I remember the first time I saw his eyes. I was mesmerized by them. “You can see the eyelashes!” my friend exclaimed in astonishment. He did indeed have great eyes. Very detailed and yes, he even had eyelashes. This was 1987. We were 17 years old and the only escape from the dull monotony of working class life in London's east end was the wonder of the multitude of worlds that video games created.

There I was in the sweaty, spunk smelling bedroom of my out of work teenage friend as we loaded up the latest game on his Commodore 64 computer; The Last Ninja. A game that achieved what we now term 'best in class' for pretty much everything. The graphics were jaw droppingly beautiful. Not many games could claim a ‘beauty’ attribute in those days; 8 bit machines just weren’t powerful enough, but Last Ninja achieved it.

And it didn’t stop at the great graphics - the game play was top notch too. You controlled a ninja walking through lush environments, fighting against baddies, exploring, finding weapons and items and solving fairly simple puzzles (for the most part at least). The Last Ninja was a showcase for video games. It played like a dream and it sold by the shed load. I was young, completely hooked on video games and this instantly became one of my all-time favourites.

It’s now 2012. I’m sitting at home. My wife and two kids are asleep upstairs. I’ve had somewhere in the region of thirty years of a wasted life playing games. I've wasted the last fifteen years working in the games industry in the vain hope of actually working on a game that I actually cared about. Old. Jaded and bored by the glut of identikit AAA games, I thought a nice change of pace was in order so I broke out the Amiga emulator.

I scroll down the long list of games, trying to find one the peaks my interest and there it is - The Last Ninja Remix! It takes seconds to load in comparison to the several minutes of the C64 original and when it's finished, breaking through time and space. Bridging 25 years of game play. There they are again. Those stunning eyes of his still hypnotise me. And he still has eyelashes!

My memory kicks in and within minutes I’m playing it like I’m still 17 with more time on my hands than Scot Bakula in Quantum Leap. It's incredibly impressive how much they managed to fit into this game. If you push aside the amazing graphics and animations, you’ve got full combat, world interaction, exploration, puzzles, multiple item usage, multiple weapons and they’ve even got time for niceties such as praying to Buddha who gives you hints! Truly impressive; for the time – this was up there.

So I’m playing loving it all over again. And then, it comes. The first river crossing!

Something that has been hidden in the dark recesses of my mind kicks suddenly back into life. ‘These river crossings were pretty hard to do weren’t they?’

Yes they were Gigi. Yes they were. My body shivers. Last Ninja, for all its greatness included one of the most frustrating mechanics ever in that each level had one or two river crossings where you had reach the other side by landing on several stepping stones. This wouldn’t be a big problem other than the fact that using these stones required pixel perfect jumping – and I mean ‘pixel perfect’.

That would still be ok (if a little hard) if it wasn’t for the fact that the jumping mechanic on Ninja was fucking shit. It wasn’t awful as much as broken. Performing a jump was a simple affair – you held down a direction, pressed the button and Ninja jumps. There’s no control of him once you initiate it – he just jumps and lands according to whether you performed a long or short jump.

The problem is that you rarely land where you expect to land. Ninja seems to do some kind of diagonal jump that takes him from bottom right to top left and vice versa. The horrible jump combined with pixel perfect jumping sections was a recipe for hardness 25 years ago. Today? It’s a game killer. Seriously. I’m sitting here wondering how on earth I played this game back then. With only 3 lives on level 1, I would have died again and again and again just trying to get across these river sections. How I didn’t give up I just don’t know.

Today? Well, thanks to emulators being incredibly sophisticated and frankly outstanding pieces of software, I have two things that turn this game from pure frustration to keeping its place of greatness.

1. Save states

2. Cheats

Infinite lives mean I can now die as many times as I need to try and get over the jumping sections, but also, save states mean I don't have to go back to the start if I make a major mistake.

To give you an example of how hard those jumping sections are; level 2 has a fire breathing dragon that cannot be beaten by combat. If you walk past it fries your ninja arse instantly. So the puzzle is to find a magical orb that gives you a shield of some sort that will let you walk past it unharmed.

The orb has a time limit – something like 5 minutes. It is located on the other side of the world from where the dragon lives. Not that big a deal when you consider the levels are quite small. But when you realise that you have to fight several baddies on the way, this make it a bit tougher. But then factor that you have to overcome two, yes, that’s right TWO, jumping river crossing sections that lie between the orb and the dragon… Well. How the fuck anyone finished this level without cheats is beyond me. I know they did and I know I did. But today. Bloody hell. It’s IMPOSSIBLE!

So even though it’s still quite a tough thing to achieve and very frustrating, the cheats and save states get me through it. I have to look at myself in the mirror and realise I'm not the hard core gamer I once was. I still love all the same hard corey things. But I no longer have the patience or the time to play through excessively difficult sections in games anymore.

The tolerance levels in video games have changed vastly in those 25 years for me. I assume that younger gamers have that time. But do they have the patience? I'm not so sure. Is this change in tolerance added to the lack of patience of today’s youth what has made the entire games industry move towards linear corridor games with high ratio of WOW:pace? I think so. And that's a shame. Not because the shit jumping mechanic in Last Ninja is something I'd ever propose, but the knock on effect of change but I do miss the ability to explore worlds. Some games still have it I guess. But the high number of AAA's that use Call of Duty as their blueprint has led to games becoming samey and boring in my opinion. I'm sure the youth will disagree.

In the meantime, if you’ve never played a Last Ninja game, well, I strongly suggest you try it out. I recommend the C64 version as that’s the best one, but the Amiga ‘Remix’ is still good if second best. I’d also say jump in at #1 – don’t play 2 or 3 first. It’s a continuous story that spans all three games and you do need to play them in order to appreciate it.

Hey! How cool is that? I went through an entire blog post without using the word ‘bollocks’! Oh. L