Gabriele Amore is back. Did he ever go away, I hear you ask? Quite frankly, we’re not sure. I mean, we asked him to leave, but two days later I found him in the Sqij Towers kitchen eating all our biscuits. He distracted me by throwing a Shuriken into the wall behind me, which on closer inspection turned out to be a Spectrum game called “The Training of the Warrior”.
It wasn’t an original copy, being on a C90 with no inlay or instructions. Fortunately the title screen looked exceedingly helpful, despite being in a nearly unreadable font (bonus points for that), giving the two available keys “O – Punch and P – Kick”.
Eager to start my samurai training, I press O or P and am presented with some pixellated training screen.
I figure that at this point, pressing O or P might come in handy, probably P for Punch (or was it O?) as directed on the status guff at the bottom of the screen.
Pressing keys makes the screen flicker and moves the arrow at the top of the screen backwards and forwards. Sometimes it brings up an extra arrow and a white block. This might be a bug or it might be intentional and integral to the gameplay. I really have no idea.
Sometimes it does this.
Eventually after stabbing random keys, I complete my training, despite having no idea whatsoever what I was supposed to be doing. I bet real samurais didn’t get off so easily!
I then started up the game again to see if I could work out how to play it.
Other times it does this.
It just showed me a different screen and flashed between kick and punch text and that was it. I reset the Spectrum in frustration. This is buggier than the average PC game on the day of release.
Score: 1 ninja star out of ten ninj… AAARGH, I’M SURROUNDED BY NINJAS. SEND HELP.
Download: .tap
I managed to fail nine times, complete it once, and get stuck in an infinite loop with the words PUNCH! and KICK! flashing on and off the screen twice. Which is funny, because PUNCH! and KICK! is exactly what I’d like to do to Gabriele right now.
I do like the font, reminiscent of all those Exploding Ninja Tiger Fighting Warrior games from about 1985.
Oh, so it is possible to fail? I figured it probably wasn’t given that I succeeded by randomly toggling between O and P (having forgotten which key was which).
Anyway, you’re better off playing Yie Ar Exploding Ninja Tiger than this pile of crap.
Yeah I think I kept failing by pressing P when I was supposed to PUNCH! instead of O, and KICK!ing instead.