Ninja Gaiden: Master Collection collects two of the finest hack-and-slash games ever made, plus Ninja Gaiden 3, and releases tomorrow on Steam. Fans' delight at the port's announcement was soon followed by the disappointment that the versions of the first two games being ported were the Sigma versions: later versions that few feel improved upon Ninja Gaiden Black or 2. But it gets worse...
In the run-up to release the game's Steam page has been updated, and there are some amazing scenes. Fancy changing the resolution? Of course you do, let's just pop into the options menu and... wait, what?
"To configure the resolution, open the game's Properties from your Steam Library. By entering '720p', '1080p', or '4k' in the text field of 'LAUNCH OPTIONS', you can fix the resolution to the corresponding value. By setting the game to a low resolution, you can reduce the processing load."
Yep, this is a $50 PC port. It may even be making some of you nostalgic: there was a time when most big-name PC ports from Japanese developers turned up in this kind of state. As we all know, however, a real ninja would recompile the kernel and then the game.
It's not just the resolution: the game launches in windowed mode and has to be changed to fullscreen using the standard top-right windows icon. Producer Fumihiko Yasuda recently discussed some of the game's settings with PCG, but somehow neglected to mention these aspects.
Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised. Team Ninja's other flagship series, Nioh, recently found its way to PC: and the port did a great game an injustice. The developer has at least fixed some of the bigger problems, but it's still not where it should be: 30FPS cutscenes do not belong in a new PC release in the year of our lord 2021. We'll have to wait and see whether Ninja Gaiden: Master Collection will receive similar post-launch attention.
