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Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Review
User Submitted Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Reviews
Date: 2008-11-16
Uninspired, Unscructured... Un-Fun
I love the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and their universe (at least the cartoon one), but their first videogame outing - unlike following titles TMNT II: The Arcade Game and TMNT III: The Manhattan Project - is almost an insult to their name. It doesn't even feel like a TMNT game asides from the fact that you control the turtles, and that April, Splinter, Rocksteady, Bebop and Shredder are there. And even that is stretching it a bit.
The game is split into two styles of play: an overview map and a 2-D sidescrolling platformer. Neither, however, is any fun to play. Almost the entire game is spent going through warehouses and sewers. Not a single enemy appears in the cartoons (some say that they are from the original comics, but all the same, they're really uninspired). Rocksteady and Bebop barely even appear, and they are executed so poorly that you can hardly even recognise them. And both pose zero challenge, in full seriousness. The game has zero atmosphere.
It's the gameplay, however, that makes this game so terrible. You can switch between any of the four turtles. However, the play control is terribly sluggish, and the turtles move at a snail's pace. Moreover, Raphael and Michelangelo are totally useless due to their limited range. Only Donatello is playable to some degree, as he can actually attack downwards as well. The jump control is the main offender. During particularly horrendous parts, you have to jump over a gap in the floor with no space whatosever to jump, and unless you line up EXACTLY right, you'll fall through the floor.
The game has no structure at all, either. The overview map is non-linear, but every non-linear game needs to at least HINT where to go. This game does not. There are more dead ends than the labyrinth of Crete. Worse still, there are so many goddamned enemies that it's virtually impossible to get through one section without taking sustained amounts of damage. The numerous mini-bosses don't help matters. What's probably worst of all is that your enemies move faster than you, and some of their weapons can easily knock out large chunks of your energy. That is not challenge; it's plain annoyance.
The third mission is the prime example of the game's flaws. It is a HUGE overworld area with MANY warehouses. Sure, you travel around in the Turtle van with a menacing torpedo gun, but you must enter the warehouses to collect ammo to blast barriers out of the way. Problem is, you don't know where exactly you are going - the pause screen map is so undetailed, it doesn't help in the slightest. This means that unless you're incredibly intuitive or just plain lucky (like I was), you're gonna wander around aimlessly for ages and lose whatever remaining interest you had in the game. Even what follows is little reason to continue (the Rambo-type guys are seriously the most retarded enemies ever).
The game just feels like a huge, uninspired mess that was made a TMNT game at the last second, barely changing anything, in hopes that it could save the appeal - with resulting success. There's just nothing about this game worth playing. There is little motivation to strive through it, because everything is so uninspired. As such, the game feels like an absolute chore to battle through.
Pick TMNT II: The Arcade Game or TMNT III: The Manhattan Project any day over this mess. I sincerely doubt whether the makers of the game even watched an episode of the cartoon. Avoid like the plague.
Date: 2008-01-24
Be prepared to spend some time on this one.
Let me start by saying that I grew up in the age of the NES. I got my Nintendo when I was 9 years old, and my brother and I would play all the time. Anybody who was growing up with me knows that games were hella expensive back then. It was easily $60 to buy a new game, and $6 to rent one for two nights. There was no more sickening feeling than saving all your allowance for months, finally bugging your parents into driving you to Child World, shelling out approximately 120 Fun Dip's worth of cash, and then beating your new game that same night. You felt cheated.
TMNT never cheated anybody. I don't think I had cleared the seaweed in the second stage by the end of my first week. It was a game that got more challenging as you progressed. It was a game that required that you develop strategies and skills. It was a game that was difficult as hell, but winable in one sitting, unlike some other saveless cartridges (Blaster Master, I'm looking in your direction.)
I was obsessed with this game for about 6 months as a kid, and I still dust it off from time to time. If you're the type of person who likes to buy a game, look up the walkthrough and cheat codes on GameFAQs, beat it in an hour and then shuffle your diminished attention span to the next distraction, never play this game. Ever. It will only make you cry. If you're the type of person who focuses on one game at a time and doesn't expect everything to be easy, give it a shot. There aren't any fancy 3D spinning, flashing graphics, you won't be able to tell what more than 5% of the enemies actually are, and there will be multiple points that you will feel aren't remotely fair at first, but all in all it is the most engrossing and enjoyable platform game I have ever played.
Date: 2007-12-01
Difficult, but fun!!!
I first played this game in 1990, when I was 6 years old (ok, I was one year late, but we rented games and tried them out before we go out and spend $50+ on them). I was a big Turtles fan, so I did'nt care. It was fun selecting different Turtles (who varied in speed, damage in Turtle weapons, and range in Turtle weapons), and picking up and using different ninja weapons such as boomerangs, shierikens, and TNT (best weapon), other than your main weapons. Graphics (for its time) were awesome and so was the music score and the controls. I love that. I only gave this game three stars because I do have 3 major complaints about the game.
-1. It was way too difficult. Even with your Nintendo Power Strategy Guide, you had to play this game 50 times to master beating it. I think this game went beyond the levels of difficulty such as how easy it was for the Turtle to die and the random changing groups of enemies throughout the game (making it hard for you to strategize your attack or moves). Even though it had some of the dark elements from the comics, the game was suppose to be for kids so there was no reason for the high levels of difficulty.
-2 Choice of characters was my main problem with this game. The cartoon series was already on their second seaon when they were designing this game. I sense that they were trying to mix in the cartoon series (Bebop, Rocksteady, and The Technodrome) with adding more elements of the darker comics, but when the hell were flying missle balloons, flying robot heads, chainsaw guy, frog man, fireman, butterflies, MechaTurtle and flying astronauts appear in the ninja turtles universe?!? How uncreative!There were alot of Ninja Turtle enemies to choose from, but omitting Krang really took the cake. It was great fighting the moving Techonodrome, but there would be NO TECHNODROME without Krang! I don't think they did the proper marketing research before making and releasing this game.
-3 You don't hear the Ninja Turtles theme music anywhere in the game. What copyright contraints were the developers under!? As a child, I was confused.
Other than the three complaints, the game was playable and it would be much better to use game genie to beat it. I know its cheating, but its more fun that way and it was the only way I was able to beat the game. Although this game was a hit, Ultra/Konami knew they messed up a bit and responded by improving the game play and character selection on the future TMNT titles plus targeting them more for kids because kids were the large fanbase of TMNT.
Date: 2007-07-11
I Think I've Given Up
When I played this game as a kid, I was able to pass level 2, the water level, two times at the most. I figured trying the game again 15 years later with more improved game skills and a walkthrough just MIGHT enable me to beat it. Now I'm thinking there's just no way. I've beaten the original Super Mario Brothers, Pilotwings, Zelda 2, Mike Tyson's Punch-Out, Jurassic Park on SNES, and other extremely challenging games, but this one is just too much.
Still, I'm not all that disappointed. I mean, I'm able to get through level 2 at almost any time now, and I actually made it all the way to level 4. So at least I can do better now than I did 15 years ago, and that's why I bought the game. To see how far I've come.
But I'm not going to make it all the way to finishing the game. It's too difficult. There is NO room for error. None. I've never seen a game where you had to be so accurate with your jumps. I mean you have to actually watch how hard you press the button. If you just barely tap it too hard or too soft, you'll miss your jump. Also, you can't be too far on or off the platform you're jumping from. You've got to press the button at JUST the right second and with JUST the right amount of force as you walk off the platform. And when you miss a jump, you have to fight a whole swarm of enemies you just killed yet another time before you get a chance to try the jump again. This wouldn't be so bad if there were a way to actually master jumping in this game. But there's not. You could try the same jump 3,000 times, and after all that, you'd still be very likely to miss your next attempt, even after all that practice.
For the past few days, I kept getting further and further along in the game every time I played, but I think I've finally had enough. I reached this part where spiked walls come at me, and all I have to do is drop down holes to avoid them. But I lost ALL FOUR of my turtles to those spikes. If the spikes touch you once you're dead. And the holes to drop down are way too easy to walk over because you have to be so darn accurate with how much force you use to tap the control pad. Of course, the spikes move fast enough so that if your timing isn't freakin perfect, you're dead. If you walk over a hole by accident, forget it, the spikes are going to get you. And if you try to be careful so you don't walk over the holes, you won't move fast enough to drop down in time, and you'll die anyway. The lack of room for error is just so frustrating, and its present at so many points in the game. You just get sick of trying to beat it.
And just because I can beat the water level now doesn't mean I can't complain about it. I mean shoot, even when you're WAY far away from the instant death seaweed, the stuff pulls you down like a magnet. And if you try to swim off the top of the screen to deactivate a bomb above, you're pulled down before you reach the top. This drains a whole lot of the miniscule time you have to complete the level. If you waste even 10 seconds fighting this kind of magnetic effect, you've lost so much time that you'll have to just swim through all the dangerous stuff in the level and take loads of damage in order to beat the time limit. Again, the slightest error is completely devestating.
It's easier to get a PHD in quantum physics than it is to beat this game. Gosh, it's depressing. But it has some great graphics and sound at least.
(Update - 7/14/07 Okay, I actually, by some miracle, got all the way to the inside of the technodrome; after getting through all the random BS where you have to hunt for it. Unfortunately all that hunting drained the heck out of my life, and I died shortly after entering the final level.)
Date: 2007-06-27
Bad!!
I had this game as a kid and I rarely played it, now that I'm older I realize why.
Not only is the game insanely ugly, it's also redicolously hard!
Take Raphael, he can't hit his weapon anywhere, it has a range of a millimeter.
The only turtle that was somewhat usuable was the Leonardo, because his sword actually could reach certain things.
The turtles also jumps insanely high, it's hard to stay out of flying monsters reach.
I remember last time I played it, I had very little health left, so I went into a place to pick up pizza that refilled the health points fully.
When I got back out, I had less than what I went in with.
The game is so hard and annoying.
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