Although they actually shipped a couple of months apart (or so the internet's best efforts to perform archaeology through video game media and retail records suggest), I have grouped these two Tengen releases together because, well, they're kind of the same game. Rolling Thunder came first in arcades, and Shinobi followed very closely in its footprints while improving on it in many respects. That's not quite how it went on NES, where Shinobi appears to have debuted first only to be followed soon after by Rolling Thunder, which promptly crushed Joe Musashi under the heel of its stylish Chelsea boot. It's funny that Tengen decided to put these conceptually similar games out in rapid succession on NES, but it sure didn't do this awful Master System-to-NES port of Shinobi any favors.