul Allen Panks
Eastern
2004

(based on 9 ratings)
3 reviews

About the Story

You are a lone ninja, protecting a shinto shrine of Japan. Your goal is to avoid capture by the Evil One, a deft ninja from a rival shrine. He is nearby, but you don't know exactly where. And it is dark outside, with only your senses to trust...

There is said to be a rare golden idol in the Evil One's shrine to the west. You must reach it before the rival ninjas find out!


Game Details


Awards

36th Place - 10th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition (2004)

Editorial Reviews

Baf's Guide


A very short game, with the main challenge of making the parser understand what you actually mean. The bad quality of this work might be deliberate; however, even if it was, this fact wouldn't add anything to the game's charm (or its rating, for that matter).

-- Valentine Kopteltsev

SPAG

You start in an ungrammatical, boring room, which includes a shrine that you cannot enter and mountains that are too far away even to be examined. Aside from various peculiarities of syntax and parsing, there is one painfully obvious puzzle to be solved.
-- Carolyn Magruder
See the full review

>INVENTORY - Paul O'Brian writes about interactive fiction

It's just really not good at all. But there is a way to enjoy it, at least for me. See, I like to think that there exists a tiny sliver of possibility that Panks is actually just a satirist with a very, very, very dry wit. I mean, really -- if IF were a Christopher Guest movie, Panks would just have to be a character. It's almost as if he's playing a character all the time in his postings, and this game works perfectly as reductio ad absurdum interactive fiction. Look at it as a parody, as perfectly straight-faced and utterly ridiculous all at once, and it may provide a moment's entertainment. Of course, that doesn't mean you'd give it a high score in the comp or anything.
See the full review

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Number of Reviews: 3
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
Miniature Text Adventure, February 13, 2022
by Cody Gaisser (Florence, Alabama, United States of America, North America, Earth, Solar System, Milky Way, Known Universe, ???)

Ninja is very brief text adventure by Paul Panks, who was apparently a rather notorious creator of interactive fiction. The game appears to have been programmed from scratch in BASIC, which probably explains why there are some issues.

The writing is very minimal. The objective of Ninja is not explained to the player in the game; but the game consists of only four simple rooms (that I could find), so it wasn't hard for me to figure out what was going on. It seems an idol must be taken from a rival clan's shrine and placed in your own shrine. The game features one simple puzzle (besides figuring out the main objective). It also seems that there is some janky random combat, as I was killed instantly by another ninja on my first attempt to take the idol (I never encountered an enemy again on subsequent playthroughs). There are a couple of glaring errors in the design (some text appears in a room description when it shouldn't, and an important item can't be examined), but the game basically works.

I wouldn't necessarily recommend playing Ninja unless, like me, you find yourself wondering "Who was Paul Panks, and why were his games so infamous?" I'm not sure Ninja answered my questions, but I have at least been given a small introduction to the works of Panks.

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
A very short game in BASIC with random death and bad parser, June 5, 2017

In this game, you play a ninja who has to retrieve a golden idol.

It's super short, with only 3 or 4 activities you need to execute.

I'm giving it 2 stars because the writing is descriptive, and because the small writing that was there did give a nice atmosphere.

But otherwise, this is tiny, with poor planning decisions and an obnoxious parser (it commits that horrible offense of understanding a command, telling you it's wrong, and telling you what command you should type instead).

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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
Avoid at all costs, October 31, 2007
by Nusco (Bologna, Italy)
Related reviews: IF Competition 2004

Short BASIC game about a ninja who must do something to someone, but ends up moving between two or three underdescribed locations and winning the game for no apparent reason. Probably contains less words than this review. Extremely buggy.

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This is version 8 of this page, edited by Paul O'Brian on 9 May 2022 at 1:08am. - View Update History - Edit This Page - Add a News Item - Delete This Page