Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Arcade Game is a curious case for me; a game I went in waves between deciding whether or not I liked it. It was a fun two-player romp, but having experienced the actual arcade game, this port was the first time I recall getting a case of "arcade envy."
This was actually the topic of an essay I wrote nearly 15 years ago. On my very first experience with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles:
"I was in a mall, and in the arcade massive amounts of people were crowded around the center display. Typically arcades had all of its newest or hottest games in the center so that way people would be able to see the flavor of the moment from the entrance and tempt them to walk into the arcade and past other machines.
However, in this one instance, there were so many people huddled around this cabinet, you couldn’t even tell what the cabinet was – you could only guess it was the second coming of sliced bread. If it weren’t for the fact that the arcade had routed a secondary video signal to a monitor above the cabinet (yet another arcade spectacle I miss), you would have had to push through a crowd just to see what was going on. At a mere 7 or 8 years old, I wasn’t quite as tall as I am now, so the big screen towered high above me. Looking up I could see all four Ninja Turtles dashing through the Technodrome, all in animation-quality graphics. My parents weren’t exactly up to waiting around for me to get in line for my chance at becoming a turtle, so we left and I constantly dreamed of being able to play the game."
The game obviously made its way to the NES eventually, and it seemed like a no-brainer that this should be the game for which I cashed in my birthday money that year. Yes, I used the coupon for the free Pizza Hut personal pan pizza.
Playing the game was odd, as it always felt fun with another player ... and it was never any trouble finding a willing second player as TMNT was amid its fever-pitch popularity at the time. But when I played the game on my own, I just always had that nag tugging at me that what I was playing just didn't match up to the arcade experience.
The graphics and animation took a huge hit going down to the 8-bit system and the moveset was trimmed down, among other very understandable concessions that had to be made to make the port a reality. But, perhaps that was how far ahead of the curve the 1989 arcade release was at the time.
"Even though my NES gave me suitable versions of Bubble Bobble, Rush ‘N’ Attack and the like, TMNT became the first time I wasn’t fully satisfied, even though the NES version received two extra stages."
Now that the arcade original is quite accessible outside of owning a cabinet, I cut the NES version some slack and enjoy it for what it is. There was even work put into it for a hack to rebalance the game a bit so the standard melee attacks can repeat on the foot soldiers to give it a more traditional beat 'em up feel. This hack even puts an options menu into the game so players can just toggle some of the settings instead of having to punch in the codes to change the number of lives you start with and the starting stage.
The excellent TMNT Cowabunga Collection also puts some shine on the game by giving players easy access to the version that released in Japan. While the content is the same, the gameplay is given some tweaks that reduce the health of a lot of the enemies and slightly changing the scoring system. With the health change, the common foot soldier can now be taken out with a single jump kick, really picking up the pace of the game.
All of this time, though, I do give the NES cart a really big nod for its soundtrack. This game has some great tracks!
