GuestLog in

Shadow Dancer for the Mega Drive is a masterpiece and cleverly designed, in no instance the player will die from randomness, or cheapness. It's a game that requires precise execution and has already three difficulties for newcomers or players used to it and want more challenging experiences. Giving it hit points goes against its careful design and actually isn't helpful in making new players, or those that just can't play it well no matter how hard they try, actually good at the game, since "I won't die if I make a few mistakes" anyway, providing a subpar experience of what designers intended.

Shadow Dancer is one of my favorites from back in the Genesis days. I had it for the console as a kid. The music is one of my favorites on the Genesis and the graphics are very nice, like a late '80s or early '90s arcade game. I remember it being tough, especially in the later levels. I never could beat it when I was young, so I decided to give it a try again using this 3 Hit Point Patch.

For the most part, I really do like this hack and, of course, it makes the game way more accessible and as a result, more enjoyable. Using this hack, I was finally able to beat this great game from my youth!

My one complaint is that when you get hit, there seemingly is no invincibility time for your character, meaning getting hit once will often result in you absorbing two hits in a row! That one, glaring behavior occurred to me SEVERAL times during my playthrough, especially during boss fights.

Usually, when you get hit in video games, your character gets pushed back along with being invincible for a few seconds to ensure you don't absorb multiple hits cheaply. That doesn't happen here, and I wish that would be added in an update or in another hack altogether. Because you'll often absorb multiple hits, it feels like you can only get hit twice before dying instead of three.

One other minor gripe is I wish the developer would've used a different icon instead of Shinobi's face to represent your hit points. In video games, a character's face usually represents how many LIVES you have left; hit points are usually represented by hearts, red gems like on the Contra: Hard Corps hack or a life bar.

Anyway, those are my opinions and suggestions for how to improve this useful Shadow Dancer hack. Hopefully, someone with the ability to program those updates will read this review and release a new patch for this legendary game.

This is a required hack for anyone looking to play the Genesis version of Shadow Dancer. As other reviewers have pointed out, the extra hitpoints are vital to making the game accessible, while still retaining enough challenge for new players. I might starting revisiting this game every so often, all because this hack made Shadow Dancer a really fun game.

This was a fun hack to try out on stream! The 3 HP really does help in the trickier portions of the stages and bosses with small hitboxes (stage 3 boss). I like how it works for all 3 difficulty levels too and really evens the playing field.

Not every gamer is an ultra hardcore masochist, but it seems a lot of developers, both then and now, didn't get the memo.

In an arcade setting, one-hit deaths make a lot of sense if you are an operator - the intent being eating as many player quarters/credits as possible - but it's still dirty and frustrating on the player's end of the spectrum.

Why some developers saw fit to bring this kind of frustration to console versions is difficult to even fathom, but here we have the solution.

Having 3 hit points makes the game a lot more manageable, and it can even be useful to those that prefer the original experience - face it like a training mode to improve enemy placement memorization, with some room for error.

For the rest of us mortals, Shadow Dancer becomes much more of an actual game and less of a frustrating exercise of patience, thanks to this.

Some of the stuff in Shadow Dancer is... really BS memorization one-hit kills. So a hitpoint patch makes it way more enjoyable. This is really good.