Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles IV: Turtles in Time

"How do the turtles brothers do on the SNES?"

During my childhood, I was lucky enough to have a lot of cool TV shows to watch and as a result, I had a lot of fictional childhood heroes. One of those heroes were the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. They were the cool thing back then, and damn it, I still love them now. So just the other day, I popped in my Turtles in Time game for the Super Nintendo, mostly for the nostalgia, and man, that game brought me back to a better time in my life.

So, obviously, you get to choose any of the four ninja turtles at the select screen. I think the best turtle to pick is Raphael, simply because he's the fastest, and in this game, you're gonna need speed because there's so many obstacles in the levels it's ridiculous. Leonardo is probably the slowest turtle, especially when you're going from the top to the bottom of the screen. It would take Leonardo five seconds to get from top to bottom while Raphael would take two seconds, so yeah, Raphael is much faster. The graphics in this game are very good for a console back then. The character models are all very nice, the colors are rich and lively, and the environments look very good as well. The only real complaint I have in regards to the graphics are the life-bars. Sometimes they're a bit hard to see, especially when you're low on health. See, when you're low on health, the light bars disappear, leaving you with dark bars, and they can sometimes be hard to see, since they usually camouflage with the background. So what I would suggest doing while low on health would be to use jump attacks, since it's harder for your enemies to hit you when you're in the air. Mind you, it's not impossible, just tougher to do.

The sounds in this game are superb. The music playing while you're dismantling all those damn ninjas just really sets a great mood. When me and my brother were playing together the other day and fighting those non-stop ninjas, remixes of the classic Ninja Turtles theme song were playing, and man, I nearly cried from the nostalgia. The music is just excellent, and the sound effects are also very well done. Plus, when you beat a level and about to move onto the next level, there's this black background with the boss of the stage in a colored shadow, and text appears above the shadow's head, kinda describing the board's environment. And you may be thinking, what's that gotta do with sound? Well, some guy reads the text, and it just sounds awesome. Yes, even that sounds awesome.

And lastly, we have the controls. The controls are very good, and fairly easy to get used to. I say they're fairly easy, because us gamers are now all too familiar with the current generation consoles, such as the Wii, the Xb-ox 360, the PS3, etc. So now, we've got much more buttons on the controllers and we have the analog sticks, which are now being used in games more than ever, so with Turtles in Time, you might have a tough time moving your turtle at first. I know I did. See, I was so used to using the analog stick to move my character that I ended up pushing more than one D-Pad direction at once, and as a result, my turtle didn't move. At first, I just thought the control was a bit awkward since I couldn't move my turtle much, but then I realized it was because I was pushing more than one D-Pad direction at a time. So the controls are good. No worries about them.

Overall, I love this game. It's the perfect arcade game. It keeps you pumped the whole time, with great graphics and even better sound. It's the classic beat 'em up genre, and it'll keep you entertained. Even when you beat the game, you can play it over again. That's what I did. The game is fun for all ages, and if you could find it, I'd recommend picking it up. I hope this review helped you.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 06/28/07