#173 – Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Arcade Game
Turtle Power! This time at home!
The cursor stares into your soul.
To Beat: Reach the ending
Played: 4/20/21
Difficulty: 7/10
My Difficulty: 2/10
My Video: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Arcade Game Longplay
A lot can change in just a few years. It was four years ago when I beat the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles for the site. I wouldn’t have guessed that I would end up learning the speedrun for this game and getting a pretty decent time for my efforts, as well as making good friends in the speedrunning community at large. I don’t speedrun too many games and not any more of the TMNT games, but I do like them quite a bit. Last April, I played TMNT II: The Arcade Game, a familiar game that got a lot of play over the years. Now this April, I am finally working the backlog and starting to write up this review. (Yes, I realize it is now June, I’m not exactly sprinting through things to get fully caught up.) Purely by coincidence, it is very fitting that April has become the de facto Turtle month for me!
For more information about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, check out my review of the first NES game.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was a smash hit in the arcades after its 1989 release. Tens of thousands of arcade cabinets were sold and shipped worldwide, and Konami had trouble keeping up with the demand. Naturally that demand was high enough that home versions were created and released on various home computers, as well as a port to the Famicom and NES. The Famicom version was released first as just Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, then a week later Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Arcade Game (TMNT II for short) arrived on the NES. Both releases were in December 1990. The game was developed and published by Konami worldwide, except for North America where it was published under the Ultra Games label. The PAL release, Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles II: The Arcade Game came out in November 1991. The arcade version was released on Xbox Live Arcade in 2007, and both the NES version and arcade version of the game are a part of the newly announced Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Cowabunga Collection coming later in 2022.
How did they get the wrecking balls upstairs?
The NES port of the TMNT arcade game is notable for adding two brand new stages to the mix. While the story of the game is rather basic, there was some detail added in the NES manual to cover for the new stages. This game plot-wise is a follow up from the 1990 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film. At the end of the movie, Shredder is thrown off the roof of a building into a garbage truck and crushed. But as it turns out, Shredder was saved from death by his titanium-laced helmet, so he is able to escape unseen and rebuilds in secret. During this, he recruits two bounty hunters, Tora and Shogun, who star in their own brand new levels. With everything lined up, Shredder captures April O’Neil again, putting our heroes on the rescue path once again.
Let’s get started with playing the game. TMNT II has two-player simultaneous play, so you can choose from 1 Player or 2 Player mode to get started. Next, each player will choose their turtle of choice. Each turtle is shown in their own square in grayscale and selecting the turtle you want will brighten him up in full color. After all players have chosen their turtle, another cutscene plays before launching into the game proper.
TMNT II is a side scrolling beat-em-up. Use the D-pad to move your turtle around the screen. Stages typically move from left to right, and you can use Up or Down to move in and out. Press A to jump. Some stages have elevated floors and you can jump up ledges to higher ground. The B button attacks. While standing or moving, this does a simple attack with your weapon. While airborne in a jump, press B to do a jump kick. This move is great for quick attacks or as a defensive maneuver if you need a short burst of speed. Perhaps the most helpful move in the game is the jump attack. To do this, press A and B at the same time. If performed correctly, you’ll do a short hop immediately into an attack. I usually perform this move by rolling my thumb across A then B, pressing B just a little bit after pressing A. This prevents me from accidentally attacking before jumping which doesn’t do the proper move. The jump attack does extra damage and defeats many basic enemies in a single strike, and there’s no penalty of any kind to use it, so I do this pretty much the entire game.
The top of your screen contains a few stats for each turtle. You see the name of your turtle, your score, your remaining health, and the number of lives in reserve. Scoring in this game is very basic; each enemy defeated is worth one point, including bosses. Your health bar starts off all the way across your status box and ticks down as you suffer enemy attacks. Some stages have pizza on the ground that you can collect to restore your health fully. You begin the game with two extra lives, and you earn another life every 200 points, a fairly tall order given the slow rate of scoring. There are no other powerups or anything else. There is a limited continue system. You get three continues to beat the game, and each one brings you back to the beginning of the current stage.
The orange glow means you’re about to win.
This is a very straightforward game. There are 10 total scenes in the game across 7 stages. In each scene, you defeat all the enemies that appear on the screen before continuing to move to the right. Most stages end in a boss fight against one of Shredder’s big baddies. Most of the enemies in the game are the standard foot soldiers, with standard attacks. As the game progresses, they come in different colors with some different abilities. For instance, yellow foot soldiers throw boomerangs. Even the default purple color enemies can vary sometimes, like the enemies that throw sticks of dynamite. There are other types of recurring enemies like the tiny mousers. The turtles themselves are pretty much interchangeable as there aren’t any turtle-specific special moves and there doesn’t appear to be any benefit to one turtle over the next. I do have fun with this game, but there’s no denying that it sticks to the same formula throughout.
TMNT II: The Arcade Game was one of the NES games I had growing up. I was big into TMNT for a few years as I was just the right age for that. I know I played the arcade release a few times but the NES version is what I remember the most. This was a multiple time rental before I got my own copy of the game. I’ve since beaten the game many times over the years. My collection copy now is not the same one I had as a kid. I loaned my cart out to a friend at school, he stuck it in his backpack, then later slipped and fell down hard. The cart inside his bag got cracked and a corner of the plastic broke off entirely. Thankfully I am not super nostalgic about having the exact same copies I grew up with, even though for the most part I took good care of my things. This is a pretty common game, but it is desirable, so it goes for about $20 for a loose cart.
This was an easy clear for me. The game came up once, maybe twice in the NintendoAge contests. (They are still going on now at videogamesage.com, though I haven’t participated in a year or two at this point.) The ruleset was to get as far as you can on one credit, with lowest score as the tiebreaker. Some stages have interactable elements that you can hit into enemies to kill them, without earning points. Grinding out attempts for a week, even years ago, got me trained up to play through the game well. For this playthrough, I did two attempts and won both times without continues. I wanted to see if I could go deathless, but that will take some effort to accomplish. In my video longplay, I actually died to Rocksteady, the Stage 1 boss, then got all the way to Krang at the end of the game before dying again. I died quite a few times to Shredder too. I would have to clean that fight up significantly. This was a clean enough run and I’m happy with it. Maybe someday I’ll go back and work on a deathless run.
Home sweet home
I bet a lot of retro gamers my age will remember the cross promotion between the NES game and Pizza Hut. Most notably, there was a coupon on the back page of the NES manual for a free, personal pan pizza. There was advertising for this plastered on the front of the game box, and Pizza Hut is referenced a few times within the game itself. I lived in a small town growing up, and the only pizza place we had in town was Pizza Hut. Those personal pan pizzas were one of the greatest things ever. My local place also carried a few arcade cabinets, and while I don’t know for sure, it’s certainly possible that there I got to play the arcade version while waiting for the cheesy goodness. While my original copy is long gone, and I’ll never know if I redeemed that coupon or not, I now own a CIB copy of TMNT II with the coupon still intact. It’s only 30 years expired at this point!
TMNT II: The Arcade Game sits in an almost overlooked place these days. I believe TMNT III is the better game of this style. The original NES TMNT game is so weird and wonky, but also unique and challenging, and I really like what it offers. The arcade version is a beautiful game and still looks amazing today, and it plays so well with different moves and 4-player simultaneous action. I think the NES port is really well done considering the limitations of the console, and after looking into it, I say it fared better than its computer ports. This game has a clean graphical style with recognizable characters and detailed sprite work. The music is great, as you would expect from Konami, and faithful to the Turtles theme. Controls are rock solid, and the gameplay is equally solid action. There are plenty of tense boss fights and scenes to keep things engaging. The only criticism I see is that the game is pretty long for just fighting enemies and moving to the right. You literally need to defeat hundreds of enemies in one sitting to beat this game. That can be tedious for some, certainly. Some people are really disappointed in this game, and others would claim its average, maybe above average at best. I say this is quite a good game, one of the better NES games out there.
#173 – Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Arcade Game