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Review: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tournament Fighter [Super Nintendo] |
I have a confession to make. As a child living with a vivid imagination, I was always bothered by the fact that I didn’t have a Leonardo action figure. Sure I had two goddamn Michelangelos (rumoured to be the more sexually experimental turtle of the quartet), so I had to repaint one as a Leonardo. And for a kid I did a great job using acrylic paint. So then I proceeded to give him toothpicks as his katana blades (sharp pizza cutting devices invented by the Japanese).
:-)
Yeah, so anyway, I figure some of you might not be familiar with these images of nostalgia often associated with 80’s cartoons, so this review of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles : Tournament Fighters for SNES might be considered a “niche” title by people prone to using such complex words. NO SIR. I won’t leave you lost amidst the obscure references I’ll be making about the highly prized and glossly (read: plastic) world of the NINJA HERO TURTLES. I’ll provide foot notes to all of you dear readers who don’t understand the references because you’re either too young, or you just prefered pouring molten hot G.I. Joe figurines all over the ants you captured. These foot notes will be called Punch notes by the way, because I have an ego to upkeep.
I start this review by explaining what the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were. It was comic book by some dudes, about some turtles who were teenagers, and then somebody made it into a TV series, and made a shit-load of money off merchandising. Especially off those goddamn toys. (Toys are articulated plastic reductions whose purposes are to break and be lost). So eventually they made video games out of this too. The first was a really hard NES game where you flip around and get killed real fast. The second, third and fourth were real cool games that were part of a genre called “beat-em ups” by fags like me, and “sidescrolling fighting games” by the arcade elite (which also coined the term “scrub” and “cheap”). That was all nice and well (and Konami thought so too), so they wanted to make some more money before it (the popularity of green teenagers) was over. So in order to make more money, Konami decided that joining the franchise of the TMNT with a popular (at the time) genre would be a good idea. Popular at the time was a genre called fighting games, made really popular by this game called Street Fighter 2 (which no one has ever played or heard of). So Konami just made the same thing but with pizza eating shells-with-legs-and-weapons.
The game I speak of is Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles : Tournament Fighters. Its featured on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. So I made my friend lend me the game so I could review it. A few months later, I finally got around to doing it.
The options made to you at first are plentiful (for the time) : you get to play a Tournament Mode, Versus mode and a Story mode. The tournament mode is your chance to score with April O’ Neil, that bitch from the cartoons who always dressed in that goddamn skin-tight yellow jumpsuit that even as a (lecherous) young man I knew how to enjoy. Actually, all she does is offer you “more money than you can possibly imagine” while on the set of TOURNAMENT FIGHTERS (A CHANNEL 6 PRODUCTION, COPYRIGHT TRADEMARK, etc) so that several characters in this game may have an excuse to hit each other in the kneecaps and groin area (because it is funny). When you win, your character is displayed next to a small pile of coins on the floor. This angered me because Uncle Scrooge, from another cartoon from around the same time (Disney’s Ducktales, you see) got to SWIM around in a vault of money. I felt cheated.
The Story mode was where I spent the majority of my time, trying to become the best funky, jive-talking Ninja (or Hero) Turtle I could be. The story starts with a note being thrown in front of the turtle’s television saying that their master (the rat Splinter) and their human friend (human super great gal strawberry reporter April O’Neil) has been kidnapped. Again. Like in every goddamn episode. So the story progresses in the following manner : you arrive to some irrelevant location (”We’ve found out Mt. Olympus!”) and proceed to fight dumb opponents. Repeat. That’s the story. So that’s that.
Now, I’d like to start talking about the gameplay itself, since my beer is running low. The game is going to wear out your thumbs. Its got a case of the ol’ “chubby” controls. That means that controls are clearly recognized, its just that you’ve really got to press the d-pad down and hard. In case you’re wondering, no my SNES pad is not worn out, I like to play the occasional game of SSF2 on it, and the controls are just fine there. Its not a problem really, just a minor annoyance or something to adapt to, depending on your level of tolerance.
Now this is where the real critique comes in, because even though TMNT:TF is one of the better SF2 clones, it has its share of problems where depth is concerned, which in turn brings up another point, which I’ll get to in due time. The whole combat system is sort of skimmed to be superficial and utilitarian. There are obvious influences from SNK fighters even, in the button assignments. There is only four buttons total, weak and strong for punches and kicks. So this brings a simplicity with it, which is reflected in other parts. For example, throws do such minimal damage that they’re more of a way of getting your opponent away from you when he’s too close, since there are no real reversals in the game. Any Dragon Punch type move that you might use as wake-up surprise might not have the priority it should have. So when you got knocked down and the enemy comes you often have no choice but to block and hope he didn’t hit you out of it. This also is problematic when enemies such as the character “War” (a pretty obvious Blanka clone, down to the move lists, appearance, throw and animalistic grunts) hit you with what seems to be a combo. But there aren’t any real combos in the game either! Hits are hardly connectible in a series, and even if you do manage the two crouching q.kicks into a fireball/dragon punch stock combo that all fighters seem to have, you don’t get rewarded by any “Combo! X hits!” or whatever that most fighters sport. Add to this the fact that characters receive no damage from blocked hits, and very little damage from blocked specials, and what you’ve got yourself is a fighter in which you wait for the opponent to be open (such as when they’re performing a move) and perform a move yourself that has something resembling priority. Repeat and continue. It will be very common for you to see dizzies at least twice per match, and it doesn’t seem to be triggered by a series of hard hits like in Street Fighter, but rather just because a certain quota of hits has been met. The formula of these fights are tightly regimented by a “blockfest” formula, which more often then not, drag out the fight and in a lot of cases, ends with timeouts.
The cast of characters are the four main turtles with Shredder, and a bunch of second rate action figures. They all seem to fit some kind of SF2 mold, where Chrome-Dome is a Dhalsim, War is a Blanka and Rat King is a Zangief and so on. The turtles themselves share basically the best moves of all the characters in the SF2 movelist (hadoukens, dragon punches, spinning bird kicks and psycho crushers and the like) and split the bounty among themselves. But they look decent doing it, so its forgivable.
The backgrounds however, are just bland locations with decent animation for a SNES game, jumbled to the max with cameos. Why are Bebop and Rocksteady background jobbers and not playable characters? I wanted to play as Splinter and convince myself the old rat wasn’t all talk and a useless animatronic.
But here’s that point I alluded to earlier : its obviously never had the intention of being a fighting game with hopes of having Viscant et company at Shoryuken.com separate into tiers and be declared “broken” or whatnot, its a fighter for fans of the cartoon series and toys, so given the attention span and age of that focus target group, its obvious that this game is good enough.
That and I had some stupid variant Raphael in a cosmonaut oufit as a toy. So I grew up to hate everything.
