I was scrubbing through GameGear Sonic soundtracks on my iPod the other day and wound up reacquainting myself with what I shall call an obscure, yet noteworthy, little spin-off series. No, not Tails' Adventure or Tails' Sky Patrol; I won't subject you to those, at least not this time. Before there was Sonic Riders (in my own opinion a very playable adrenaline-twitch-racer that in some ways makes F-Zero GX look tame), and before there was Sonic R (a forgivably misguided attempt at a Sonic 3D racer, with unforgivably misguided execution), way back when Super Mario Kart was the hot thing on SNES (2 years later, to be precise), Sega had actually made one very early foray into Sonic-themed gimmick-racing: Sonic Drift.

For some reason, all the ways I can think of starting to describe Shinobi III: Return of the Ninja Master involve Essence of Ninja packed tightly into a 16-bit cartridge by ninja highly trained in the art of packing Essence of Ninja into 16-bit cartridges.

Shinobi III was released by Sega for the Genesis in 1993. While the Shinobi series is broader and more complex than even I was aware of prior to researching this article, RotNM has one very key distinction over its predecessors and even some successors. Previous Master System and Genesis titles were about walking around slowly and throwing shuriken at things. Previous Game Gear titles featured flips, ceiling-walks, and slashing stuff, but never as the same character. They were also about rescuing Power Rangers and recovering magical rainbow crystals. The most recent PS2 game is about some magic demon wizard stuff and getting killed by your own sword.

Shinobi III, by contrast, is about flipping out and killing people. More specifically, it's about flipping out and killing explosive zombie-soldiers armed with automatic weapons, slicing up giant bioengineered meat-golems, horse-stomping ninja super-soldiers, jetboard-flying-kicking heavily armed marine tank robots, destroying robo-godzilla, scaling cliffs by jumping between falling boulders, navigating entire areas using only wall-jumps, katana-ing heavily armed airships out of the sky, and I think something about an evil super-ninja trying to take over the world, but that's only the plot, and if you know what the plot is, you obviously aren't very familiar with the concept of Ninja-ing.

Editor's Note: The Shenmue games have always struck me as emblematic of Sega's downfall. Full of outrageous ambition and short-sightedness, yet charming, beautiful, and magical. The video game industry lost something special the day the Dreamcast died, and it was more than just the conclusion to this epic story. Read this for a trip back to a time when Sega made games like no-one else, and we loved them for it. -mossy_11

Prepare to step into another world. A world where shopkeepers and traders get up early to ply their trade, ladies step out of their front gate to sweep away the fallen leaves and gossip, young men kneel polishing their motorbikes, and old men go to the park to sit thoughtfully or practice Tai Chi. This is a world in which the sun rises and sets, skies aren't always clear, and, on a snowy day, you might witness the murder of your father at the hands of a mysterious man in long Chinese robes. You've just entered the fantastically vivid world of Yu Suzuki's Shenmue!