Ninja Rabbits

1991, mid-afternoon, and I'm sitting in front of the monitor with the feeling that the game's title can't be serious. Ninja Rabbits. Ninja. Rabbits. And yet I launched the EXE and played.

The story is exactly as bizarre as the name promises. A chemical factory, a toxic gas leak, a world gone mad — and you're a ninja rabbit who's supposed to fix it all somehow. MicroValue didn't need to develop this premise further; they just needed to give the player a reason to mash buttons. They got one.

It's a sidescrolling action game where your rabbit weaves through levels and dishes out beatings to everything that moves. Controls are simple to the point of bare bones — movement, jump, attack. No combo system depth, no special moves requiring three hours of training. You just go right and hit things. But that very simplicity is also its biggest weakness. After the first few minutes, you feel like you've seen everything the game has to offer, and the rest is just repetition with different background colors. Difficulty fluctuates unevenly, and enemies move with an enthusiasm that would make many an arcade programmer jealous — which is to say, not very convincingly at all.

What I remember most about Ninja Rabbits is that strange feeling of a cheap game trying to be more than it actually is. MicroValue back then was targeting the market segment where price decided over quality, and Ninja Rabbits is perfect proof of that. The graphics do their job, the SoundBlaster music won't cause trauma, but it won't create atmosphere either. The whole thing works like a quick afternoon's entertainment from 1991 — perfectly suited to that time, perfectly suited to that purpose. It aged faithfully to its origins: mediocrely, without pretense.

Today Ninja Rabbits will appeal to those who love short historical artifacts as testimony to an era — cheap DOS action games that filled store shelves alongside games three times more expensive and three times better. If you're looking for depth or challenge, look elsewhere. If you want to spend twenty minutes with a ninja rabbit without worrying about anything serious, this is it. You can handle it in your browser without installation and without pangs of conscience.