RunDLC writes: "Sometimes tinkering with a successful formula pays off in dividends. The Shinobi games were doing fine on both the Sega Master System and Sega Genesis, but Sega decided to take a chance by adding a faithful K-9 companion to the mix. The result, Shadow Dancer, is unexpectedly good, although you might be turned off by the lowered difficulty if you're a veteran of the Shinobi series. It's available now on the Virtual Console service for a mere 800 Wii points."
Entering its fifth calendar year of existence in the States, the Virtual Console seems to have evened out. It's locked into a pretty regular update schedule of one new game per week, and the bulk of these releases are good, if not great.
Diehard GameFAN writes: For the first time that I can remember, the WiiWare update was looked forward to by a lot of people. Nintendo's usually secretive about their plans for their games (as proven way back in '08, when they pulled an end-around on three companies as retribution for them leaking their updates early), but we knew ahead of time that a well anticipated game – Muscle March – was coming today. We'll tell you more about that title in a little bit, but that's the lead title in what might be the best week Nintendo's had for their download services in a long time.
Shadow Dancer started out life in 1989 in the arcades as the sequel to the ever-popular Shinobi, which was a sizable hit for creator Sega. In the same year the company also released the rather excellent Revenge of Shinobi as an early title for the fledgling Mega Drive/Genesis. It strayed from the classic arcade formula by introducing an energy bar to allow the player to take several hits. The Mega Drive version of Shadow Dancer released a year later as the follow-up to Revenge of Shinobi sought to take things back to basics with more the challenging one-hit-you're-dead rule.
