This weekend, RetroNuts, Go Ninja Go!

Seeking refuge at Audacity has been a fairly recent trend for video games. Developers and

publishers self-consciously adopting ridiculous or asinine publicity in order to draw attention.

The idea being apparently, it's so dumb it must be awesome, right? Frequently these games do turn out to be dumb,

but awesome? Not so often. Games aren't so great at self-awareness.

That's what I love about Ninja 5.0. Hudson and Konami's odd little Game Boy Advance sleeper hit from 2003.

There was no strained irony about the game, no camp for the sake of laughs, no pretenses, really no self-awareness.

It was totally a straight-laced action platformer in the 16-bit vein, and it's publisher evidently called it Ninja 5.0 in all sincerity.

Like, hey, here's a game about a policeman who happens to be a ninja. It would totally make sense for us to name it after a TV series

that hasn't been on the year for 20 years, right? And the game ended up bumbling beneath the radar as a result, though the dopey title was only part of the story there.

Ninja 5.0 is a strange little game, credited to Hudson, but with a staff seemingly consisting of Konami vets.

It appears to have been one of the first results of the slow-burning and ill-fated merger between the two companies.

Whatever its corporate identity and provenance, most of the talent behind Ninja 5.0, hail from Konami,

having worked on projects ranging from Konami's Latter-day GBA Ninja Turtles titles to survival kids,

to classics like Animaniacs or Super NES and the Osamu Tezika inspired Hino Tori for Famicom.

The game's heritage shows it's as old school in design as you'd expect from former Famicom designers.

Ninja 5.0 felt like a shameless adivism at the time of its 2003 release,

retillant of 8 and 16-bit classics like Shinobi, Bionic Commando, and Rolling Thunder.

Its closest antecedents were probably Umihara Kawasei and Elevator Action Returns,

both nearly a decade old by the time Ninja 5.0 rolled around, inhaling from a forgotten generation.

Ninja 5.0 arrived too late to be timely and too soon to be hip.

Cave story and the retro revival would help usher in were still more than a year away,

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