Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

"One of the few games you CAN'T BEAT without a Game Genie"

Remember that old fad of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles before FOX got ahold of them and tried to make them appeal to a crowd that was in love with shows like Pokemon or that Yu-Gi-Oh! show? Yup, the TMNT's had it all: cheesy merchandise, a hit TV show, several movies, and tons of action figures. At this time, Konami was known as Ultra Games, and was the only company to be able to grab ahold of the TMNT game industry. This was probably their only flop in the TMNT series besides the Gameboy games that were better than this one too.

This TMNT was much different than the rest of the series. The rest of the series were based on the supierior Arcade machine (if you ever saw one, you'd seriously know what I mean), and were all much better no matter what system it was on. Although this TMNT was different, it did have it's moments...

Story
Somehow, the Shredder comes out of hiding and manages to steal TV Reporter April 'O Neil right in plain sight in the middle of the night infront of our Ninja Foursome. Master Splinter raises a finger at April and it places you back at the title screen. Great story!! Although it does shift a bit later on..

Gameplay
HERE'S WHAT WRECKS THIS GAME! As you see with other reviews, the only characters worth using ARE INDEED Don and Leo. Raph is just too dang weak, although he does tear up the metal enemies somewhat quickly, and Mike likes to party too much making him weak until he gets down to half his life, then gets just a tad bit stronger than Leo. Don can pretty much kill anything with one hit or two, and Leo is better for all the hits as his Katana's can kill stuff in a few hits, but only a bit stronger than Raph's or Mike's.

The action is all side scrolling, with the normal NES glitches of not being powerful enough to put too many enemies on the screen at once. This does lead to problems though, cause once the standard 4-5 enemies show up on the screen, everything starts to slow down, the excess enemies go invisible but are still there, so you can get hit by NOTHING. And some of the enemies are just too strong with their glitched attacks that can kill you in several hits if you get too close due to the lack of hit detection in this game. An example is getting into a fight with the brain walker thingys. They can shoot you with their laser, and if you are too close at the time, you'll get hit by them as soon as the little noise goes away, then you'll keep getting hit until the thing walks past you or you get to kill it. Quite bad really.

Then the variance of the enemies is really all random. In one area of the game, you could run into a different set of enemies just by walking into the room at a certain moment. An example of this is climbing up a ladder after fighting the purple set of enemies, only to run into the red set of enemies! The game put their enemies into color coded sets, which all varies from different moments you walk into the room, purple being the weakest, and the dinosaurs being the hardest. You can either have an easy game, or a ridiculously hard game just depending on the set of baddies you run into.

Controlls
Arrgh! That phrase is one that you may be listening to quite often in this game, just due to the crappy controls in this game! The problem is that the controls don't have a great detection on how well your jump is. An example of this is trying to leap over a small chasm in a level onto another platform. If you jump too high, you'll hit the wall and fall into the hole, and if you jump too low, you won't make it at all. Unfortunately, instead of using the mechanics that made Mario's jumping abilities so great, Ultra decided to use some crappy jumping ability that depends on the pressure you use on the 'A' button. So if you mash in the button at full power, you'll jump at full power. If you press it a smidge, then you'll only jump that far. It's all in the thumbs, and that's not good enough for some people in this game.

Otherwise, the movement, the weapons, and maps are all good.

Music and Sound
I can still remember quite a bit of music from this game. Call me a nutjob, but I do like video game music, and the music from this game brings back memories of going to my Aunts house and playing this for long periods of time. The sound was all of Ultra's best at the time. You had the little jump noise, the weapons all sounded different (you can't really tell the Sai from the Nunchucks though), and the enemies made no noise at all except for the little buzz noise you made when you touched them. They all made a small squish noise when you blasted through them too.

Replay?
Only for the first few levels of the game. Ultra made the last level too ridiculously hard for even a hardcore gamer to beat it. This wouldn't be so bad if they eased up on the difficulty of the only fixed set of enemies at this section of the game. Otherwise, you can replay the first 4 levels over and over again, cause those are the only ones you'll have the most fun in.

Should I waste my dollar on this?
Since it IS only one dollar in most of your used game stores, what the heck? You get one of the hardest games in the world with some replay for a buck! And those 10-10-2-20 commercials all say you can't get anything for a buck...HA!

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 03/08/03, Updated 03/08/03