TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES (ARCADE)

First Sonic the Hedgehog and now this. That’s two games in a row that you have not only probably heard of but might well have even played yourself. I’m getting dangerously close to the mainstream. The mainstream from, erm, almost thirty years ago, anyway. Don’t worry, I’m sure I’ll get back to barely-remembered home computer games soon enough, but for today it’s Konami’s 1989 arcade superhit Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles!

A surprisingly bland title screen for such a well-loved game, but not to worry – Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles makes up for it with the game’s attract mode, which is a recreation of the TMNT cartoon’s opening sequence, complete with a portion of the show’s theme tune. It’s the “teenage mutant ninja turtles, teenage mutant ninja turtles” bit you get to hear, with none of the parts of the song that explain the turtle’s personality quirks and that they will cut the evil Shredder no slack. They didn’t need those bits of the song, because Konami have included their own descriptions of each turtle to get you up to speed.

Not that you necessarily need a bio for each turtle. The TMNT franchise has been around for over thirty years now, and if you’re the kind of person who has sought out a TMNT arcade game then you’re probably already well aware that Leonardo leads and Michelangelo is a party dude. Back in 1989, though, the turtles were still getting big off the back of their first animated series – the series upon which this game is based – so there might have been some kids who didn’t know who the turtles were. In fact, I can imagine this game being a lot of kids’ gateway drug to full-blown turtlemania.

Turtle number one is Leonardo, the leader of the gang. We all know he’s the sensible, level-headed member of the team, but I think that description has been influenced by years of newer TMNT media, because from what I remember of the 80s cartoon Leonardo was just as much of a pizza-obsessed dork as the rest of the turtles. Nowadays he really is the leader of the turtles, but back then “leader” was a vanity title. Also, you’d think someone who has dedicated their life to the mastery of Japanese swordsmanship would baulk at the idea of using their treasured blades to slice pizza, but give Leo a break. He’s a hideous green mutant who lives in the sewers, it’s not like he can nip down to Wilko and buy a pizza cutter.

Next up is Michelangelo, the party dude, the turtle most likely to require an intervention at some point in the future. “I just like having fun, dude,” he says as his family and friends gather around him, “it’s not like I have a problem.”

Then there’s Donatello, who nowadays is much more strongly presented as a “nerd,” but back in the day he just “did machines.” The bloke who fixed my tumble drier also “does machines” for a living, but that doesn’t make him a nerd. I will be playing as Donatello last time, because I played as Michelangelo last time I covered a TMNT game and because I’m hoping Donatello’s resentment at being equipped with a stick rather than a cool ninja weapon will translate into a ferocious fighting style.

Lastly there’s Raphael, and his character has changed even more than Leonardo’s over the years: now thought of as the surly, hot-headed rebel of the bunch, in the first cartoon series Raphael was merely a sarcastic, smart-mouthed type. You know the type, you’re always worried that they’re going to invite you to their open-mic stand-up show.
You’ll notice that the turtle’s bios are leaning very heavily on their relationship with pizza. This is hardly surprising, a love of pizza is one of the turtles’ defining traits – but I think it’s mentioned so often because the developers didn’t have much else to work with. Supposedly the game was designed around just the first five episodes of the cartoon, so there wasn’t as much material there as there would be later on: the TMNT cartoon ran for ten seasons, after all. This means that while TMNT does capture a lot of the spirit of the cartoon – in fact, that’s one of the game’s biggest strengths – there are some elements that are surprising in their absence.

The game begins with a fire. The turtles’ friend and confidante April O’Neil is in that building! Being the heroic amphibians they are, the turtles leap into action with no regard for their personal safety and, apparently, no plan for getting to the building beyond “we’ll jump off this building.” That’s either impressive or foolhardy, depending on how much of a turtle’s famous ability for long-jumps the heroes in a half-shell kept during their mutation.

It works out all right for them in the end. Well, mostly. Michelangelo falls on his arse, so it’s a good job I won’t be playing as him. It’d be difficult to fight the evil Foot Clan with a shattered coccyx.

It’s gameplay time, and yes, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is a side-scrolling beat-em-up. It works a little differently to what you might be expecting, what with it being developed at the same time as Final Fight (the game that really consolidated the genre’s “rules”). Still, it’s a familiar mix of walking around, jumping, jump-kicking and using your attacks to pummel the various members of the Foot Clan that get in your way. You can see some Foot Clan ninjas above, resplendent in their purple and white uniforms, with the turtles and the Foot Clan locked in a battle to determine which group are the least ninja-like ninjas of all time. It’s the usual “walk right and punch things” formula, then, except I’m hitting the bad guys with a stick rather than punching them.

It’s been quite a while since I played TMNT properly, and I’ve played a lot of other, more (let’s say) “traditional” brawlers in the interim, so some of the things TMNT does differently are really jumping out at me. One is that there’s no “desperation move,” a special attack activated by pressing both buttons together that knocks down all enemies near you at the cost of some of your health. The turtles do have a move executed by both buttons, but it’s more of a big, jumping swing (Raphael’s is slightly different) that doesn’t attack in 360 degrees, doesn’t make you invincible while it’s active and doesn’t reduce your health. That took some getting used to.

Then there’s the throwing mechanics. In most brawlers, if you walk right into an enemy you’ll grab them, and from there you can usually hit them a couple of time or throw them (or both). Not so in TMNT. There are throwing attacks – in Donatello’s case he picks his opponent up with his stick and flips them over – but I’m not entirely sure how they work. You attack the enemies and most times you’ll just whack them, but sometimes you’ll throw them. I never managed to figure out whether it’s completely arbitrary or it’s somehow related to the enemy’s remaining health, but my best guess is that there’s some kind of hidden “timer” or combo counter and when it’s full your next attack will be a throw. It’s unpredictable, and that might be a problem in other brawlers but TMNT is so fast-paced and hectic that it’s never much of an issue. Plus, if you throw an enemy into a wall, they slam into it and then slowly slide down to the ground, so any issues with the throwing system are redeemed by that graphical flourish alone.

Having reached the end of this (very short) first stage, the turtles have located April. Don’t look too closely at April’s face, it really brings down the otherwise excellent graphics. Instead, let’s enjoy the arrival of Rocksteady, Shredder’s mutated rhino-man minion. In particular, let’s take a moment to appreciate Rocksteady’s driving skills, because he’s arrived here by piloting an underground tunnelling machine with a massive drill on the front. Considering April’s apartment is at the top of a skyscraper, that is one hell of a drive to pop up through her living room floor.

Boss battle time, and I don’t really know what the best way to approach this fight is. “Not from the front” is a good bet, because Rocksteady has a machine gun and he’s not reluctant to use it. Even when I avoided the gun, however, I’d land a couple of hits from what I thought was a safe position, only for Rocksteady to boot me across the room. Hit-and-run tactics seem to be your best option, then, while keeping an eye out for the moments when Rocksteady goes bananas and starts wildly firing his gun in all directions. At least Donatello’s stick gives him some much-needed extra range, and it wasn’t long before I’d poked Rocksteady into submission. Wait a minute, that means I’ve rescued April. So… game over, then?

Nope, never mind: Shredder has appeared and grabbed April before jumping out of a window with her tucked under his arm. Makes you wonder why he bothered setting fire to April’s apartment in the first place, really. Unless the fire was a side effect of drilling though a block of flats with underground excavation machinery. Yeah, it’s probably that.

TMNT’s first stage is short enough to feel more like a prologue than anything, but now that the turtles – well, Donatello, anyway – have hit the city streets we’re into full-length stage territory. There are lots of Foot Soldiers about, so the turtles have been forced to abandon their efforts to remain hidden from the general populace, presumably enjoying the sunlight and air that smells significantly less like human effluent as they crack heads, perform many jumping kicks and repeatedly fall down an open manhole cover because they’re not paying enough attention. That last bit might be down to me, actually.
Helpfully, the Foot Clan have colour-coded their minions so you can tell at a glance what you’re dealing with: purple soldiers use their bare fists, yellow soldiers have boomerangs, white-clad ninjas wield swords. It’s good to be able to differentiate melee troops from their projectile-carrying brethren, at least, and the different colours mean it feels like there’s a little more enemy variation. Like I said, Konami didn’t have much material to draw on when designing TMNT, so there aren’t that many different types of goons: Foot Soldiers, Mouser robots and those uni-wheeled whip-armed robot things are about all you get.

Well well, look at this. Some kind soul has spray-painted the word “Caution” on the floor – either that, or they’ve spend a long time painstakingly arranging a puddle into those letters – to warn me of upcoming danger. But where is the threat lurking? Is it that crumbling corner of the pavement? It does look like a sprained ankle waiting to happen, but I’ve already safely negotiated that particular hazard. Maybe there’s a Foot Soldier with a high-powered sniper rifle waiting off-screen? But then you take a closer look at the billboard in the background and notice it says “Trapcorp” on it.

Yep, the billboard is a trap: walk underneath it and a couple of Foot Soldiers will push it onto your head. How wonderful is it that the billboard literally told you it was a trap? That’s one of my favourite little flourishes I’ve seen in a game for a while. And, even though I knew there was a trap there, the billboard still hit me. Trapcorp do good work. Wile E. Coyote might want to look into switching suppliers.

Waiting at the end of the street is Bebop, the warthog half of the Bebop and Rocksteady tag-team. That’s Donatello insulting Bebop’s appearance in that speech bubble, by the way. Getting socked right in the jaw may be more justified than usual. Also, glass houses and all that, Donny. I don’t think you’re ever going to be appearing on the cover of GQ, are you?
Given that they’re both muscular mutants carrying guns, it’s no surprise that this fight is similar to the one against Rocksteady. Bebop’s got a little more space to move around in, though, and he uses this to try to shoulder-charge you once you get too far away. The basics remain the same, however; wait until he’s finished shooting or shoulder charging, whack him a couple of times, move up or down to avoid his counter attacks and don’t get too greedy – if you try to unload a full combo on Bebop, half-way through he’ll just thump you across the stage.

After dealing with Bebop, it’s back to the sewers. Not back from the sewers, that’s one of the Game Boy TMNT games. Anyway, there’s not much new to see and do here- bad guys attack, you whack ‘em with your ninja weaponry, so on and so forth. There are a few traps, like these spiked gates, and some of the Foot Soldiers enter the fray by climbing hand-over-hand along the pipes in the foreground in a manner that’s about as stealthy and discreet as wearing a big neon sign on their head that flashes “I AM A NINJA” whenever they move. Overall it’s a pretty bland stage, though. If videogames have taught us nothing else over the years, it’s that it’s very difficult to make an interesting sewer level.

I hope you got lots of practise fighting those Mousers, because Baxter Stockman has arrived for the boss battle and he’s brought hundreds of the bloody things with him. In the most egregious example of this game not having enough TMNT material to work with, Stockman shows up in his far-less-interesting “deranged inventor” incarnation. I know, I know, a mad scientist is usually a very welcome character to include but later in the show Baxter Stockman is transformed into a half-mad-scientist / half fly monster abomination and we can all agree that would be a much better boss fight. Instead what we get is Stockman flying around in a robot capsule thing – after bellowing “Yippee-I-ay!” at you, the weirdo – and throwing Mousers into the fray. You can attack the Mousers but they’ll just keep coming, so you might as well focus on Stockman. The problem with that approach, and this might just be me, but I had trouble lining up my attacks. It’s because he’s flying, I never seemed to be on the right horizontal plane even with Stockman’s shadow working as a guide. Oh well, it’s not an especially fun battle but neither is it terrible. It’s just kinda… there. And now I’ve finished it. Onwards!

The villains pop up between stages to let me know they’re still holding April hostage. Thanks for that, chaps. I might have forgotten what I was doing otherwise. I notice that Baxter Stockman isn’t with you. I assume he was killed during the previous battle. You have my condolences.

More street fighting now, except all of the player characters are musclebound green freaks and not just Blanka. It’s all motoring along at a fair old clip, and both the turtles and the Foot Soldiers are speedy and agile. Still, the combat itself doesn’t feel quite right. It’s definitely fun, and maybe it’s because it’s impossible to play TMNT without viewing it through the prism of all the other side-scrolling beat-em-ups I’ve played, but there’s something a little off about it. For one thing, it doesn’t feel very solid. It’s a difficult concept to explain, but there’s little sensation of weight behind your blows, perhaps due to the game’s sometimes tinny sound effects. Then there’s your standard combos – in most beat-em-ups, once you hit an enemy with the start of your combo they’re stuck there while you unleash your entire combo on them. In TMNT, however, the enemies can interrupt your combo sometimes, and this seems to be especially true when you’re playing as Donatello because of his slightly slower attacks. You can also move while you’re comboing, so if you’re holding the joystick when attacking your turtle will slide around a bit in between each attack. It adds up to gameplay that feels a touch loose, a hair floaty, but because it’s such an all-action, high-impact spectacle you’re left with very little chance for it to become a problem.

Bebop and Rocksteady are back. I’m happy enough with that, I like Bebop and Rocksteady. They were good in Turtles Forever, anyway. It’s a bit of a pain having to fight them both at the same time, especially as they both have guns, but on the plus side they’ve got a move where they both charge at the same time and smash into each other face-first. Being a rhino, I reckon Rocksteady will have come out of that collision better than Bebop.

April has been rescued! You could see her in the background of the previous fight, actually. Bebop and Rocksteady probably should have left her back at the Technodrome, really, but she’s free now and she rewards Donatello with a kiss on the head. Donny doesn’t look much like he’s into it, does he? Then again, why would be? Not many people would want to kiss a mutant turtle, and presumably it works the other way around. If you’re about to send me links to certain website with pictorial evidence that some people do want to make out with the ninja turtles, please keep it to yourself. We both know it’s out there, let’s just leave it at that.

Ah yes, the secret factory. So secret, in fact, that this is the first I’m hearing about it.

The Foot Clan Air Force is suffering from cutbacks, I see. I wonder what transgressions these poor ninjas made to be ordered into battle carrying bombs over their heads? It can’t be “being completely ineffectual in stopping the turtles,” because then the entire Foot Clan from Shredder down would be up for court-martial.
So, the turtles make their way to the secret factory by walking right down the middle of the highway, despite the previous stage showing that they own a van. Okay, sure, whatever, but that does leave them prone to being run over.

Say what you will about the Foot Clan, but they know how to ride in style.

Now we know where the Ninja Air Force’s budget went, they’ve spent it all on these one-man attack helicopters that are unsuited to carrying large ordnance. Donatello is riding a skateboard now, because of course he is. I wonder when the skateboard went from being shorthand for cool to shorthand for trying to be cool but failing? About five nanoseconds after the first advertising exec signed off on a skateboard-riding mascot, I suppose. That won’t bother the turtles, mind you: they love skateboarding, especially rocket skateboarding, because slapping a jet engine on a wheeled plank of wood is the best way to get through the sewers quickly.
It might look like this stage is trying to do something new and exciting, and I guess it is trying, but it doesn’t really work. The skateboard’s always directly under your two-toed feet so it’s not like you have to worry about falling off – all it means is that you have to spend the entire stage doing jumping attacks. It’s all a bit of a pain, really.

Oh, now the Turtle Wagon shows up. Coulda saved me a lot of time and frustration there, lads.

You know what? I’m just going to come out and say it - turtles shouldn’t be allowed to drive. Think about it, there’s no way they’ve got licenses. I’m sure the DVLA would agree that they’re a menace to themselves and others.

While the turtles were busy causing major delays on the city’s roads, Splinter has managed to get himself kidnapped. “We gotta save Splinter,” says Donatello, before standing still and letting the Mousers carry his master away. Good ninja reflexes there, Donny. Very sharp. It’s odd, because it’s not like the turtles need a rescue mission to motivate them, the desire to slap Shredder around should be more than enough to get them moving.

This’ll be the secret factory, then. It features the same Foot-fighting action as the other stages, and it’s particularly notable for featuring a bunch of these spear-carrying Foot Soldiers. They are a colossal pain in the backside, because not only do the spears give their melee attacks far greater range than even Donatello’s whackin’ stick, but they can also throw their spears at you for a projectile attack. I think I lost more health to these pricks than I did to the swarm of gun-toting attack helicopters. Oh, and there are more traps than ever in this stage, notably the mechanical-looking things on the platform below Donatello’s feet. Those are laser beam emitters that damage you if you stand in front of them, so in this case the machines did Donatello.

Halfway through the stage, Shredder sends up one of his drill machines packed with laser-spraying, insectoid drones. I’m sure Shredder doesn’t think they’ll actually stop the turtles – they certainly don’t pose much of a challenge and to call it a boss fight would rather devalue the rest of the game’s bosses. I think he just sent them up to annoy the turtles, then. Well, it didn’t work. Now I’m not on a skateboard I’m having too much fun to get annoyed.

The stage’s real boss is this curiously bird-faced rock soldier. One of Metroid’s Chozo statues gone rogue? Maybe. All I know is that being made of granite doesn’t prevent him from taking damage when I bash him with my stick, which you’d think would be entry number one on the “reasons why being a stone soldier is awesome” list. Anyway, the stone soldier fights very similarly to Bebop and Rocksteady: he’s got a gun (a flamethrower, in this case) and he’ll hit you with a powerful strike if you get greedy with combos or have the temerity to jump towards him. The same tactics for defeating him apply, you just have to be a bit more careful. Before he’s reduced to decorative aquarium gravel, however, take a good look at his flamethrower. That is definitely the Pulse Rifle from Aliens mixed with, erm, the flamethrower from Aliens. Maybe Konami knew they were going to be starting work on an Aliens arcade game right after TMNT came out so they figured they’d get in some practise drawing the movie’s weapons.

Oh, I get it – it’s called the “secret factory” because it makes secrets. Secrets like the Technodrome, the mobile fortress belonging to Shredder’s boss, Krang. That’ll be the final stage, then. I wish more final stages took place in enormous spherical death-tanks with robots eyeballs sticking out of the top.

Well, this shouldn’t take long.

The inside of the Technodrome is about what you’d expect: lots of vaguely sci-fi-looking scenery and dozens of Foot Soldiers. Here, you can see a Foot Soldier is about to harm Donatello by throwing a spear into his back. You’d think the one thing the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles would be safe from is spears in the back, but the ways of ninjitsu truly are mysterious.
There are also a lot of traps in this stage. Electricity blasters, gun turrets, freeze rays, it’s like a Bond villain’s jumble sale. I’m happy for all these deathtraps to be here, because it certainly enlivens proceedings. Some of the earlier stages were a little bland, especially the sewer, so more stuff to avoid is fun. I had enough chances to use the environment against the Foot Clan – by kicking traffic cones at them or detonating exploding oil drums or opening fire hydrants – that a bit of turnabout actually does feel like fair play.

TMNT even mixes up the standard beat-em-up “ride an elevator while enemies jump in” section by replacing the goons with big steel balls. That made a nice change, mostly because I didn’t have to worry about getting a spear in the back. Plus the turtles can jump really high in this game, so it’s not much of a challenge to avoid the balls.

Here comes another boss, and in fact the game is all bosses from here on out. This one’s another rock bloke – General Traag, to be precise. The fight got off to a bad start, because I was standing next to the door when Traag kicked it open at the start of the battle. Then it got worse when I tried to circle around him and accidentally touched the laser grid covering the now-open doorway. The look of sheer misery on Donatello’s skull is going to haunt me for a while.
So, another day, another rock man. This one also has a gun. I honestly can’t remember if there’s any differences between Traag and the last rock man I fought, other than Traag wearing kicky purple boots. They’re both got the prominent rocky codpieces, I know that much. As with the other rock man, and most of the bosses in the game, it’s more hit-and-run fighting only with more running than hitting. If you’re trying to get through the fight safely, it can take quite a long time, which makes sense when you’re trying to destroy a walking boulder by hitting it with a wooden stick. It doesn’t make for the most thrilling gameplay, though.

Once you’ve beaten Traag, it’s time to face Krang! You know, Krang, the alien brain-creature riding around inside the belly of a bald robot wearing underpants and suspenders? Krang is Shredder’s boss, so it’s a little odd that we haven’t seen him in the game before now and he wanders out of the teleporter screen with very little fanfare. Maybe Konami were trying to keep his appearance a surprise. By the way, Shredder built Krang’s robot body, which tells you a lot about how highly Shredder regards Krang.
As for the fight, at the risk of repeating myself it’s yet another cautious affair where getting a single hit in then running away is your best strategy. Krang attacks with eye beams and a hefty kick, but because he’s bigger and consequently slower than the other bosses he’s probably the easiest one in the game to beat. It’s something of a disappointment, and he was much cooler when he appeared in his giant mode in TMNT IV: Turtles in Time, but just look at his joyous, squishy little face in the screenshot above. Krang’s having such a good time that it’s impossible to be too disappointed.

With nary a moment to draw your breath, once Krang’s been dealt with Shredder appears for the final confrontation. And when I say Shredder, I mean two Shredders. He’s used his ninja magic to create a doppelganger, and I never did figure out if one of them is the “true” Shredder that you should be focussing on or if they both take damage, so I pummelled both of them just about equally. It’s a much more enjoyable fight than the last two, as well – for starters, you can actually get a combo off against Shredder without having to leg it after each successful hit, and as he slashes at you with his sword and you dodge out of the way while trying to keep the other Shredder at bay, it all gels into a fun, fast and slick battle that’s definitely suitable for the game’s final set piece.

It’s a real shame, then, that Shredder also has a wide-range special move that’s an instant kill if it hits you: he whips out his retro-muto-thingamabob and fires it in a three-way spread, turning any Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle back into a regular, non-mutant, non-ninja (though presumably still teenaged) turtle. It is avoidable and if you’re quick you can knock Shredder out of the attack while he’s pulling his gun out, but it still feels ever so slightly like bullshit. Does it help that if it does hit you, you’re replaced by a special sprite of a tiny, adorable turtle? Yes, yes it does.

Eventually, though, Shredder was defeated and the Technodrome exploded. Of course it did, this is a Konami arcade game. If the enemy base didn’t blow up at the end I’d ask for my money back. There’s not much to the game’s ending, with it basically telling you what you already know: you won. It is frankly astonishing that there’s not a single mention of pizza in here – instead we’re left to wonder about the mechanics of vaporising something into milkshake. Surely that would be liquidising, not vaporising.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is one of the most widely-loved arcade games of all time, but in some ways it’s probably not as great as you remember it being. It’s core gameplay is still fun, in concept and mostly in execution, but it has problems like some not-very interesting boss battle and a light, slippery feel to some of the combat. On a purely mechanical level it’s not as good as something like Final Fight or Streets of Rage, then, but here’s the thing – that doesn’t really matter in this instance. Whatever its flaws, TMNT makes up for them with the pure joy of its presentation. Just look at it – it’s so colourful, so vibrant, so charming in its spritework and animation, and best of all it absolutely, one hundred percent nails the look and feel of the TMNT cartoon. This is the closest you can get to being a mutant ninja turtle yourself without strapping a load of terrapins to your naked body and running through the Chernobyl exclusion zone. As well as the graphics, there’s the excellent soundtrack:

It combines the cartoon’s soundtrack with Konami’s arcade music sensibilities to create a thoroughly danceable set of tracks, if you don’t mind being caught dancing to old videogame music. You won’t be able to help dancing, I assure you. This game probably has the weakest of all Konami’s classic TMNT game soundtracks, but that’s only because they’re all deeply excellent, and TMNT IV: Turtles in Time has one of the best arcade soundtracks ever.
On top of that, there’s one other thing that gives TMNT a push towards greatness…

The four-player mode! Grab three of your friends, neighbours, randos off the street, whoever, and let them play as a turtle each for the true half-shell experience. As you can see, the action reaches a level you could safely describe as “fairly mental” and it’s so much more fun as a result. I’d say it’s about 400% more fun than in single-player, appropriately enough.
Well, that was fun. Enough fun to make me say “cowabunga!” out loud? Maybe if I wasn’t alone in a very quiet house while writing this. There’s something quite dismal about saying “cowabunga” in that setting. Still, y'know, it was fun.

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TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES II: BACK FROM THE SEWERS (GAME BOY)

The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: as the cartoon's theme song informs us, they're heroes in a half-shell, and they're green. Are they, though? Obviously, yes, they're green heroes, but it's the half-shell bit I have a problem with. What's the yellow bit on the front of their torsos if it's not shell? Turtle pecs? They have as much of a full shell as any other shelled animal. You wouldn't go up to a non-mutated turtle and say "nice attempt at evolving a full protective carapace, half-shell," that would just be rude. Raphael might say something like that, I suppose, but then he is rude. That's in the theme song, too. Anyway, none of that matters now, because I'm going to write a bunch of words about Konami's 1991 Game Boy cowabunga-em-up Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: Back From the Sewers!

Yes, they're back from the sewers, leaving a trails of filth behind them and cloaked in the indescribable stench of creatures that live in human effluent and only eat pizza! What diseases do they have? Science doesn't know, but they're definitely full of them!

The turtle brothers gather together for a family snapshot, all of them trying to look as serious and intense as you can when you're a mutant reptile. Fortunately the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are so well known - and are still the subject of new TV shows and movies to this day - that I don't have to explain who they are. We've all grown up with some iteration of the antics of Lennyardo, Micky D'Angelo, Don E. Tellow and Raff, their characters and catchphrases engraved into our hearts and, sometimes, onto our lunchboxes. This particular TMNT game is based on the original cartoon series, so do not expect any of the later TMNT series' slightly darker edge to come through. The closest the first cartoon Turtles got to a dark edge was Raphael telling someone to go suck a lemon.

Pick a turtle, any turtle. It doesn't really matter which, they're all identical aside from the length of their weapons, he says as the Innuendo Police pull up in front of VGJunk Towers. Raphael's sai have a short range, Donatello's mighty and definitely ninja-appropriate stick has a long range but slightly slower attack speed and Michelangelo and Leonardo are somewhere in the middle. Nice and generic, that's Leonardo. He doesn't have Michelangelo's party-dude persona to make him interesting, either. Speaking of Michelangelo, I picked him for the first stage, probably due to lingering resentment that his nunchaku were censored in the UK broadcasts of the cartoon. I spent enough money on TMNT merchandise as a kid to feel that I'm owed these nunchucks, all right?

There's no plot revealed at the start of the game, so those of us without the manual will just have to assume that April O'Neil has been kidnapped. It seems like a pretty safe bet. Anyway, the gameplay: Back From the Sewers is a single-plane side-scrolling beat-em-up with the odd novelty stage thrown in to mix things up, and I'll get right to the ugly truth - this is an extremely shallow and limited game. You can jump and attack, plus the requisite jumping kick which isn't always that useful but is at least a damn sight better than the one in Street Smart. Your chosen turtle lumbers around the screen sluggishly enough to suggest that maybe the thrill has gone out of rescuing April O'Neil and they'd rather be sitting in their underground lair, eating pizza and counting their vast Michael Bay-inflated fortunes. Foot Soldiers - who are both footsoldiers and soldiers of the villainous Foot Clan, and also robots - walk onto the screen just as slowly. You poke the Foot Soldiers with your weapon and they explode, you walk forward a short distance and do it again. Sometimes the Foot Soldiers are hanging from the wall or firing guns or sliding at you, but on the whole it's the same thing repeated, and repeated a lot.

This Foot Soldier is a traitor, a Judas, a backstabbing cur who will burn in the lowest pits of Robot Hell for his efforts to supply the turtles with health-restoring pizza. Michelangelo will go to a slightly higher rung of Turtle Hell for mercilessly destroying the Foot Soldier who was only trying to help him.

Once you're out of the sewers, the turtles' usual desire to remain hidden and unseen by the general populace now rendered moot by every living human having deserted New York, the game tries to stretch itself a little with multi-level areas and Foot Soldiers that attack by throwing manhole covers at you. They are not exactly thrilling additions to the combat. I'm trying to to get too negative too soon on this one, but I can't help but feel it's lacking that certain spark. The limitations of the Game Boy hardware don't help, and I do wonder if the slow movement speed of, well, everything in the game was an attempt to mitigate the blurring effects of motion on the Game Boy screen, but mostly I think I'm comparing it to Konami's other TMNT beat-em-ups. That's patently not fair, but it's a difficult comparison to avoid when so many aspects of this game are lifted from the TMNT arcade brawlers, like the (spoilers) upcoming skating sections and the ability to fall into open drains complete with "who turned out the lights?!" text bubble.

One thing I can't fault are the game's looks. Big, chunky sprites that look just like the TMNT action figures of the time with just a twist of a Japanese manga aesthetic, they capture the feel of the show remarkably well. Then there's the soundtrack, which is probably the best thing about the game, or at least the part of Back From the Sewers that I can recommend wholeheartedly. It's heavily based around the cartoon's theme song in large part, which is no bad thing considering the TMNT theme is a sharpened spike of pure hummability thrust deep into the brain of anyone who's ever heard it. Here, check out this theme from stage three.

Pretty great, but hardly surprising given that Konami's TMNT games include some of the best videogame music of the period.

Back to the game, and Master Splinter pops out of a window, throws a whole pizza on the ground and says "Eat that floor-pizza! Get down on your creepy three-fingered hands and knees and eat it like the animal you are!" He doesn't say it out loud, but he'd definitely saying it with his eyes. Splinter hates himself, you see, he hates what he has become, he hates having to work in a turtles-themed pizzeria that apparently the heroes in a half-shell own and operate. He's a distinguished ninja master, not Papa John.

Splinter's pizza bonanza was a hint that a boss would be appearing soon, and so it proves in the warty and stunningly unintelligent form of Rocksteady. Part man, part rhino, yet somehow able to project enough competence that Shredder trusts him with a gun, Rocksteady represents a wild upswing in Back to the Sewers' difficulty level. It's not that he's particularly challenging to defeat, it's that the entire first stage was so monotonous and simplistic that by the time you reach Rocksteady you've been lulled into a strange torpor and having to pay attention in order to proceed comes as a shock.
Rocksteady mostly attacks by firing his gun and jump at you, so you can negate his attacks by jumping over his bullets and walking under him when he jumps. However, this simple pattern is complicated by the Foot Soldier in the windows above, who joins in by trying to drop flowerpots on your head while you fight. That's some real martial arts training you got there, buddy. Learn that at Ninja Academy, did you?

With Rocksteady out of the way, the turtles can indulge in a Bonus Game, which will almost certainly be pizza themed. I hope the bonus game invoves trying to cram as much pizza into your fat face as possible while simultaneously pushing your feelings of shame deep, deep down inside of you. I'd like the opportunity to put my years of practise to use.

That's sort of how it works - pizzas appear at random points around the screen, and you have to dash around and collect as many as you can. My top tip: you can collect the pizzas by kicking them, which means less time spent slowly walking over to them. Do not try this in real life. Your pizza delivery person will not thank you for it.

I thought I'd take Leonardo out for the next stage. Well, I should probably give him a chance. It's only a bit of forced-scrolling skateboarding action. You can't even fall off the skateboard! Just kick or avoid the Foot Soldiers, how hard can it be?

This is why no-one likes you, Leonardo.

Donatello is making a much better fist of the skateboarding section, even though he's riding a skateboard so tiny I suspect he's stolen it from the most radical and gnarly Prince of the Elf-Folk, and this stage is a nice change of pace from the one-note combat of the first level. It's sometimes a little difficult to tell where you'll be safe from the Foot Soldiers' gunfire, especially the ones in the flying machines, and that's a common theme throughout the game, but mostly it's enjoyable enough.

Bebop is waiting at the end of the highway to challenge you to a boss fight, which is to be expected. You can't have Rocksteady without Bebop. It'd be like Laurel without Hardy, Shaggy without Scooby, Donald Trump without the tiny alien that pilots him from inside in an attempt to undermine the credibility of Earth's governmental systems. There are two things I love about this fight with Bebop, which is otherwise fairly similar to the fight against Rocksteady: one is that his sprite is fantastic, immediately recognisible and nicely animated. The other is that one of his favoured moves is putting his boot right up your turtle's arse. I admire the simplicity of it.

But wait, what's this? After beating Bebop but before moving on to the next stage, I was thrown into the "Rescue Game," in which I faced off against a giant robot policeman. The policebot's name is REX-1. If you've read the Robo Army article, you may remember me mentioning REX-1 in there. I don't know why he's fighting on the side of evil now, although I suppose from his perspective he isn't: the turtles must have committed some crimes for which they must be punished by the law. At the very least, I can't imagine they pay any taxes. So, you have to fight REX-1, and it's quite a challenge. He has a plethora of projectile attacks and the ability to jump on you, plus if you get close enough to hit him, fifty percent of the time he'll just hit you right back. Things are complicated by the fact you don't have a life bar in this fight but rather a timer, and each hit from REX-1 reduces your remaining time. The best way to go about this is to patiently wait at the left-hand side of the screen, avoid the boss' projectiles until he moves a little closer and then get him with the very tip of a jumping kick, which should keep you out of harm's way due to its increased range. If you can do that consistently without ever getting hit you should have just enough time to beat him.

If you win, you can rescue a captured turtle and return them to playable status, making this the game's "lives" system. Once all the turtles are captured it's game over, and freeing one is like finding an extra life. As I'm here and I've already beaten the boss, I should probably let Leonardo out of his cell. He's lucky this isn't The Crystal Maze, I don't think I'd bother spending a crystal to set him free.

Onward to stage three, which takes place in a construction site packed with Foot Soldiers and Mousers, small bipedal robots developed with the sole aim of biting things. Science advanced enough to build a mechanical chomping machine but didn't stop to consider whether it should. The stage is also enlivened by having certain ceiling beams that you can grab hold of and hang from, or use to propel yourself upwards to the platform above. If doesn't change the gameplay all that much - it still has a very stop-start feeling as you inch forwards trying to activate as few enemies as possible at once - but after the first stage was almost entirely flat, level planes it's nice to have even a little freedom of movement. I'm less impressed with these oil drums. They're included because it is Videogame Law that every beat-em-up must include oil drums, but they block your path and you can't kick them out of the way or throw them at the Foot Clan. What kind of self-respecting beat-em-up hero can't smash an oil barrel? There might be pizza hiding under there! On the other hand, given how the turtles got mutated in the first place they're probably wary of unlabelled chemical containers. Okay, you get a pass on this one.

The boss of the construction yard - no, not, like, the foreman or whatever, but the villain waiting at the end - is Krang, the hideous pink brain-blob and Shredder's boss. Krang has done what all disembodied brains, as well as those of us with perfectly functional bodies, longs to do and has built a bipedal mechanized death-suit for eliminating his foes. Good for you, Krang. Raphael regards the mecha-Krang with smug contempt, because that is Raphael's default setting, although his smugness was quickly wiped away once Krang started shooting him. Yes, Krang is another boss that attacks by firing a gun and jumping around. You might be thinking that maybe the Foot Clan should try some different tactics because these ones clearly aren't working, but it's perfectly in keeping with the show. Shredder keeps sending Bebop and Rocksteady after the turtles, after all.

Because there are no turtles currently in captivity, between stages I get to try another bonus game. It works the same as the other bonus game, except in this instance half of the available platforms are covered in painful spikes. At this point, you have to accept that you've gone beyond merely liking pizza and into full-blown pizza addiction.

Stage four sees your chosen turtle chasing Shredder's underground drill-machine through the tunnels it has created, with Shredder apparently kicking Foot Soldiers and flamethrower out the back of his ride every half a yard in order to cover his escape with a blanket of awkward, dull combat. Konami have increased the difficulty level by means of cramming more enemies into each area and having traps designed to activate just as the rhythm of your movements takes you into their path. On paper that's fine, overconfidence should be punished and forcing players to slow down and pay attention to their surroundings is a perfectly valid design decision... but the rest of Back From the Sewers was already a juddery, tippy-toe kind of experience and the addition of having to wait for time flame-jets is not making it any more dynamic.

The collision detection isn't helping, either. I seem to have been complaining about hit detection in a lot of games I've written about recently, so I'm sorry to bore you with repetition but it does hamper a game when there's no consistency in what will or won't harm you, especially a game like Back From the Sewer where there are a surprising amount of very accurate movements needed to avoid projectiles and enemies. For example, see the screenshot above. This rolling boulder will hurt Raphael...

...while this boulder will not, despite it clearly touching our amphibious hero. Part of the problem stems from the game's large sprites. They may look very nice, but being so big leave you very little room to manoeuvre and you end up feeling like a regular, non-ninjitsu-trained turtle. My solution, one which I feel would have improved the entire game, would have been to make everything a little smaller. You'd have more space to move around, and more of the screen being visible would have made planning your attacks an option, rather than having to respond to enemies that can appear right next to you at the edge of the screen without warning.

There's a miniboss half-way through the tunnel, an alien being that resembles the alien from that movie franchise about aliens, you know, what's it called? Oh, never mind, let's just enjoy a boss that doesn't have the same attack pattern as all the others - instead, it hides underwater before bursting out and trying to slice your face off with its claws. Not a bad strategy, all things considered, and I did struggle to get its patterns committed to memory. This monster does appear in the cartoon, and it represents Shredder's attempts at psychological warfare: starting out as an egg that resembles a meatball, Shredder tries to place them on the turtles' pizza knowing that when reheated in a microwave the eggs will hatch into huge, slavering star-beasts. That's right, he tries to turn pizza against the turtles, an act of shocking mental cruelty that cements Shredder's place as one of the all-time most deranged cartoon villains. Of course, Shredder is also a whining, incompetent idiot, so his plan doesn't work.

Oh, hello Shredder. I was just talking about you. Using the jumping kicks, are you? I see you've read my other beat-em-up articles. It doesn't seem to be doing you much good, though, you keep missing me with your kicks but landing right next to me, where I easily stab you with my sai. Turtle Power!

With Shredder being soundly defeated, you might think Back From the Sewers is over, but you'd be wrong. Shredder runs away, but not before shaking his fist at me in a manner that manages to be both curmudgeonly and really camp at the same time.

The next stage begins with Splinter flying the Turtle Blimp towards the Foot Clan's arrangement of hovering platforms while you cling to the underside, so I take back anything negative I've said about this game. Well, I've got one criticism left - why can't I play as Splinter? Is he too much of a radical rat for me to handle? He clearly knows what he's doing, let him get out there and clobber some villains with his stick.

A much more open and expansive stage, this one has you climbing between small platforms while avoiding gun turrets and aerial bombardments. It's good to be out of the cramped sewer tunnels, and interestingly the platforms seem to form an infinite vertical loop: you can fall, but you can't fall off the bottom of the stage and die or anything, and if you keep climbing upwards the platforms you pass will start to repeat themselves. I'm not sure if it's purely moving to the right that triggers progress or if there's some other factor that determines whether you can escape from this gravity-defying labyrinth, but it seemed to take a very long time to get where I was going.

Where I was going turned out to be this rooftop, the arena for a battle with half-man-half-fly mutant Baxter Stockman. Good old Baxter Stockman, source of much childhood anxiety after I watched the episode where Krang gets fed up of him and decides to put him in the disintegrator. I was not expecting to see a TMNT villain flippantly murder someone by erasing them from existence in what looked like a giant microwave. Obviously it didn't work out like that, and Stockman was fused with a fly that followed him into the disintegrator. That's kind of a shitty disintegrator you've got there, Krang. I hope all your equipment on the Technodrome isn't so unfit for purpose, or I'd hate to see what happens when you flush your toilet.
Oh right, the fight. I just stood on top of the doorway in the background and clobbered Baxter when he came near. Ironically, it was actually easier than swatting a fly.

Inside the building is a stone man with a flamethrower and, weirdly, a beaky face. He reminds me of the bird people from Yume Nikki but, you know, made of rocks and not strangely unnerving. I hit him with my stick a few times, that seemed to calm him down.

April O'Neil had been kidnapped? What a shocker! I wonder who kidnapped her. The stone guy? Shredder? You'd think Shredder would have made more of a big deal out of it. I suspect the turtles faked her kidnapping to keep her out of the way, they don't have time to be protecting a journalist while they save New York. My evidence for this theory is that "cowabunga" graffiti on the wall behind here. The turtles must have been here before, who else would go around writing "cowabunga" on the walls of derelict buildings? Whatever the case, April is free now - in a nice touch she has a speech sample of her saying "thank you, turtles!" - and with the damsel un-distressed you might think that Back From the Sewers is over, but you'd be wrong, again.

There's one more stage, a mish-mash of all the other elements we've seen throughout the rest of the game, beginning with a surfing section that's almost identical to the skateboarding part but with a hugely increased chance of losing a life due to extreme toe stubbing. Just walk around! There's a perfectly suitable pathway visible in the background, and it's not like this surfboard is that much faster than running. Or, I dunno, swim. Actually, no, I just remembered the NES TMNT game, forget I mentioned swimming.

Eventually you'll make it into the Technodrome, where there's a battle against another stone man waiting for you. I believe he's called General Traag. I'm flabbergasted that his name is not a rock-based pun of some kind. I like that he's wearing boots. You'd think one of the perks of having granite feet would be not having to go shoe shopping, but here we are.

I'm not sure what's going on with Michelangelo in this screenshot, but it can't end well. It looks like his mutation is running out of control, and Michelangelo's sheepish expression seems to say "sorry, folks, but I will have to feast on your livegiving blood to sustain my transformation. I know it is neither radical nor bodacious, but I must feed, and feed soon."
Awkwardly-captured screenshots of a turtle in mid-jump aside, this final stage is a long, drawn-out episode in a game that hasn't exactly been thrilling even at its highest points. There's a little bit of everything included: mousers jumping from holes in a tunnel, an elevator ride with the usual flood of enemies pouring in, a section of platforming with dead-ends included that you could call a maze in the same way that standing a puddle could be considered swimming. The thing is, it feels like there's no reason to be doing any of these. We've already beaten Krang and Shredder and rescued April, so why are we here?

We're here to fight Shredder again, obviously. It took one hell of a swing to chop him in half with nunchuks, but Mikey has apparently been working on his upper body strength. Not really, what's happening is that Shredder can now disappear and reappear, Dracula from Castlevania­-style, ready to hit you with the sword he also picked up somewhere along the way. Unfortunately for him, the screen is so small that wherever he appears he's close enough to get clobbered, so it's not as effective as you might think. However, there's a twist. Back From the Sewers has three difficulty settings - easy, normal and hard - and rather doing the usual thing of giving enemies more health and harder-hitting attacks on the higher difficulties, bosses in Back From the Sewers actually gain whole new attacks when you're playing on Hard mode. For example, Shredder can teleport directly behind you for an easy hit. It's an approach to raising the level of challenge that you rarely see in any game, let alone Game Boy games from 1991, and Konami must be applauded for not taking the easy route.

We're still in the Technodrome. Still. I know it's a big place but I don't think it was necessary to make the player see every single room.

And finally, Big Krang. Krang in his giant robot body, a body that was designed by Shredder as a cruel jab at his partner in crime / alien overlord. Why else would he build Krang a robot body that looks like an extremely stupid bald man who doesn't own clothes aside from underpants if not as a "screw you" to Krang? It could have looked like anything, but no, Shredder built it to look like a middle-aged British man sleeping on a sunlounger in Tenerife, sunglasses and all, and that was a decision that could only have come from malice.
After the latter stages of the game had been fairly difficult, the final encounter with Krang is remarkably straightforward. All Krang wants to do is jump around, filled with glee at having a working pair of legs. This works to your advantage, because he's not focussed on killing you and you can hit him as he bounces as long as you remember to watch out for when he jumps all the way over to the left of the screen. Keep that up for a minute or so and you'll achieve victory, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: Back From the Sewers is over.

There goes the Technodrome. It jiggles around a bit, which I think is meant to imply that it's exploding. Well, this is the end of a Konami game, it'd be weird if it didn't blow up.

The game ends, as I should have expected, with pizza. What I didn't expect was that I'd be so glad it's over. A classic-era Konami TMNT brawler is something I would have expected to get much more pleasure from than this. It's just missing something, that vital spark that could lift it out of the tedious sludge it inhabits. It's not a terrible game, but it does drag on rather, in a herky-jerky fashion that just rubbed me the wrong way. I guess I just like my ninjas to be more agile. The wonky collision detection doesn't help, either. Still, there's a lot to praise about the game: the graphics are great, as is the soundtrack, the "rescue your captured turtles" mechanic is neat, the gameplay changes on higher difficulty settings are impressive and the look and feel of the cartoon is captured really well. I suspect there are a lot of people out there that played Back From the Sewers in their youth and remember it as a great game, so if you want to tell me I'm wrong then go ahead. There's a chance I am wrong, and it just wasn't quite clicking with me. I'm definitely right about Shredder designing Krang's body as a dick move, though.

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