When I spoke with Alec Stamos, creator of Tales of the Renegade Sector Games, we had come to an arrangement: I would test his upcoming game and he would tell me whatever I wanted to know. Tips, lore, easter eggs. Anything.
Now, I hold within me secrets. Secrets that if I told them to you, a ninja would be sent to eviscerate me. Readers, I live in constant fear now that I have played Ninja Outbreak.
The Interview
Are all your games interconnected?
Why ninjas?
At the same time, I was re-releasing Venusian Vengeance as a series of episodic flash games. And so I was remembering the last level from Venusian Vengeance, which was a laboratory overrun by a ninja virus. It was a joke in that game, sort of tongue-in-cheek. The station was quarantined because of a zombie outbreak but then you get there and it turns out it’s not zombies, it’s ninjas.
Are these ninjas weaker than the one before?
You put the inverse law of ninjas into this game?
For those of you who don’t know, The Law of Inverse Ninja Strength, also known as The Conservation of Ninjutsu, is a trope in which ninjas become proportionally weaker the more ninjas are present.
A lone ninja is an unstoppable badass.
But an army of ninjas is just meat for the grinder.
This same math makes its way into Ninja Outbreak.
Would you categorize this game as survival horror?
Were you concerned with making the game scary or did you just want the mechanics of a survival horror?
Why did you choose to limit the ammo and other resources?
“Am I going the right way? Am I going in too deep? Am I going about this the wrong way? Should I be here?” That’s the sort of tension I wanted to get out of this game.
Did anyone else work on this game with you?
Is there anything else you’d like to tell us?
The dragon’s fire burns hot?
The Conclusion
I beat the entire game that day. It took a little over three hours.
There are a few easter eggs in this room. Read the black ninja description. That’s almost a verbatim quote from Thunder Ninja Kids in the Golden Adventure, which was the first Godfrey Ho movie I ever watched in its entirety.
Basically, there’s one bit where two main characters are going:
“Black ninja! What are they?”
“They’re all black!”
“Sounds like black ninja.”
Stamos assured me there are still more secrets to be found. “You got most of the items,” he told me. “And there’s some more secrets you missed.”
The rest of our playthrough and discussion, though, went strictly off the record.
