Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

"Did We Find the Technodrome Yet?"

Say there, were you a fan of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon series when you were a child? Why, that's great. If you should happen to find an old tape with an episode or two on it, do yourself a favor and don't watch it. As it turns out, our parents were right; the series was terrible. The animation was sub-par, and the scripts were banal, even for a children's animated series. Not to mention that the whole thing was nothing more than a cheap excuse to sell toys, a ploy that... well, worked. I have dozens of old Donatello figurines rotting away in a closet somewhere.

That being said, let's talk about the arcade game, perhaps one of the best things to come out of the TMNT phenomenon - Konami put forth noticeable effort to make this arcade adaptation a fun game. Considering that you could have slapped the Ninja Turtles logo on any old piece of crap at the time, and people would have still plunked quarters into it, this is really saying something.

The gameplay is - well, it's a scrolling fighter. After Final Fight hit it big, these babies came a dime a dozen. It was the most popular genre to use when you needed a video game adaptation of a television series: it was used for The Simpsons, Bucky O'Hare, you name it. Regardless, TMNT was one of the first of this parade of games, and it's done fairly competently. You fight through hundreds of Foot Soldiers, you fight the boss, you move on.

The graphics seem simplistic by today's standards, even when considering the limitations of arcade games at the time. But they're pleasantly quaint, with the blank expressions on the turtles and the exaggerated features on the Foot Soldiers. There's time for some visual humor, too: If a Foot Soldier or a Turtle is hit and flies into a building, he smacks along the side and painfully slides off. We're not talking comedy gold here, but it's a nice touch. One interesting flaw in the graphics concerns a problem with correct size and perspective. Parking meters tower over your head. When you go to rescue April, you find her screaming alongside a desk which is way too big for any reasonable person to use. I suppose the creators of the sprites weren't on the same page as the creators of the backgrounds.

The music is cute and catchy - and all songs incorporate the familiar TMNT theme at some point. Can't really fault them on that though - such was the tradition with any game featuring the Turtles, even the original, perplexing NES game.

The game was produced in 1989; that fact makes the digital voices seem much more astounding. Sure, Final Fight had grunts, shouts, and the occasional "Oh my God," but TMNT had full one-liners all over the place. They couldn't get the original animated series actors, and they were left with some pretty terrible voice work, but just that they exist in such high technical quality is amazing. "Do not resist us," say the Roadkill Rodneys in tinny, mechanical voices. "They ain't gettin' any prettier," your turtle quips before Bebop's fist makes contact with his jaw. And maybe it was just me, but hearing Baxter Stockman yell out "Yippie-kai-yay" still makes a smile cross my face.

As with most arcade games of that era, many aspects of the game are amusingly nonsensical. The stages are divided into "scenes" that don't have titles so much as they have descriptive quotes about what you'll be doing - and they all end in two exclamation points. Scene 1 takes place in a burning apartment building, and is titled "Fire! We Gotta Get April Out!!" Of course, the Turtles completely disregard anyone else that might be living there, unless the Foot Clan helpfully got everyone else out of the building first.

Scene 3 is "Let's Get to That Secret Factory!!" I mean, never mind the fact that this is the first we've heard of said factory. (That's some secret you've got there, Shredder.) My personal favorite is Scene 5, "We Gotta Find the Technodrome!!" This proclamation, of course, taking place several seconds after you found and entered the Technodrome. Whether these gaffes are due to poor translation or just plain laziness, I'm not sure. But hey, it's just a video game.

As it stands, you won't be totally blown away by TMNT, as the scrolling fighting game was done more dynamically elsewhere - especially in comparison to this game's sequel, Turtles in Time. But for sheer enjoyment, this is always a good bet - and then there is the fine port to the NES, surprisingly expansive for an 8-bit world. The show may have been awful, but if anything proved that "Turtle Power" did indeed exist, it was this game.

This review of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles arcade game is Copyright 2004, Ian Pugh

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 11/15/04, Updated 11/15/04