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Humpday Gaming: The Sorta Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Compendium

The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles basically went hand in hand with my childhood. Sure, I was into He-Man and Transformers as a young 80’s kid, but when the Turtles hit, there was no turning back. Toys, clothes, cartoons, I was obsessed with all of them. Actually, I think I still have every issue of the official TMNT Magazine that was published (yes, there was an official TMNT magazine). Yeah, I was a pretty big loser, and I’d be lying if I said that I don’t have a complete set of Turtles figures sitting on my work desk right now. Some things never change, I guess. Especially the loser aspect.

Alas, we’re not here to discuss how big of a loser I am (that’s what the rest of this site is for). Instead, today we’ll be taking a look at a good chunk of most of the games that featured the Turtles. As a kid (and to some extent as an adult), I was all over any game that featured the Turtles, shitty or not. Thankfully, most were just fine, minus a few that should probably be forgotten to time. Keep in mind that this isn’t a complete list, it’s just the games I have personally played. So if you’ve played one that isn’t on this list, feel free to chime in down in the comments. I’d love to hear what I missed. So let’s get started, dudes!

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles NES

Picture it: I’m coming home from third grade on the bus one day, and my friend next to me makes the terrible decision to show me what he had been hiding in his backpack all day. Out of that fucker’s backpack comes an almost brand new NES cartridge that just happens to be the first and only TMNT game on the Nintendo at the time. Needless to say, I shit my pants. Probably quite literally, actually. For the rest of the trip home, I went out of my way to promise this kid pretty much anything he could ever want from me for the rest of his life if he would just let me borrow it for one night. I had essentially become that druggie that would suck your dick for just one hit. It was pathetic. I didn’t give a damn, though, as this was the ONLY Turtles game in existence. In my world, LIVES depended upon me being able to play this damn game THAT NIGHT. Eventually he gave in (possibly from sheer fear), and I stepped off the bus ready to spend a night with what could only be the greatest video game ever made. I ran in the house, popped that fucker in, took it back out, blew in it, popped that fucker back in, and was totally ready to have my ass blown through the wall. Twenty minutes later, I turned off the NES, and probably cried for a good ten minutes.

TMNT on the NES would go down in history as one of the most unnecessarily over-complicated games ever made. Take for example what most kids wanted from a Turtles game at the time:

• Play as the Turtles
• Beat up the Foot Clan

That was IT. That’s ALL YOU NEEDED TO DO. That’s what the NES TMNT should have been. We would have played it for days straight even if it had one stage, as long as that one stage let us do those two things mentioned above. Instead, what we got was some weird hybrid action/adventure game that had almost nothing to do with the actual Turtles. What should have been a simple beat-em-up came complete with overhead maps, weird non-linear exploration, enemies that had nothing at all to do with TMNT, and hard as nails difficulty. What the fuck is this shit? I just wanna kill ninjas with Donatello. Not explore an overhead map, while spending hours going in circles, dying every other second due to constantly respawning enemies. It’s like someone tried to make scrambled eggs, but added fifty extra steps in to do so. Just scramble the fucking eggs, Konami!

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles The Arcade Game

The seminal Turtles game that had kids lining up for days to play it. After the load of shit that was the NES TMNT, the arcade version came out to make us all remember how right you could make things. Everything about it was perfect. The graphics were amazingly detailed, all the turtles and enemies were perfectly rendered, the animation made it look straight out of the cartoon, and it was fun as Hell to play. Especially with four other people. This game is actually one of the few games that really mean a lot to me in terms of nostalgia. I used to visit my cousin’s family for spring break every year, and it just so happened that the local Wal Mart by their house had a TMNT cabinet sitting right inside. We would save up quarters for weeks, and then when it came time, we would single-handedly waste about twenty dollars in an hour trying to play through it. We didn’t care though, Shredder needed to go down. Even if it took a pile of quarters the size of a small car.

The game hasn’t been ported to too many systems, sadly enough. The last one being not too long ago to Live Arcade by Ubisoft (The current owners of the TMNT game license). It’s a solid port that is only tainted by the super retarded decision by Ubisoft to replace the original character select screen with portraits containing the newer CG-ized turtle crew. It’s a baffling addition, but once you get into the game proper, all is right with the world. It’s still just as fun now as it was standing in a Wal Mart, playing it for hours on end with my cousin.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2: The Arcade Game NES

Konami must have recieved the message loud and clear with the first NES game, because the second is exactly what we wanted in the first place: a port of the damn arcade game. Admittedly, it doesn’t look anywhere near as good as the arcade, but it played just fine. Finally, we had a great TMNT game on the NES. Konami even went one better by adding in a few new stages that wasn’t in the arcade, while stretching out the rest of the stages by more than double. This made it so that the game went on fooooreeeveeerrrr. Later in life, I would learn to hate when developers did that shit to artificially lengthen a game. At the time though, it was the best thing that had ever happened.

Bonus awesome points: The game actually came with a coupon for a free pizza from Pizza Hut. It was like the ten year-old kid equivalent to winning the lottery while getting a blowjob.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Fall Of The Foot Clan Gameboy

This was probably one of the first games I ever got for the original Game Boy. I remember the game fondly, but the game isn’t so great. It’s nothing more than a very basic beat-em-up in the form of something like Kung-Fu: walk to the right, hit guys as they jump in, do some light platforming, and so on. It’s as by the numbers as they come. One highlight was that the graphics were pretty great for the time. The characters were all pretty large, and everything looked like it should from the TV Show. I guess you would probably expect that for a Turtles game, but for a time when most Game Boy games required a magnifying glass to make out various stuff on screen, this was pretty neat. I also forgot how ridiculously short it was. The game only had like, five stages total, I think. You could beat the entire game in less than half an hour, which honestly didn’t bother me a bit at the time. Like I said, I wasn’t picky with my Turtle games at that age. It did the basics well enough to distract me from realizing that I paid forty bucks for a game that could be beat in twenty minutes. At the end of the day, Turtles on Game Boy was a win for any twelve year-old that picked it up. Just don’t play it now.

Fun fact: If you manage to take the twenty or so minutes it takes to beat the game, you’ll be presented with the quickest credit roll of all time. Literally, like five Asian guys made this game. Two western names also appear, but I’m going to guess they were nothing more than localization. How times have changed.

Turtles In Time Arcade/SNES

Turtles In Time is that one game where everything came together just right to produce one of the greatest beat-em-ups ever made. It is without a doubt the apex of the Turtle games, claiming its place among the greats of Final Fight, and Streets of Rage 2. The game took the base of the original arcade game, and ran with it until it couldn’t go any further. Throwing out amazing amounts of enemies, great humor, and all new ways to beat the hell out of the Foot Clan (throwing dudes at the screen is still incredibly satisfying). Add in the whole time travel aspect, and it made for an amazingly diverse game, even when you were doing the same thing over and over the entire game. Bottom line: it was just amazing fun, and shouldn’t be missed by anyone that enjoys the beat-em-up genre.

Konami also did itself one better with the home port, by again adding additional stages to the SNES version not seen in the arcade game. It also didn’t hurt that this was one of the best arcade ports ever made at the time. I probably rented this game more from my local video store than any other game. This fucker had a vice-grip on my weekly allowance. That’s probably about the best compliment I could ever give it. A timeless classic through and through.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Tournament Fighters SNES

One of the last Turtles games made for quite a while, TMNT The Tournament Fighters was Konami’s chance to step into the uber-competitive fighting game genre that was all the rave with the kids during the 90’s. To its credit, it’s not terrible. It’s just mostly completely misguided in what it’s trying to do. For one thing, no one ever cared about any character that wasn’t a turtle. Really, who among you had been having fevered fantasies to beat ass with Aska? And just who the fuck IS Aska? Sure it was cool to be Shredder, but the rest of the cast was a who’s who of crap from the Turtles toy line (Armagonn? Really? He was in goddamn Archie comics for Christ sake). What you ended up with was a fighting game that kids got tired of real quick from fighting each other with the same five characters over and over. Sad, since the fighting engine was decently solid. Too bad most kids didn’t give a damn.

TMNT 360/PC

Don’t judge me, but I totally played through TMNT on the 360. It’s not a horrible game, but it’s not really a good one either. It’s about what I would consider a kids game to be, IE: mindless, easy, and generally completely mind-numbing for anyone older than six. Even then, I have to wonder if games like TMNT are shortchanging kids, since if you sat me down in front of this game as a kid, I’d have been bored with it within an hour. The game is dead simple, going back and forth between incredibly linear Assassin’s Creed-like traversal, to brawler type shit. The weird thing is just how seperated those two things are, as there are zero enemies to fight while you traverse through the level. When you do hit a point where enemies are though, it’s like a bizarre caged in section of the stage that you have to clear before you go back into jumping around the level. It is also completely bizarre as to why I am spending this much time telling you about a boring-assed kids game that was a cash in for a shitty movie. Don’t play this.

Turtles In Time Live Arcade/PSN

A few weeks ago in the Humpday Gaming blog, I made the following comment about Ubisoft games in general:

“Lately all of their games seem to be built by robots in a manufacturing plant. I can’t quite put my finger on it as to why I feel like that. I guess it’s like staring at a dead body: it’s still a person and exists, but there’s no life left to it. That’s where Ubisoft rushes in to electronically move the body’s arms and legs around while shooting off fireworks in an effort to trick you into thinking that thing is still alive and well, but it’s not fooling anyone.”

This perfectly describes Turtles In Time on Live Arcade and PSN, and it just happens to have been made by Ubisoft as well. It’s a soulless remake of a game that had more personality in its character select screen than this remake has for the entire game. Now I’m not one of those old game grouches that shits on anything remade in modern times (Bionic Commando was amazing), but what we have here is just an unfortunate disservice to the original. The bright colors, sharp animation, and great music of the original has been replaced by a drab, hard to play clone that can’t even get the basics right. The only fun you’ll have playing through this is remembering the fun you had playing the original.

TMNT Smash Up Wii

One of the most recent and strangest attempts at a Turtles game. It’s like someone at Ubisoft noticed that no one played TMNT Tournament Fighters, and decided to rectify that by making yet another fighting game that no one will play. This time, instead of taking cues from Street Fighter, the game is heavily based around Super Smash Bros. Admittedly, it’s an interesting concept that isn’t terribly bad. Then you quickly realize that if you want to play Super Smash Bros, you will probably just play Super Smash Bros. Why pass up that totally solid game in favor of a sort of okay TMNT clone? Not surprisingly, the game sold like shit, and probably went ahead and put the nail in the coffin for the Turtle franchise for quite a while. At least until a new movie is made. IF a new movie is made.

So that’s about all I’ve got. I’m well aware that there were a couple more NES games, and that the Genesis versions of Turtles In Time and Tournament Fighters were vastly different than their SNES counterparts, but I never got to play them. There’s even a really obscure DOS game out there somewhere that I’d love to check out. I also totally skipped over the TMNT games released on the PS2, mostly because I have zero interest in them. Like I said up top though, feel free to post about any of the games mentioned or not mentioned below in the comments.

So until next time, rock on, dudes!

Damnit, I guess this article actually did end up about me being a loser. Fuck you guys.