Renegade Space Ninja

Renegade Space Ninja is a 1996 side-on one-on-one fighting game for the Macintosh by Phil Stroffolino. A legendary ninja convenes a tournament on a mysterious island to settle a power struggle among rival factions, and you pick a fighter and brawl your way through the bracket against CPU opponents.

Premise

The setup frames each match as a round in a grand competition staged on an island whose resources and influence multiple factions are fighting over. The renegade ninja organizing the tournament uses combat as the means to resolve the dispute, giving the roster a built-in mix of motivations.

Gameplay

Matches are hand-to-hand bouts against computer-controlled opponents in the classic two-fighter, side-view layout. Players choose a character from a roster of distinct styles before each fight and trade strikes until one combatant is defeated.

Roster

The cast spans several martial disciplines, including traditional martial artists, ninjas, and kickboxers, each with their own fighting style so the bracket plays differently depending on whom you pilot.

System Requirements

68k or PowerPC Macintosh running System 7.0 through 7.6 or Mac OS 9. The current distribution is renegade_space_ninja_v223.sit at roughly 3.66 MB, and the game runs cleanly under SheepShaver and Basilisk II for modern users.