Shinobi

Shinobi is the game that made the modern ninja an arcade staple. You are Joe Musashi, and across five missions - hostage rescue, train pursuit, dockyards, a mansion, the final duel - you clear screen after screen of enemy soldiers and ninjas with shuriken, sword and a wall-hanging agility no earlier side-scroller had.

Two systems define it. First, the hostage rescue: each mission ends with a bonus stage where freed captives reward you with a ninja magic charge, a one-use screen annihilation that also makes you temporarily invulnerable - spending it at the right moment is the core resource decision. Second, the first-person sniper sections: between stages the view drops into a first-person grid and you throw stars at window-hiding gunmen, a genre-mixing detour that was widely copied afterwards. The System 16 original has sprites and scaling tricks the many home versions approximated, and its difficulty is honest: patterns are learnable, and the one-hit death is softened by generous lives. It spawned one of Sega's longest-running series.

• ▸Ninja magic earned by rescuing hostages - a true limited super move
• ▸First-person shuriken sniper bonus stages between missions
• ▸Wall jumps, crouches and posture play years before it was standard
• ▸Five varied missions from train tops to a final one-on-one duel