YMMV / Ninja Gaiden (Arcade)

• Hilarious in Hindsight: the bosses of Stage 3 are three masked fighters, who wield long claws and jump like crazy. You fight them in Las Vegas. Three years later, Street Fighter II featured Vega, a very similar masked fighter with claw who appeared as the boss.
• Narm: This game is rife with this at the "round clear" screens of each stage. Specific mention is its premise: a seemingly random ninja who happens to be Ryu goes to America ("NINJA IN U.S.A.") to beat the crap out of an evil cult full of hockey-mask wearing thugs, sumo and normal wrestlers alike, and various others, all led by "Bladedamus", a descendant of Nostradamus clad in BDSM gear and with a mural of death and a similarly-clad man's ass in his throne room. One of the clear cards even depicts Ryu cheerfully messing up a window cleaner's work (and spooking them), and another has him shooting craps at a casino table, clad in a pink suit and surrounded by Playboy Bunny girls!
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • The infamous Continue Countdown reeks of this, in which the player character is tied down to a table while a buzz saw is slowly lowered down towards him. It's pretty much the only thing gamers remember from this game.
  • Also from the arcade installment, the shadow of Ryu behind a window at the start of every stage, with Red Eyes, Take Warning before he bursts through the screen and starts the level.
• Nightmare Retardant: The aforementioned Continue Countdown is quite scary... until you run out of time and the buzzsaw actually reaches Ryu's body, at which point the action simply freezes, the colors turn red, and he lets out an underwhelming "oom..."
• Polished Port: Surprisingly, the Amiga version is an example of this, widely regarded as being one of the very few games on the system to not be a Porting Disaster.