The Situation

XBOX is in a tough spot. It's in distant third place for console sales, compared to PlayStation and Nintendo, and Microsoft recently completed one of the largest software publisher acquisitions in the history of gaming, putting pressure on it to generate a financial return from that purchase. 

XBOX's relatively small install base means that it can't sell enough copies of its franchises on its own console to recoup development costs and make enough profit to satisfy the Microsoft overlords. So a few years back, XBOX leadership decided to start publishing its first party franchise games on PC (meaning, on Steam), Sony PlayStation and Nintendo Switch. This could be fine if XBOX and Microsoft were planning to go the Sega route and simply embrace being a third party publisher on other consoles, but that doesn't seem to be the plan of XBOX's new CEO... and I'm glad. 

XBOX's new CEO, Asha Sharma, has laid out a series of priorities for XBOX, one of which is a "return to XBOX". To me, that certainly doesn't sound like they plan to exit the hardware business, and further underscoring that is the reveal of "Project Helix", the codename for their next generation console. Helix is allegedly going to be a premium pc-console hybrid, that is widely assumed will carry a premium price tag as well. She also stated Microsoft Games Studios will be rebranded back to XBOX Games Studios; certainly not something you would do if you planned to just become a third party developer for other consoles.

But, what does XBOX need to do in order to be competitive as a console developer? Well... 

One major thing it needs are exclusives. 

Exclusives are one of the main reasons why consumers (gamers) will choose one console over another, or priortize buying one console first before another (which would be my situation). If you publish your games everywhere, even if you delay the release, it reduces the reason to buy your console over your competitors'.

Nintendo and Sony know this better than anyone. 

Exclusivity

Where can you play The Last of Us? PlayStation. Where can you play God of War? PlayStation. Sony may have dabbled a bit in PC ports of its games, but recent news indicates it is pulling back from that. The financial results weren't compelling enough to offset the impacts to its brand, so its pulling back.

Where can you play the latest Mario, Zelda, Metroid or Pokemon game? Nintendo. Only Nintendo.

There's a very good reason for this.

Video game consoles having exclusive games developed and/or published by their parent company can be traced back to the earliest days of gaming. Starting back on the Atari 2600, a console's exclusive games were used to make one console more desireable over its competition. This is why Atari had Missile Command, Nintendo had Super Mario, Sega had Sonic, PlayStation had Crash, and Xbox had Halo. Without exclusives, consoles simply become comdodities, competing on price. There isn't a lot of history to look at where a company created a console and had no exclusives, because the need for consoles to have exclusives was a well established industry norm. 

Exclusivity drives console sales, and higher console sales make exclusives more financially viable. If you aren't able to sell a high enough number of consoles, then exclusives have a very hard time recouping their development costs and they don't make sense, but without exclusives people have very little reason to buy your console. It's a revolving door, "chicken or the egg" issue,and this is the probably Xbox is faced with right now.

Xbox wasn't able to sell enough consoles to reach critical mass this generation in order to keep all of their first party published games exclusive to Xbox, but if they don't have exclusive games then there is very little reason to own an Xbox. Their gamepass service is great, but clearly it wasn't enough to get gamers to either switch from Nintendo or PlayStation to Xbox, or buy an Xbox in addition to another console. So if they try and keep their games exclusive, they won't be able to recoup their development costs, but without exclusives they give gamers very little reason to buy an Xbox. So their position in the console space is very challenging. So maybe they should focus on PC instead? 

Microsoft was established as a PC software company and it continues to dominate that space, so maybe Xbox should just pivot to focusing primarily on PC. Well, there's one big problem with that: Microsoft already lost the PC gaming market to Steam.

[Talk about Steam's domination of the PC gaming market and the fees they collect.]

Critical Discourse and Player Feedback

Being that Ninja Gaiden III first released on the NES back in 1991, most critical reviews of the game are either found in PDF scans of old gaming magazines, or from the game's rerelease on Nintendo's Virtual Console back in the Wii days. Back when Ninja Gaiden III first released, Electronic Gaming Monthly gave it four 8's, praising the game's graphics, gameplay and toughness (they actually welcomed the challenge - claiming the first two weren't hard enough). When the game rereleased on Virtual Console, IGN reviewed it and gave it an 8/10, but Nintendo Life reviewed it and gave it 5/10. From a player rating perspective, the recent Console Archives release on PS5 currently has a 4.91 out of 5 score from 34 ratings, with 94% of ratings giving it a perfect 5.

My Hands-On Impressions

I had previously picked up Ninja Gaiden II: The Dark Sword of Chaos when it released as one of the very first entries in the Console Archives series. Oddly, even though I love that game, it wasn't an obvious purchase since Nintendo added it to their NES Nintendo Online service at almost the exact same time. Plus, I already own a physical copy of the original Ninja Gaiden II on NES, and I can just fire it up whenever I want. 

This is not the case for this game, however.

Ninja Gaiden III released later in the NES' lifecycle, and by that time my little kid mind was anxiously awaiting the release of the Super Nintendo, and all its incredible looking games. Plus, the previews I saw in EGM and other gaming magazines at the time really didn't excite me. Ninja Gaiden II's Ashtar really added a level of cool to the second game that the third game just seemed to be missing. (To this day I couldn't tell you who the final boss of Ninja Gaiden III is.)

Since I never owned Ninja Gaiden III, this entry in the series is the least known to me, although I have had the chance to play it a few times on various retro consoles that come preloaded with 20,000-ish roms of questionable legality. You never know the rom quality however, and I don't love the "questionable legality" part either.

Now that Ninja Gaiden III is available through Console Archives I can finally get to properly play the only entry in the NES series I've never gotten a chance to beat. And having convenient save states doesn't hurt either since the English version is notoriously difficult.

From a technical perspective, Console Archives games work much the same way as HAMSTER's previous Arcade Archives series, and pretty much uses the exact same interface with the exact same CRT filter options. I tend to like CRT filters for retro pixel-art games, and after playing around with the various options, I decided on the "A1" filter, which applies the lightest level of scanlines, but does add a bilinear filter which slightly blurs the image. The numbers of each filter just indicate the level of scanline intensity and resulting picture darkening. The A filters use a simple bilinear filter which slightly blurs the picture (which I prefer), and the B filters do what the A filters do, plus it adds a horizontal scan bar (is that the right term?) which I generally find annoying.

Oddly, the only slight technical glitch is a very slight audio difference when compared to the original game. Ninja Gaiden II also had a similar audio difference, so it must be a Console Archives thing. If you haven't played the original in quite a while (or ever), you won't even notice.