Developed by Konami and published by Ultra Games in 1989
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Anyone growing up in the late 1980's and early 90's should be familiar with the Teenage Mutant Ninja (Hero) Turtles. What with the cartoon series, comics and a plethora of merchandise, turtle-mania was just about everywhere! In terms of video games, Konami was responsible for developing the brilliant 4-player arcade coin-op, as well as a series of games for the home consoles, including the NES.
In this particular game, the objective is to hunt down the evil Shredder and recover a special 'Life Transformer' gun that has the ability to restore Master Splinter to his human form. The turtles must accomplish other objectives along the way, including rescuing April O'Neil and preventing destruction of the city's damn.
The game is divided into two sections. The first of these is the over-world map where the player moves between various locations, looking for building and other locations that can be entered.
Upon entering a location, the game switches to the the horizontal scrolling/platforming sections of the game that most people will be familiar with. Not all of these stages must be visited to beat the game, but non-essential areas usually contain bonus weapons or power-ups that make the visit worthwhile.
Each side-scrolling section is chock full of bad guys, including droids, insects and all manner of other weird creatures. Touching these baddies will drain your turtle's health quickly, so it's important to deal with them as soon as possible.
One of the neat features about the game is the fact that it's possible to switch to any of the four turtles at enemy time by pressing the start button and selecting the desired character from the right-hand menu. Each turtle has his own independent health bar, so a good strategy is swap turtles when one gets low on health.
As well as health management, each turtle carries his own signature weapons from the cartoon series. Each weapon has it's own strengths and weaknesses, so there is a degree of strategy where the player can choose the most effective weapon to deal with a set of enemies.
In addition to their default weapons, each of the turtles can hold a secondary ranged weapon. These can be found in some of the game's stages, but also from defeated foes. These include shuriken, boomerangs and magic scrolls, which are certainly the most useful (and the rarest). Since a turtle can only carry one of these at a time, any existing weapon will be instantly replaced by the next type that the player touches.
It's also worth mentioning that this is an extremely tough game to beat. Not only are there loads of enemies to beat, but they also respawn - scrolling the screen left or right will often cause many of the enemies to return, so it's a good idea to make sure you don't backtrack through a level unnecessarily.
Of course, it's not possible to talk about this game without mentioning the dam level. The player's turtle must swim around the level in an attempt to locate and defuse a series of time-bombs before they explode. The bombs are usually protected by lightning barriers that cause the player lose health when touched. Getting past these barriers is a matter of patience and timing since the barriers remain down for only a few seconds before reactivating. However, the worst thing about this level by far are the weeds(?) that electrocute you if you touch them. The player has to guide their turtle through a corridor of these weeds with pixel-level precision, else they'll be electrocuted and take a large amount of damage.
The game's visuals are reasonably impressive, with all of the sprites being big, chunky and bold in their designs. I was glad to see that each of the turtles wear masks and pads with the correct colours (unlike some of the other ports where they are all black). However, the game does suffer from pronounced levels of sprite flicker when multiple enemies appear on the screen simultaneously and this can be quite distracting.
As for audio, the NES sound chip churns out a funky selection of chip-tunes that all sound really good. The main intro theme to the cartoon is present and correct, but my personal favourite remains the catchy tune used in the city over-world sections of the game; definitely one to hum along to!
Having completed the game, I'm pretty impressed with the overall quality of the game.The controls and general performance are of a much higher standard, so it's easy to see why it was popular when released. This is a title that demands plenty of patience and practice to beat, but those who take their time and put the effort in are sure to be rewarded.
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