Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Arcade Game

Some changes were made to the overall plot. By the time Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2: The Arcade Game saw its release on the NES, the live action feature film had been rocking the theatres around the world and found immense success with the audience, becoming the most profitable independent movie of all time (until The Blair Witch Projectbeat the record in 1999). Due to this success, the NES version actually presents itself as a sequel to the movie, mentioning the climatic ending in its manual and detailing Shredder’s survival and return. This gives the sequel status a duality, as it can be seen as a sequel to the first game, or rather continuing the movie’s storyline and distancing itself from the first NES outing. Aside from that added detail, the game remains nearly identical in story to the arcade edition.

Not being able to handle all four players at once, the NES version is now adjusted to suit a more controlled two player experience, with fewer onscreen enemies and overall graphical detail. Like most arcade ports during this particular time, the technological gap between the capabilities offered on the NES and arcade was so wide that home ports often required to be modified significantly to offer a more tailored and appropriately sized games to play to the “strengths” of the home console. Sometimes this just led to mediocre ports like SNK’s Athena which were just too hard due to their coin-up nature that didn’t translate well into a home product, but luckily for TMNT, the NES port of the arcade game was among the best ever offered on the system.

Naturally, the biggest dive comes in the graphical department, with smaller sized sprites with less overall details, and less activity on screen. That’s not to say the game looks worse than its arcade counterpart however, because it’s still one of the better looking NES games, and with a more faded color palette the whole game makes the general tone of the game a bit more effective rather than overly cartoony.

Even more impressive is the added amount of levels and music in this version. Konami didn’t settle for just moving the game over to the platform, they added two full new levels, each with their very different look, enemies and bosses exclusive to the NES. These levels add much value to the overall game as well as new plot points. The first of these is a snow covered New York City boardwalk, due to a weather modulator used by Tora, an all new wolf mutant affiliate of the Foot Clan. The Foot, always quick to adapt, have various enemies and vehicles based around ice and snow to stop the turtles in their tracks. The second of these levels is an all new magic dojo, acting as a hideout for Shredder and the path to the Technodrome. This stage is filled with sharp bamboo spikes piercing through the floors as well as magical tigers, before facing off against Shogun, a mechanical shogun samurai. Both Tora and Shogun were designed by Kevin Eastman specifically for this game and never appeared since, but Shogun has been noted to be a potential precursor to Chrome Dome who would later appear in the cartoon and in Tournament Fighters on SNES.

Skateboard Girl

Tiny Cartridge revealed that the unnamed Skateboard girl which rides the streets of the second stage in The Arcade Game, made an unlikely and very well hidden cameo in the 2009 game Contra Rebirth. In TMNT, the girl is interactive and screams a terrifying haunting scream if the player slashes in her direction. Between 1989 and 2009, she was never seen in any other game.

Her cameo occurs during the second stage of the game in a crowd of fleeing civilians, slightly updated to fit the graphics of the other characters on screen. M2, the developer of Contra Rebirth, is mostly comprised by young talents from Japan and the US, so it is most likely the case of someone wanting to sneak in an obscure cameo to see if anyone would notice.

Baxter Stockman appears twice in this game, both in human form and his mutated fly form, replacing Rocksteady and Bebop as the dual bosses during the 4th stage. Rocksteady and Bebop appear in their respective places as singular bosses.

The one thing that probably carried over the most appropriately is the soundtrack. The 2A03 conversion lives up to the arcade soundtrack with grace and even builds upon it by adding all new tracks for the exclusive stages. While the original songs revolve around the famous theme song to draw in attention from bypassers around the arcade cabinet, these new NES songs have a chance to prosper beyond that, adding a rich new sound that makes the new stages all the more exciting and memorable as they engage themselves more emotionally than commercially in composition. Certain tracks such as the Technodrome stage sound even stronger on the NES with a cleaner sound and stronger percussion, a fine showcase that technical limitation can provide a superior product.

The arcade game also had a lack of strikes to mix things up, and sadly the NES has even less, removing the throw altogether and giving Raphael the standard special move rather than the sliding kick from the arcade. Luckily the floaty feel to the attacks is fixed on the NES, adding a much appreciated sound effect and recovery time for each strike. While there’s a more perceptiable blowback after attacking an enemy, they’re also invincible for about a second, so you can’t execute a consective attack immediately, as it’ll pass right through them. The lack of a varied arsenal of strikes means less overall strategy, which leads the game to become somewhat of a glorified button masher.

While the loss of four player simultaneous action does moderate the game into a somewhat slower experience, the two player feature proves itself to be a fully functional and bonding experience, with a good varied amount of aesthetics and action to keep the game interesting. The Arcade Game still stands as one of the best arcade conversions on NES, and is dearly beloved by fans, having aged just as gracefully, if not even better, than the arcade edition. As with most Konami games, the Konami code can be performed for some extra lives.

Pizza Hut ran a campaign with the game that included packed in coupons for pizza in their restaurants, as well as in game product placement, one of the first examples of this on the NES. This commercial tie-in was removed from future ports and the coupons were not included in the European and Japanese versions of the game. In Japan, it was released as simply Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, since first game was treated nearly as a different property altogether.

The initial code was written from the DOS version, and all the subsequent computer releases were based around the DOS code. You might think that this time, the developers had more time to prepare for the game’s release and port the game successfully over, capturing the magic of the arcade’s simple yet addicting gameplay to the stronger home computer systems? Well, that was certainly not the case. The first impressions might be impressive enough, with graphics faithful to the arcade game. But the horrors start here. First of all, and most glaringly of all, the music. See, this game has one track, and one track only. And if it was an iconic, catchy and diverse track, maybe it could be excused and tolerated. Sadly what we have here is failure to produce anything near being tolerable, sounding like a crude dude passing gas along a Looney Tunes melody and sampled into the game. And it never stops, absolutely never, not between stages, not during boss fights, not at the end. It just never stops. It never ever stops.

The animations and controls are just as atrocious, and are far worse than the NES game by miles and miles. It’s like for every movement any character makes, it’s missing 10 out of 15 frames in the animation and feels nauseating to watch. The sound effects are simple claps and swooshes that sound as out of place as that damn music. Did we mention that the one track in the whole game never stops playing? The music sounds like something that should be in Beverly Hillbillies The Game, not Ninja Turtles.

For some reason, the turtles themselves are left out of the cutscene during the transition from level 1 to 2, leaving Shredder and April the only characters in frame and apparently free to get away as far as preferable. Most peculiar.

There is a two player feature in this version like in the NES, but you don’t have any friends anyway if you own this game so you would never know that. (Editor’s Note: The writer of this article owns a copy of this game)

The Amiga version is handled a bit better on the surface, cleaning up the graphics a bit. The title screen has one of the cruelest teases in game history, as it states the music is done by legendary Jeroen Tel. Well, he did compose a rather bland original title theme, but that’s it. Yes, instead of just one song throughout the whole game, or porting the great soundtrack over, this version has no music whatsoever. Such a massive disappointment considering the potential of Tel’s talent and capabilities. The game itself is just as dogged down as the DOS port, with crippling difficulty and even less animation than before.

The Atari ST fares better than both DOS and Amiga, but not by much. Suffering from many of the same problems as the Amiga with awkward scrolling and little animation, there is at least a few songs played throughout the game. The music isn’t all that special, but it’s not bad at least. The controls and difficulty is also a bit more manageable compared to the Amiga.

The Amstrad CPC brings the game closer to a playable state, thought with heavily reduced detail. The animation flows much better, the graphics are fine enough considering the system even though it runs on a smaller window, and it controls just alright. There’s almost no sound whatsoever to be found in the entire game, outside of a few high pitched clicks when you connect a strike.

The Commodore 64 version differs in many aspects from the rest of the PC ports. Lacking the capabilities to run large sprites and layers of animation, the whole graphical scheme has been redone specifically for the C64, and the result is a game that visually fits in well with the library and has a unique look to it compared to all the other versions available. The characters have even been retooled and now have individual qualities, such as Don having longer reach and better strength. The soundtrack has also been completely changed and while it doesn’t live up to the original, it’s cool in its own right with some pretty catchy tunes and good clear sound effects. The music was once again handled by Jeroen Tel. The controls are a tad bit stiff as to be expected with C64 games, but all in all, outside of the NES game, this is the only version worth owning as it differs enough from the others to feel special enough.

The ZX Spectrum edition of the game is a port of the Amstrad CPC’s game, though with only two colors. This allow for more clear detailing on the sprites, and it looks more like a decent handheld game. Like on the Amstrad, this version feels alright and doesn’t offend as much as the Amiga and DOS.

All of these versions were released in the same time frame of one another, right behind the release of the NES version. The home computer ports were reasonably easy to locate throughout European game shops, though went largely unnoticed in the US market. This has led a few of the games to become rare and sought after as collector items in recent years, despite their questionable quality.

In 2006, hobbyist programmer Jason Orme started work on a recreation of the 1989 arcade TMNT engine in order to have a fully functional and sourced version of the ever popular game, and also the ability to add all new levels, sprites and other user content into the game. The work on the engine is described as a way for Orme to develop his own skill and eventually enable for all new TMNT fan games with the ability to meet the high quality of the original.

Work is still in relatively early stages, with many effects, characters and mechanics entirely missing. In the playable release, only Leonardo is selectable, and most of the effects in the game are static or not working properly. The engine is prone to crashing on sudden changes to music or enemy appearances as well, and some are lacking proper hit collision parameters.

Still, the work done so far is fairly impressive, and with the prospect of one day being able to port the game in arcade perfect form and add user content certainly allows for some very interesting ideas for the future. It has not seen any public update since early 2009 however, so it is unknown whether Orme has abandoned the project altogether or has simply been silently at work.