Capcom's Strider (1989) put you in the boots of Hiryu, an agile future-ninja wielding the plasma Cypher blade, leaping and flipping through a globe-trotting espionage plot.

The odd thing about this cartridge is that it is not a port. Capcom developed the arcade Strider and the NES Strider at the same time, as two halves of one project that also included a manga, and they share a premise and a protagonist and almost nothing else. The arcade game is a short, spectacular, one-way run. The NES game is an exploration game with a world map, dialogue, keycards and backtracking, closer to Metroid than to the coin-op it shares a name with. People who loved one have historically been baffled by the other.

Hiryu's moveset carries it. The Cypher swings in a wide arc that covers most of what's in front of you, he slides, and he can plant himself on a wall and climb it, which the levels are built around. The triangle jump between two close walls is how you reach half the map. Later you pick up the Plasma Arrow and a set of drones that orbit and fire, and the difficulty eases considerably once you have them.

Where it loses people is direction. You travel between Kazakh, Egypt, China and an orbital station by picking destinations off a map, and the game expects you to have read a line of dialogue several screens back to know which one is next. There's no quest log. In 1989 that meant a notebook.

Strider went on to bigger fame in arcades and on other systems, but this is where a lot of us first met Hiryu. Pure cool, and a strange cartridge once you look at it closely.