Tenchu Z

Seriously, that's the process you have to go through before each mission - confirming that, yes, you really would like to start the level a staggering five times before it finally lets you begin. Then you've just got the scrolling text introduction, a ponderous loading time and a short cut-scene to get through. And here's the kicker - fail a mission, and you're dumped back at the Ninja Village. Not only do you have to go through that whole process again (which takes a good two minutes, even when you skip the intro and cut-scene) but you also have to reequip whatever items you'd selected to take with you.

Once you're in the game, it's like 1998 all over again. The graphics wouldn't trouble the PS2, filled as they are with jagged polygons, flat textures and weird glitches. Walk up a sloped roof and marvel at how your feet and legs vanish into the tiles. Run up some stairs and gasp at the way your feet don't even seem to touch the floor. Walk over a table or similar low obstacle, and boggle at how you suddenly flicker and appear on top of it. Shadows are cast through solid objects. Sprays of blood are made up of jagged black and red lines. After such displays of visual prehistory it barely comes as a surprise that the same few character and building models recur throughout, and that many of the 50 levels try to pass off repeated maps as new locations.

Combine this with the absolutely embarrassing enemy AI and you've got a game still fatally tethered to the hardware generation before last. Because of their genetic stupidity, it feels positively cruel to slaughter the blundering automatons stiffly roaming the levels in fixed linear patterns. They're so easy to confuse, often simply by running around a corner or jumping in a bush, that it feels more like you're being asked to invade an old folk's home and murder the addled residents as they wander the halls muttering about the price of eggs.

(Cut to Rockstar head office, where an eager young producer suddenly has a great idea...)

And I haven't even mentioned some of the smaller annoyances I found along the way. Such as the way it's possible to completely ace a level, killing your target without ever being spotted, only to be awarded a low rank because you didn't kill enough mindless minions along the way. Since when did ninjas go out of their way to kill as many people as possible? Or that the loading screens boast such priceless advice as "Use items to deal with difficult situations" or, my personal favourite, "Change clothes for a change of pace". Who knew ninjas enjoy retail therapy almost as much as Colleen and Posh? Or that the end of Mission 17 suddenly throws you into a daylight boss fight which requires you to use all the melee combat skills you've spent the rest of the game dutifully avoiding. Yeah, that's always fun.

The sad thing is, when you manage to align the clunky pieces in the right way, the game can still be sort of entertaining. There's a thrill to the perfectly executed stealth kill that all the half-assed development decisions can't entirely erase. Yet even in those moments, you're uncomfortably aware that you're not being challenged. Stealth games, perhaps even moreso than first-person shooters, rely on the sensation that you're outwitting dangerous and intelligent foes but here you're left feeling like you're taking advantage of the game's idiotic coding. There's little pleasure, and no honour, in such a victory.