Ninja Turtles

I received my TMNT: Tournament Fighters in the mail a couple of days ago, turned it on, played it for a bit and proceeded to be disappointed. The fighting seemed slow, the fighters small, the sound gimmicky. I then played it a bit more and I realized that it actually isnt a sucky game. The reason it appears slow is because I'm used to playing new generation games, the fighters are small and blurry because of my small screen and bad connection and the audio...well the audio is still pretty bad.

Lets talk about the game. There were three different versions: the Sega game which had Raph on the cover, the NES game with Leo and, the one I had, the SNES version with Don dancing with a shark. No love for Mike I guess. The games not only had different covers but they also had different character rosters and, obviously, different graphics.

Like I said, the game really isnt that bad. The available characters included the Turtles as well as five other non-turtle characters. Casey Jones was in there...in the Genesis version. April was also playable...in the Genesis version. The SNES game got some not so great characters, including a purple dinosaur looking guy named "War", Wingnut,, the Shredder, a token female character and a few more. I might have gotten over my initial disappointment of the game but I stil have issues with the available characters. I find myself not caring for any of them. I used to like Wingnut as I had that action figure but not anymore. I think the Rat King is the final boss. I dont remember if you can later select the Rat King but I hope so.

But there are many pluses, this is an old-school drawn fighting game. Of course its modeled after Street Fighter and KOF, but it also does a few other things those didnt have at the time (such as a separate bar for a super move). Each character has a unique stage, also reminiscent of SFII, each character has unique moves, most are able to throw projectiles using the standard Hadouken movement.

Sure this might be a bit forced but the Turtles is a franchise with so many discrepancies between all of its media appearances: what happens in the tv show is different than the movie, than the comic book and so on. That the video game would be just as disconnected is not surprising.

The game is good, yes its a bit slow and yes its a bit difficult but that was the norm when it came out. It really isnt fair to compare it to todays game but thats what we do because of what the norm is today. The biggest issue then really isnt that the character selection is poor but rather that this was not followed up on such in the same way that SF or KOF was. If it had been then TMNT: 2009 would be something else.