I am a spider!!

Catnipped had been telling me about Tenchu Z and how exciting and satisfying it was to pull off these amazing stealth kills. This brought back fond memories of Hitman 2 and pulling off "Silent Assassin" rankings on all the missions. The allure of the cooperative multiplayer (all 50 levels in the game!!) through Xbox live was the icing on the cake.

After a failed attempt at acquiring it from walmart, I was able to pick it up from the local Gamestop. I popped the disc in with illusions of being the ultimate silent assassin, blending in with the shadows, and all that other cool ninja stuff. Sadly, that was quickly shattered as I screwed up on the training mission with the VERY FIRST guy. He even had his back turned. Instead of actually pulling off a stealth kill, I decided to sneak very quietly up to the guy and proceed to make menacing slicing noises behind him without actually hitting him. Of course this alerted him to my presence and I had to run away as that "I am a spider" thing totally didn't work.

The next part of training was supposed to teach me how to use the grappling hook. Now, this would seem like a piece of cake but because my TV was so small, I couldn't read the instructions given on the screen. After finally figuring out how to shoot the damn thing, I decided to do my first ultracool ninja type thing. The plan was to grapple onto the ceiling, then leap into the middle of these three patrolling archers and quickly stealth kill them in rapid succession. The attempt went well enough at the start as I was able to quickly grapple onto the celing; however, I forgot to take into the account that the ceiling was a little too high and so instead of landing gracefully, I ended up falling face first onto the mat right in the middle of the group.

The next part of the training was about how to quietly move through the water. The instructions said to press the green button to "roll quietly into the water." What it failed to mention was that if you press it while you are ALREADY IN the water, your ninja does this amazing high jump out of the water and then proceeds to do a cannonball back into it causing a huge amount of noise.

After going 0/3 on steath kill attempts, I made it to the last part of the training which was doing rapid chain stealth kills. The guys were lined up perfectly for the attempt: backs turned, unaware, never turning. I crouched forward towards the first guy and just when it looked like I might actually pull this off, instead of kiling him with a cool move, my ninja decided to choke hold the guy, creating a lot of noise and alerting the entire room. I figured out that this was because I did not have my sword drawn when attempting to execute a stealth kill. So this time, I snuck up quietly to the group again, and then drew my sword.....which instantly caused all of them to turn around again because the act of drawing a sword causes noise which they can hear.