I'm willing to believe the arcade game works decently well in multiplayer, when you have more to break up the moment-to-moment gameplay, and stuff like dropping power-ups when you get hit lending itself to playful competition. As a singleplayer experience? Forget about it. Enemies respawn so damn quickly, which makes slowly navigating certain rooms a complete nightmare. That one stage with the TMNT NES jump you have to clear by crouching first is a horrendous test of patience, and while I don't exactly trust it to be much easier in multiplayer, at least having someone run interference on enemy spawns would help things a good deal. The ammo upgrade system seems designed to piss the player off, too. It's neat the first time when you accidentally cycle back from fully-upgraded shots to wimpy starter shots, but then you realize that that bouncing upgrade ball's gonna keep spawning, and you're gonna keep having to deal with the cycle resetting. Good grief.

Music's pretty cool, though. Feels very WarioWare by way of the Mega Drive. And hey, this beat Psycho Solider to the punch with vocals in a video game.

As a single-player experience, Quartet for the Master System is a decent but kind of annoying action shooting game. I say "single-player" because I get a strong feeling this is the kind of game that is more fun with a friend going off the name and the style of the cabinets I've seen out in the wild. While not having the ability to sport 4 players like the title would insinuate, there is a 2-player option, and I bet the game is for fun through that. With one person, this is a serviceable action game but it won't hold your interest for very long.

6/10