Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2 - The Arcade Game

As the title states, this a direct port of the original arcade game. The "2" in the title only references Konami/Ultra's previous NES release, so don't worry about having missed some other arcade version you weren't aware of. For the conversion, basically nothing has changed. You pick one of the four turtles and move through different levels fighting off Shredder's robot foot soldiers; who are the only force in the universe equal in numbers to the Empire's Stormtroopers. They come in various colors, flavors, and sport different weapons, but all act the same. They will try to keep a distance from you and sling available weapons or punches, and they will all fall to two strikes from any weapon. A few other enemies support these ninjas, mostly obviously the walking mouse robots. The first level has you rushing to save friend and reporter April O'Neil from an apartment fire. Unfortunately, Shredder snaps her up first and you spend the rest of your time chasing after her. Most, if not all of the villains from the cartoon make appearances as bosses - even Baxter Stockman in human and later fly form. The entire game references the show extremely well, so fans aren't likely to be disappointed.

There's a surprising lack of variation between the turtles when you're playing, which is unfortunate. Each turtle has his proper bandanna coloring and unique weapon, but they all fight identically, and have no unique moves. In this version, the kitanas don't have a longer reach over the sais, nor does any weapon do more damage than the others. The differences are simply in the appearances. However, there's a lot of enjoyable fighting in store for you as you battle a number of well-designed soldiers and bad guys. This is the only game I can think of right away where the enemies are actually more interesting than the main characters, mostly through their entrances. They make great use of the background, and always have some interesting way to appear on the scene, such as breaking through doors or popping up through manholes to toss the lid at you. It results in having you watch every background with some anticipation, waiting to see what part of it will "come alive" as a foot soldier explodes out of it. These are just the standard bad guys too; the bosses also work to add great variation and are challenging without being overly difficult. The levels themselves sometimes work in your favor, with animated objects you can use against the foot soldiers.

Controls work well, with a simple jump and attack setup. However, the useful throw move from the arcade, which was automatically triggered if you attacked while close enough to a foe, has been removed here for some reason. Perhaps because the throwing displayed unique animations for the throwee, and they ran out of cart space. It means that this version comes off a little more mindless, as all you can really do is smack the attack button until the bad guy falls. Also, if you're playing this on an emulator, you'll encounter a serious flaw. The power attack, which can kill soldiers in one hit and as such was your most useful attack in the arcade, doesn't work here. In order to do it you pressed A and B at the same time, but when you do that on a keyboard the computer just kinda tilts its head to one side, squints, then says "fuck you" and picks one or the other. So through the entire game you're stuck with only your basic attack and the jump kick, making every fight much longer than it needs to be, and groups of bad guys much more dangerous than they should be. But if you're hardcore enough to own a gamepad, or to play this on an NES proper, then you'll be all set.