No me esperaba que el primer juego de las Tortugas Ninja fuera un side-scroller de acción y plataformas con un estilo similar a Castlevania, y si bien el resultado final tiene sus grandes fallos, no puedo negar haberlo disfrutado en cierta medida.
Es un juego sumamente dificil y exigente, en algunos momentos incluso injusto. Personalmente no me gustan este tipo de juegos, pero el haberlo probado en la Cowabunga Collection me permitió disfrutar del mismo. Probablemente a muchos puristas no les agrade esta idea de guardar en cualquier momento e incluso rebobinar en el tiempo, pero en mi experiencia personal, agradezco este tipo de comodidades, ya que me permiten disfrutar de juegos antiguos que de otra forma no podría completar en lo absoluto.
Sobre el juego en si, diría que se siente bastante impreciso y tosco, que los enemigos muchas veces spawnean de forma bastante injusta, y que hay bastantes saltos y plataformas que están posicionados de forma muy incomoda. Lo que destacaría es el sistema de cambiar de personaje en cualquier momento, e irlos curando o rescatando a medida que se quedan sin vida.
No es un juego que podría recomendar en su versión original, pero creo que con estas mejoras de calidad de vida, y sumado a su corta duración, creo que no está tan mal como experiencia para aquellos que les pueda picar la curiosidad.

The first videogame appearance of our favourite heroes in a half-shell could certainly be called very ambitious. On paper, it all sounds fantastic. All four Ninja Turtles are playable and can even be swapped at any time via the menu. So you can switch directly to Donatello if you need his long-raged Bō or if a Turtle is almost out of HP to prevent capture. Each member of the turtle gang has its own health pool. In addition to the actual side-scroll levels, there are 5 overworld maps, which are quite straightforward at the beginning but become more open later on. On these, you can run around or ride the Party Wagon through New York. This gives the whole game a feeling of a bigger scale in which we enter different houses and sewers. The actual levels consist of dodging the many enemy types, of course also defeating them and jumping sections with a few powerups consisting of optional weapons such as shuriken. So we fight, drive, swim and jump through the levels to put an end to the evil Shredder. Doesn't sound bad at all, does it? I mean the game also looks great for an NES game. Wrong. The game is weak in many areas. The overworld map later becomes a time-consuming trial and error of which houses have to be entered to get the items needed to progress. The menu only shows you where the locations are, which you can enter and a short info from April or Master Splinter about what is needed. Since enemies respawn all the time, every spot that doesn't bring progress is a waste of time and probably also HP. The enemies, especially in the last third of the game, are simply horrible. Sometimes they spawn right in front of you and need several hits to defeat them, which leads to an inevitable hit on us. In some places, you have to jump over a hole or spikes only to be surprised in mid-jump by an enemy that suddenly spawns into the visible screen. This usually not only causes you to lose HP but also to be pushed into a pit or spikes. Often those sections feel like you require prior knowledge of the stages. Something that is not uncommon with arcade machines and their usually very high difficulty in order to pull as many quarters as possible out of the teens' pockets. But here we have a home console game. In all these moments, even when Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1987) throws 5 enemies at you at once, the game never feels difficult but cheap. The fact that the jumping of the four boys is super wobbly doesn't make the aforementioned jumping passages (often over bodies of water or spikes) any easier. The bosses are also semi-well-designed. Most of them have projectiles and run towards us, which is difficult to dodge depending on the stage. But especially the last boss, who is stunned by our blows, I defeated on the first try without him having a chance to hit back. What? This game could really have used a lot more polish and a lot more fairness. At the end of my almost 2 hours, I have to say that I rarely had any real fun. Instead, swearing was the order of the day and exclamations such as "How was I supposed to know?", "Of course, he spawned right in my face!" and "What were they thinking!" were not uncommon. And don't even get me started on the underwater level. Better put the game aside and play Turtles in Time, which is worlds better.

Ever since the late 80s and the early 90s, there have been a LOT of video games made based on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and as you would expect, a lot of them range heavily in quality, going from the ones that are considered to be some of the best of their respective genres that hold up extremely well to this day, to the kinds of games that should stay hidden deep down in the ooze-filled sewer that it came from. In particular, back in the day when the TMNT games were primarily made by Konami, a good number of them are remembered as being pretty great, such as the case with TMNT: Turtles in Time, which is considered to be one of the best beat-’em-ups ever made. However, not all of the TMNT games they made hold up as much as that title, such as with the case of the very first TMNT video game, made on the NES.

I have heard about this game from time to time before, and out of all of what I have heard, none of it has been in a positive light, and judging from footage that I have seen of it, I could kind of get it. Nevertheless, I went in with an open mind, as I usually do for most of the games I cover on here, and upon playing yet… yeah, you know what, I agree, this sucks. I will say, I don’t hate the game THAT much, as it didn’t turn out to be as bad as I thought it would be, but yeah, I could tell just by playing it that it definitely needed more time in the oven, so that it didn’t turn out to be as rotten as this was.

The story is basically just a bunch of TMNT shenanigans, ultimately leading to you stopping the Shredder, which is basically ever TMNT story ever (at least from what I know), so it isn’t that big of a deal, the graphics are… fine, I guess, although they don’t really shout “TMNT” all that much, like they should, the music isn’t too great, but it is somewhat memorable, and the tracks aren’t that bad, so I approve of them, the control is a bit of a mess, which I will go into further later on, and the gameplay is mostly what you would expect from a licensed NES game, but mixed together with a spoonful of bullshit to really feel like the legit licensed NES experience.

The game is primarily a 2D action platformer, where you will travel through many different environments and stages, starting out with a top down perspective, which doesn’t really serve any purpose other than to get you from Point A to Point B, while also throwing enemies to keep you on your toes. The real bread and butter lies in the 2D aspect when you enter sewers and buildings, where you then must travel through said sewers and buildings, taking out many different enemies, getting secondary weapons and health items to help you out, switching inbetween the four turtles to get an advantage over whatever situation you are facing, and taking down plenty of bosses from the show and comics (or not from those) along the way.

It is what you would expect, but I will say, I do like the amount of stuff that this game has going for it, with the secondary weapons and playable characters. Some of the secondary weapons are actually pretty damn useful, and in terms of the turtles, each one has their own unique health bars and stats, making them not feel too much just like an alternate skin of the same character, and in some instances, like with the second boss fight (you know the one), certain characters will triumph where others don’t. With all that being said, these features doesn’t save what is ultimately a pretty poorly constructed mess of a game.

Is it just me, or does controlling the turtles themselves feel really awkward and clunky? It’s not to say the controls themselves are bad, but the movement and actions that you can pull off with them feel very weird to execute, either not going at the proper speed you feel it should, or the jumping physics being pretty damn awkward, with several instances in the game having moments where you need to have pixel-perfect jumps in order to cross some gaps, which is never fun to deal with. Not to mention, the level design in general is pretty fucking bad, with the primary fault of it being how cramped it all feels. The sprites for the turtles, as well as most of the other enemies for that matter, are pretty big in comparison to everything else, and there are plenty of moments throughout the game where there is no room for you to really move around or crouch when next to an enemy, meaning that you will more then likely get hit at least once if you want a chance of making it past that part. This is also in conjecture to parts of the levels that are just designed pretty poorly, such as the part where you can just walk over a gap in the floor that is placed there for seemingly no reason.

And of course, just like with many of Konami’s titles, as well as plenty of other NES titles, the game is pretty hard, but not too hard. Given how you are given plenty of chances to get secondary weapons, and the fact that you have four separate characters to play as with different stats for each, you do have enough to where you can get through most situations just fine, but then there are instances where the level design and the enemies can be a huge pain in the ass. The biggest example I have seen anyone talking about is one example that is found in Stage 2, where you are swimming through a room filled to the brim with electric… things on the sides of the walls, and you are given such a small amount of space in order to swim through it all. This unforgiving level design, coupled with the heavy controls that I mentioned earlier, make it seem almost impossible to get through this section without taking a hit. Thankfully, I was playing through this game on the Cowabunga Collection, so I had the rewind feature to help make things a lot less stressful, but even still, it is something that holds the game back.

Overall, while it does have gameplay features that made the experience less stressful all throughout, this is still a pretty piss-poor first attempt at bringing the iconic turtle team into the world of video games, and I can definitely see now why many people say that this game is pretty bad. Thankfully though, Konami would get better about this, and plenty of the other TMNT games they make afterwards would be pretty damn great… for the most part. So, let’s all just pretend that this game doesn’t exist, and we can just consider the first arcade TMNT game to be the first one, ok? Alright.

Game #258

There are some classic memes that flow through games and become a part of the language of gaming. Explosive barrels being red, depowering the player after the tutorial, consumables you'll "save for later" but never use, and bad water levels being examples of these tropes.

And if you want a game to blame for starting the "bad water level" trope, it's probably this one.

Game is unfairly punishing in combat, platforming and player guidance, likely due to it being designed in a time where games wanted you to pump endless quarters into machines to progress. It gets 1 bonus star for being nostalgic to me.