Here's another one from the "my son wanted to play video games with me" file.
He's been really into the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles recently, and when he found out there was a TMNT video game, he was super pumped. As far as he knows, this is the only Ninja Turtles in existance and honestly, when I was his age I thought the same thing. It seems most people think of the original TMNT when they talk about Turtles games on the NES and Turtles in Time when they talk about Turtles games throughout history. But for me, TMNT: The Arcade Game will always be the first one I think of.
I don't think the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles need any introduction. Anyone that grew up in the 80's or 90's had some exposure to these four mutant reptiles named after renaissance artists and their rat sensei. Whether they were huge fans or casual viewers, Leonardo, Donatello, Raphael and Michelangelo were a part of kids' Saturday Mornings everywhere. None of us had any idea they came from a comic book meant to be a parody, or that they came from a one-off comic book in 1984. But we were instantly drawn to the quirky characters with their surfer lingo and borderline fanatical love of pizza. Of course, anything that popular was going to bring about merchandise (actually, this was a case where the toys came first, but the show lead to even more merchandise). TMNT:The Arcade Game, an arcade beat-em-up, was among that merchandise.
And since Arcade to NES ports were as ubiquitous as the Ninja Turtles in the early 90's, this got the home console port treatment. While it may not have had the four player functionality of the arcade version and its certainly graphically inferior, Ultra absolutely nailed this one. Never heard of Ultra? That's because they were Konami in disguise. Nintendo used to limit the number of games their third party publishers could release on their consoles in the early days of the NES. To get around this restriction, Konami started publishing games under the name Ultra. Weird.
I know I kind of got off on a tangent, but sometimes its hard to get deep into the gameplay of third generation/8-bit and earlier games because in a lot of cases, there just isn't that much. TMNT Arcade fits into that category somewhat, but it just feels like there is a lot more to do than in other beat-em-ups. You only have two buttons, A jumps and B attacks while the d-pad moves your turtle around in pseudo 3-D. But for just one attack button, they managed to include a lot of different means of attack. Each turtle can swing their weapon, do a jumping slash, a diving kick, a super slash and a running attack. Each move can be performed with a different combination of button presses or by pressing buttons at the same time. It's responsive and intuitive, even if it sounds like a pain. I never once had trouble performing the exact attack I wanted. I do think it's unfortunate that all the turtles play the same, the only difference is the range of their weapons. That means there's little reason to not pick Don or ever pick Raphael, but that's a minor gripe.
The graphics may be inferior to the arcade, but they are still outstanding for the NES. Everything is bright and colorful and the locations are unique and varied. There are lots of cool details in the foreground and background and all the enemy sprites look great. Well, most of the enemy sprites look great, the white foot soldiers have a weird outline, but again, that's a nitpick. The bosses look great as well, though most of them are one color for some reason. You will battle familiar enemies like Beebop, Rocksteady, Dr. Baxter and, of course, the Shredder. I appreciate that they actually used characters from the series instead of just generic baddies, which they could have easily done in a game like this. I also like the sound, to me this is one of the soundtracks that epitomizes NES chip music. It's crisp, clear and well done and some of the tracks are truly memorable. Quite a few are just remixes of the TMNT theme, but they are different enough that you won't feel bored.
One of the biggest problems with beat-em-ups is lack of enemy variety. That isn't the case here. They do palette swap the foot soldier sprite a million times, but each type of foot soldier behaves differently. The basic purple guys just attack, but as you progress, their abilities get stronger and stronger. Some throw kunai or boomerangs while others swing giant hammers or toss dynamite. There are also plenty of other enemies to provide variety, like the rolling robots, mechanical dogs or bouncing snowmen. Each level also throws unique stage hazards at you, you will find pitfalls in the city streets or giant snowmobiles in the ice level. But you can use the backgrounds to your advantage as well. Hitting some objects with your weapons will sometimes send them crashing into foot soldiers, taking out three or four at a time. Later levels will find you riding a skateboard down a street filled with enemies, which helps break things up. It may be simple, but its very engaging.
It would have been nice to have four player, but lets be honest with ourselves, did anyone actually own the NES multitap? I actually did, but sold it to Funcoland, probably for way less than it commands on EBay today. This game is still a blast with two players. Bashing foot soldiers with a buddy is so rewarding and it opens up whole new strategies for fighting bosses. If one player is much stronger than the other, their partner can borrow lives if the are available. This allows better players to carry weaker ones and ensures that one person isn't sitting there like a moron while the other goes nuts and solos the entire game. Continues are shared, so there's no forced backtracking unless both players die. Lose all three of your continues and the game is over. It's totally fair, especially since you can gain more lives by defeating more enemies.
TMNT Arcade is a great game, but there are a few flaws. As I mentioned, the turtles don't play any differently, which I would consider a downgrade from the first game. It's also way more straightforward than the first TMNT, although given what a pain that game was, that might not necessarily be a flaw. Some of the boss fights boil down to just repeatedly jump kicking them until they die, although the later bosses certainly don't have that problem. Again, its almost not a flaw, I think it's okay to have early bosses that you can figure out easily or cheese to see the rest of the game. The later bosses are brutal and Shredder is comically difficult, this is one of my least favorite final boss fights in history. I love how expressive the turtle sprites are, but I wish they were a little more detailed. Finally, and this is very much a personal issue that's not really a real problem, but it always bothered me that the turtles take damage when they fall into open sewer holes on the second level. Why would they take damage from the sewer? Don't they live in the sewer? What's up with that?
All in all though, TMNT Arcade is an outstanding playthrough and totally worth playing today. This isn't the kind of game you have to be a hardcore expert just to pick up (another problem I have with lots of modern games) and any two people with controllers can just pop it in and play it. They may not beat it, but they can play it. When I first put together my top 100 games of all time list in the mid 00's this game just barely snuck in, I think it was 92 or 93 or something. I don't know if that would still be the case. I did not rank Turtles in Time on that list and there's no way I would rank TMNT Arcade over Turtles in Time if I did that exercise again. Add in all of the new games I have played, plus the PS3/360/Wii and later libraries and I don't think it would quite make the cut. Still, I think TMNT Arcade is a blast and worth a playthrough, especially for casual gamers and Turtles fans.
9/10
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