Welcome to VC Weekly, N-Europe's guide to the wonderful world of Nintendo's download service. Written by Sam C Gittins.

Yet another solo release this time and it's essentially a repeat at that, will Nintendo pick up the pace with releases any time soon? Anyway enough from me and on with the erm... game!

Available for download this week we have...

• Ninja Gaiden

Points: 800
Publisher: Tecmo
Developer: Tecmo
Released: 1988
System: Arcade

As big names go the Ninja Gaiden series is still widely recognised to this date thanks to the success of recent titles on certain HD consoles and of course the portable version Ninja Gaiden : Dragon Sword on the DS all of which deliver a brilliant third-person action/adventure experience. But what of the one that started it all, lest we forget that this series had a rather humble beginning as a simple yet unforgiving side-scrolling arcade game.

For the uninitiated you control a Ninja named Ryu as you journey across America visiting such locales as castles, city areas, forests, jungles and even a railroad as you take out enemies along the way, that's the basic idea behind it which is beautifully simple even if the difficulty isn't.

It's very nicely put together for a beat-em-up of its era with a lot of bold colours used throughout which makes for some nicely detailed environments not to mention that there are some rather impressive moves that you can perform to put and end to your enemies. Accompanying music works well with the rest of the game and there are a handful of items to obtain such as extra time, health restores and a powered-up Ninja sword with limited usage.

Sadly though it's a decent game on the whole, the unforgiving difficulty of it is almost enough to prevent people playing it; the enemy A.I is cheap to the point of pettiness as you will often be faced with a barrage of baddies all at once which makes it rather easy to mess up. In all honesty, the NES version is a much fairer game than its coin-up counterpart and so the game suffers for this reason.

You'd be much better off going for the NES version which may be graphically inferior but there's a lot to be said for it since it's more playable than the arcade version and is two hundred points cheaper to boot. The choice of course is yours but just be aware that though this arcade version is better on a technical level it's brought down by how frustrating it can become.

Verdict : The original but not quite the best.

That's it for another installment of VC Weekly which will return again soon. So until then, enjoy the rest of the week and Game On!

Sam Gittins
[email protected]

Looking for reviews on other Virtual Console games? Or a full list of games available on the system? Then Check out our Virtual Console Index Page.