The transition from hit comic book to video game is tough for most intellectual properties. Most heroes do better when things are left up to the imagination, like when they’re stuck in the pages of your favorite comic rag.
Put these super-people in a 3D playable world, and things often get ugly. Graphical anomalies and poor gameplay engine design combine to form heroes that can hardly leap tall buildings in multiple bounds. Even worse, the shapes of player characters look nothing like you remember from those inked pages of recycled papyrus.
If you go back to a time when games went from the arcade to the console (instead of from the console to the handheld), you’ll see that comic book IPs had much less of a problem coping. It was so cool that a game was even based off of comic heroes that any gameplay issues were sloughed off, as another stack of quarters lined up on the cabinet glass. A perfect example of this is Konami’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles coin-op; it wasn’t the best arcade game out at the time, but playing as the Mirage mag mutants - four-abreast no less - was enough to make it one of the more popular cabinets ever to hit the arcades.
In near-perfect timing with TMNT the CGI movie and TMNT the Xbox 360 video game, Ubisoft has dropped the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Arcade bomb on us once again, with some help from Xbox Live. Instead of being pent-up in some compilation disc with a bunch of games we hardly care about, Microsoft and Ubi are allowing hardcore TMNT and classic arcade fans a crack at these half-shells for a cool five, ahem, greenbacks.
Keeping the inevitable recession in mind, is this single, late 80’s arcade ROM of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Arcade worth 400 Microsoft Points? That probably depends how into the TMNT IP the person you are asking really is, for the game itself is a bit basic for a side-scrolling, low-bit action game. This doesn’t mean it doesn’t have its fun moments, but it seems as though it was designed for the youngsters that were gaga over the ’87 animated series than for fans of the Mirage book.
In any event, you do get to play as one of the four turtles in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Arcade, and you will be hot on the trail of main adversary Shredder throughout this adventure. But before you can nab the boss baddie, you’ll have to decide on a turtle to control. Even though these Italian artists turned ninjas wield different weapons and subsequent animations in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Arcade, they all have the same move repertoires. Be it sai, nunchaku, staff or sword, turtle PC’s can simple weapon melee, jump, or combine the two for aerial kick attacks. A weapon grab-and-toss move is also available, but it seems a bit arbitrary when this maneuver is triggered. At first it seems like a certain distance will trigger the grab, but that’s not always consistent. Just be aware that you may be tossing when you planned on stabbing in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Arcade.
The good news with Ubisoft’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Arcade offering is that they replicated the four-joystick console by allowing local play for up to four players. Better than local battles is the ability to team-up via Live with up to four friends, each lending a hand in blowing up robotic ninjas and the like. Keep in mind Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Arcade is from the arcade era, which means that it actually helps to have all four turtles in on the action. Four turtles at once meant three times the revenue for this quarter-gobbling beast of a coin-op.
Konami used little tricks here and there to make Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Arcade appear more than just your ordinary side-scroller. There is a very basic storyline here, but it is moved along through still cuts, text, and audio which surely help the action seem more episodic and comic book-like. You’ll also notice that Konami dabbled with the idea of verticality in a single plane with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Arcade, as your hero will be able to seemingly jump up to another plateau. This adds a fair amount of variety to the ground level action, as enemies can attack from the heavens and the second level can be used as a safe haven from any shenanigans happening below (such as those pesky flying manhole covers). Konami even messed around with top-to-bottom scrolling techniques in a few key areas of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Arcade which really give the environment some depth. You’ll still be playing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Arcade predominately west to east, but it’s cool to see one of the earlier attempts at breaking free of the rigid side scroller rails.
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