There's no doubt about it, Shadow Dancer is one of the best ninja-based 2D action games of all time. It mixed crazy weapon-based combat with the ability to order your dog into treacherous situations. Yet as much as I love Shadow Dancer, I'm somewhat embarrassed to admit that when I see a cover like this. While I'm not going to say that the Shinobi series has had great art designs (from port to port the artwork has been all over the place), at the same time it's hard to look at a cover like this and see anything but a disaster of epic proportions. It's hard to take a game (any game) seriously when your character looks like that. Not only does he not look like the hero in the video game, but he also doesn't look like any of those cool ninjas you saw in the movies. Instead he looks like the kind of guy who made a costume out of the table cloth and spray painted his poor dog (no wonder the dog is pissed off). Judging from these pictures this guy has a train that rivals most young brides, and I hear in the ninja world that's considered a fashion faux pas.

And then there's the issue of whose game this is. That seems to depend on what part of the cover you're looking at. For example, if you're only looking at the top (where our poorly dressed hero and his dog are fighting a bunch of guys who have clearly given up) then you probably think this game is by Sega. Heck, it even says Sega in the lower right corner. But wait, it also says that it's "Marketed by U.S. Gold." What does that mean? Are they the publisher? Or did they only market this bad boy. From the looks of it they're the ones responsible for this ugly cover art (I refuse to believe Sega could do something this vile ... even after playing that recent Sonic the Hedgehog game on the Xbox 360). Either way, this is one of the ugliest covers around. I kind of wish there was a way where I could simply erase the memory of seeing this cover, but I know I can't (and now neither can you).