Old School Gamer Review Presents: TMNT: Turtles In Time

Children of the 90s please! Please calm down…stop screaming! I know I know…this game defined your childhood, yada yada…However, let me give the readers who for some reason have no clue as to who the Turtles are…a clue.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles began as a comic book(a much more violent and disturbing comic book) and became extremely successful and popular due to a self-titled morning cartoon show. Like everything else in the 90s it had to have not only a television show, but a board game, t-shirts, jewelry, a series of video games, and spin-off toys guaranteed to catapult a child from excitement to tears on Christmas morning.

MOM! WTF!

There were a few different games, but today we are reviewing the arcade port of the Turtles in Time “episode.” So let’s take a journey with a few pizza eating turtles, through time!

Storyline

After a hard day of training, chowing down on pizza, exchanging hilarious quips and whatever else New Yorkers do. The Turtles sit down to watch catch their favorite news anchor on television. Before their very eyes Krang (who now has wings) makes off with the entire statue of liberty! Shredder immediately takes credit for it and the TMNT team is off to catch him. They eventually catch up to Shredder and seemingly defeat him. However he has one last trick up his sleeve. It’s all been a trap!

Uh…thanks Admiral “after the fact.” Anyway, he opens a portal in time and slings the Turtles into it. The TMNT team must fight their way through different time periods in order to get back to present day New York!

Cast of Characters

The playable characters are Leonardo, Michelangelo, Donatello, and Raphael. April O’neil and Master Splinter makes an appearance as well as several villains from the show.

GAMEPLAY

The infamous screen toss! The controls are great, extremely fluid. If you want to sling your swords around you can do that, somebody comes up from behind? BAM! Kick to the chin while you still face the other way. Oh that bad guy’s getting on your nerves? Sling him into the screen! The controls for this gameplay are amazing. Very inventive for its time period. Not to mention it’s a giant mess of four player, beat-em up, Turtle-ey goodness!

Graphics

The graphics are great for the time. The backgrounds are simple but well done. The picture up there clearly shows the Empire State Building lit up as it is at night. That’s a nice touch to add to the great animation that’s going on. It really looks just like the cartoon show, and that’s really what you need when creating a game like this, and for the techies-

Raster graphics
Horizontal orientation
Resolution: 288×224 pixels
Refresh rate: 60.00 Hz
2048 colors

MUSIC

The music is great. Why? Because it’s the music from the actual television show, changed to reflect the period of time that you are playing in at the time!

The Test Of Time

Sit down around the SNES and play this little ditty. Seriously you will have some of the most fun ever. Side-scrollers are oft forgotten in this generation, which is sad because they were some of the greatest games to play. Especially the 4 player beat-em ups. Yes it’s very fun to snipe your friend in the head on HALO, but teaming up with him to take down Shredder is even more fun! Wave after wave of enemies through different time periods, as well as different difficulty levels will keep you busy for some time.

Final Score

Five stars! Great controls, cool comic book storyline, multi-player, and you can throw people into the screen! How cool is that? Unfortunately if it were released today I don’t think it would get a chance. Ah such is life. If you get a chance get this game and play with a friend!

Thanks for reading!

Sincerely,

Brian Bell-Wiseguy Industries

The New Justice League Movie, some ideas but maybe to little, to late.

So for quite awhile now I’ve been hearing about Warner Brothers attempting to make a Justice league movie. Lest we forget –

Yeah if you’ve never seen that it’s a still collage from the Justice League of America made for tv film. A fun game is to try and watch all 82 minutes of it without throwing your television into the street in anger, (did i say fun game? I meant “substitute for being in a saw movie”).

This little mistake may be why the WB has focused so much on their animated films, (awesome) instead of expanding smaller characters into feature length live action films. They are scared. To be sure they’re characters were never as…realistically character driven as Marvel’s characters. The reason Marvel became so popular in the first place is because Stan Lee’s focus was on showing normal people who attain SUPER powers and that’s why they show up so well on screen. I mean sure the 90s marvel films all sucked but that’s because they ignored what made the characters great in the first place.

So now that Marvel has found its mark with the Avengers, DC is licking its chops ‘cuz boy do they smell money. I’m sure those executives at WB and DC sat in the tallest building just drooling all over the table.

“THINK OF IT OH THE MONEY!”

“YES WE’LL MAKE MILLIONS,BILLIONS!”

(and then the one guy who makes sense)

Uh guys, wouldn’t we just be copying Marvel? And don’t people usually respond negatively to cheap knockoffs clearly made for nothing more than the money?

Then this happens…

Yeah they are making it, so lets just talk about what they SHOULD do.

WHAT THEY SHOULD DO

They SHOULD have a lead in to it entitled “World’s Finest” Starring Batman and Superman. If you aren’t familiar with the animated “movie” (it was really a two part on Batman the animated series later released as a feature length film). It has The Joker going to metropolis with a lot of Kryptonite, he’s somehow found out that it’s superman’s weakness and he knows the one guy who will pay for him to be gone (if you’re good at something never do it for free).

This ends up being the first true meeting of Batman and Superman as Batman finds out what Joker’s up to and takes a trip to save Superman. This perfectly sets up the relationship between the two and as I think their relationship is one of, if not the, best friendship in superhero history, I would really like to see this on the big screen.

Them teaming up at the end to defeat the two could lead to a further idea in Batman’s head to set up an entire team in case of a giant event. Thus the Justice league could be born without having to do several other movies like Marvel did. One new superman movie, one new batman movie, world’s finest, Justice League. Bad-A-Boom Bad-A-Bing like magic.

WHAT’S GOING TO HAPPEN

I’m not a pessimist, I’m not an optimist, though I try to be. In truth I’m a realist and I’ve seen this go bad before and in my darkest nightmares I see the worst that could, and probably will happen. No they won’t get Schumer to direct it, that would incite a full fledged nerd war. But they will make several bad decisions. Such as poor casting in all venues including director. They were talking about Ben affleck but after Daredevil people just aren’t as warm to him in the superhero genre. I’ve also seen the name Michael Bay floated around, he can stick to the Daredevil’s spawn of TMNT and racist robots thank you. Preferably they’d get JJ Abrams to direct it but he’ll be doing star wars AND star trek (lucky). So who does that leave? uh a bunch of people actually that will be spitballed around a room and then thrown away for whoever they think has the big enough name to bring in the money.

They won’t develop the characters properly.

There would be WAY too much CGI. It’d be to the point where they couldn’t even have certain key characters because of all the powers the Justice league utilizes.

Basically this is just a big flaming ball of turd waiting to happen. However maybe they’ll listen to the fans for once and pull of a spectacular film. Or maybe they’ll just pull it completely.

Thanks for reading.

Sincerely,

Wise guys guessing