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By Anthony Swinnich on October 31st, 2007
When Data Design Interactive announced they were bringing a dozen games to the Wii, a small bubble of hope started to swell inside of me. Upon further investigation, you know, like actually looking at pictures of these games, that bubble popped. These games set a new standard for "budget." Even though they run a fairly diverse selection in terms of genre (racing, platformer, uh... that’s it), they all use the same engine. Even so, one of these games had a premise too bizarre to ignore. Who wouldn’t want to play as a cookie that can throw shurikens and fight an army of baked goods? Ninjabread Man, which released in Europe on the PS2 and PC in 2005, was at one time a difficult game to find. Now, it’s now readily available, but after just one hour of play it becomes clear that rarity was the only thing this game had going for it.
"Half baked? They didn’t even bother to finish stirring the mix."
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That’s right, an hour of play. Ninjabread Man can be completed in just one hour. There is a tutorial and three stages. They might as well have called the tutorial "Stage One" since counts as 25 percent of the game. You unlock a scoring-based mode, timed mode and a hidden item collection mode after finishing the four crusty levels, but it’s clear that these were tacked on in the name of longevity with a 1997 PSOne style mindset. There’s also no story whatsoever — not a cutscene or prerendered cinema during the game at all, even at the end. That’s a big problem in a game selling itself on a bizarre environment. The simple truth is that even if Ninjabread Man had quadruple the amount of stages and an hour of cinemas it still would be a mess to play. The game follows the basic 3D platforming formula to a T, but it screws up the most important part: the controls. Your cookie moves at two paces: slower than human evolution, or faster than a Wii shipment sell-out. Keep in mind that there is no consistent way to move slowly, so if you’re on a particularly narrow ledge (which there aren’t many of) your best bet is to run and hope for the best. Navigating your way across small floating platforms is a frustrating task, not just because it was so hard to make smaller movements, but also because the jump mechanics are so goofy. The developers show you in Level One the tutorial that jumping is performed by thrusting the nunchuck upwards; you repeat the movement quickly to perform a double-jump. The problem is that it doesn’t work, not as consistently as you need in a platformer. After about 15 minutes of struggling I got the bright idea to press some buttons, and guess what I found: a jump button! It didn’t make the game any more fun, but it certainly made it possible to climb cakes without regularly falling to my doom.
"It fails to live up to its oddball premise and kick-ass cover art..."
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There are a plethora of other problems. Enemies can be dispatched through use of your sword or your ninja stars. Swinging the controller will attack with the sword, but you have to swing it slowly since the game fails to register movements faster than an anesthetized turtle. Pointing at the screen to fire stars is easy enough, but you’ll never need your sword since each of the game’s four enemies can be defeated without it and at a safe distance. So much for gameplay diversity. The land-mines found in the last few minutes of the game explode if you get close to them, and there is absolutely no way to avoid taking damage from them. A particularly nasty one is placed on a ledge, and chances are you’ll be knocked into the abyss below. Half baked? Please — they didn’t even bother to finish stirring the mix. Ninjabread Man is an empty and utterly unfulfilling experience on every level. It fails to live up to its oddball premise and kick-ass cover art — should you find this game on a shelf somewhere, stay far, far away. | 
