365//365: Day 001 – Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (NES) [RRR]

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What I thought back during release….

Being a fan of Ninja Turtles cartoon and movies, this isn’t a very faithful game, but man it’s fun. The turtles all play the same but with a different range of attack and damage spread, but the action is fast and intense. Maybe one of the hardest games I have ever played as well. Right from the get go, I’m being challenged and pushed to extremes. I just wish that the jumping was more precise, and the later stages weren’t so overwhelmingly difficult. Nitpicking aside, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is a seriously challenging game that’s very addictive and entertaining.

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Rating Then: 8.3

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What I think years later….

TMNT has been the subject of ridicule for a number of reasons. James Rolfe of Angry Video Game Nerd fame thought it was a god awful abomination of a game. Many have complained about the infamous seaweed portion of the second stage as being nearly impossible and unnecessary. While I know the game was extremely difficult, I felt that a lot of the panning it has received as of late was unjustified. It’s been years since I’ve played the game, but I’m going into this with fond memories of a fun game with a good look, great music and some of the most difficult stages I had ever played in a video game. Will I find the same enjoyment I found all those years back, or am I in for a shell shock?

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I never really noticed until now that the mood and the look are grimier and darker than the animated series. That’s where most of us first learned of the Ninja Turtles. Most of us didn’t know about the comics, which were more violent and far from the kid friendly party animals we grew up with. The “over-world” has the same ugly deformed characters with simple looking buildings and scenery. Going inside the sewers or buildings, I immediately see a total lack of colors being used. Lots of purple and green abound. The turtles themselves look detailed enough and distinguishable, though just barely. Backgrounds are as simplistic, but workable, as I remembered. I just can’t get over all these freaky looking enemies that never appeared in the animated series. So many flying things and weird upside down ceiling bobbers. There’s really not much here that represents the cartoon.

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Each turtle has their signature weapon, but as always, there’s no reason to ever play anyone but Leonardo and Donatello. They have the best range and damage to their attacks, with Donatello being able to attack an enemy that’s close to his back. The only reason I ever used Raphael and Michelangelo was to go across the harder parts of the game where I had to actually take damage, or the over-world in case an enemy hits me.

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It’s everything I remembered, up until the second level. This is where frustration starts to set in. Now I remember a few jumps being a huge pain to clear, but I didn’t remember where exactly they were. Right before you exit out of the building to get to the top of the dam, you find your first hair pulling jumping segment. The problem is that jumping has a couple of variables – how long you hold the button down and if there is a ceiling above you. Hold the jump button too long with a ceiling above you, and you hit it and drop down short of the other side. If you don’t hold the jump button long enough, you under jump the gap. This comes up several times and is something I remember quite well. I had to attempt a jump over twenty times to clear it. By the time I was able to get to the other side, Donatello was dead, Raphael and Michelangelo have one unit of health and Leonardo has half a life bar.

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One of the reasons why the health on all my turtles is that low is because every time I kill an enemy and advance the screen, if I come back to that same screen, the enemies all respawned. So if I cleared the bottom to the right so I can climb the ladder to walk back to the left across the top, all the enemies I killed when walking by, have magically respawned. So if I miss that jump, I fall back down, have to clear the enemies once again, take some hits, and try once more.

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Now we come to the infamous seaweed section. I remember having trouble here and there, but it was never so severe that I wanted to burn down Ultra Games’ headquarters. My first attempt was to get a feel for it all again, which is almost impossible when one turtle is dead, two have one bar of health and the last one is half dead. Might as well give up and get back to this point. For my second attempt, everyone but Mike is full health. I clear the first 4 bombs without getting touched more than once, which forced me to switch to Raphael. Full health until I got to this part -

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Within seconds, I go from full health (8 units) to near death (2 units). I used to be able to navigate that with only two hits landing. Granted its been years since I’ve done this, that’s just insane! Then there’s this part -

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There’s a patch of seaweed before this, where if you touch it, it’s an instant death. So not only do I have to stay high, but I also have to not stay too high or else I get hit, but the timer is running down. It’s just a crazy series of events culminating into a sped up musical feed and you rushing to the last bomb before it blows up. It’s hectic if anything, and yes, you take a ton of unnecessary damage since you’re rushing through, but it’s not a game breaker. Just a patch of annoyance.

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I have to say though, the music is still really good. No theme song from the TV series is present, but the music selection available is catchy and quite memorable. There’s not a ton of variation between the all, but its as good as its ever been.

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The repetition of clearing your way to one side and having to re-clear because you fell short of your jump starts to lay in thick. When you get past that one jump and onto another section, there’s the sewer section where the spacing between platforms, along with the platforms themselves start to shrink, making jumping a treacherous hell.

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Frustration really starts to set in now. I really don’t remember that many jumps being a hassle. The respawning enemies are quite annoying, especially with no connection to the Ninja Turtle canon from what I can tell. Maybe if I saw more of what looked like Foot Soldiers from the first stage, and Mousers from that first stage as well, I wouldn’t feel like this is overly monotonous.

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I’m having fun with the game though. The problem is it seems like I downplayed how many jumping problems there were back when I first played this. The seaweed wasn’t that bad, but there are way too many jumps that are infuriating. The further I progress, the difficulty seems based more off jump timing and the subsequent retries and re-clearing. The boss battles go from simplistic (stay up on the crates and hold down while pressing B to attack Rocksteady with no worries) to multi tiered madhouse battles (the Technodrome’s several stept battle, which begs the question “Why is the Technodrome in a 1:100,000 scale to the cartoon Technodrome?”) The last stages are a circus of astronaut looking enemies shooting laser beams at you, with corridors that lead you to constant dead ends.

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Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was one of the first five titles I received when I got my Nintendo for Christmas back in 90 or 91. I’ve had fond memories of this game for many many years, and after playing it for the first time in quite a while, I feel sort of let down. What I played before was a fun game with some frustrating moments. While that thought still stands, I feel a lot more frustrated than I ever did before, and the cheap respawning enemy bit became tiresome. I wouldn’t go as far as to say it’s one of the weakest NES games I’ve played. It may not be the cartoon based game you wanted, nor is it the game I remembered from years back, but it’s still worth adding to your collection.

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Rating Now: 7.3