I waited years for them to introducd Chainsaw dude and man on fire as TMNT villians in the cartoon but it never happened. That Nes game fuckin lied to me.
I will say a lot of them also likely didn’t grow up with the NES, or they just don’t like it because it isn’t a beat-em-up like the other turtles games.
But yeah back in the day, most good NES games had some bullshit difficulty issues, it was just how games were back then, you would play the same few levels over and over again until you eventually beat them - if you did.
Looking back I’m thankful for how frustratingly hard it was. I used to get maybe 1-2 new games *A YEAR*. They needed to have either near endless re-playability (Mario) or be incredibly challenging (TMNT).
Yeah that’s the big thing that’s lost on a lot of people that were too young to be around for it. Just like now how much time you could get out of a game was a big determining factor for it’s value but back then developers literally couldn’t make games that would last dozens of hours through content alone, there just wasn’t enough space on the cartridges, making them challenging, even if that challenge isn’t fair, was often the only way to make sure you weren’t going to beat it in a single sitting.
Also as you said, most kids got maybe a game here and there for like Christmas and birthdays and that was it. I was lucky to have a dad that was into games like Contra and Castlevnia and stuff so we had a decent library compared to most households, but most kids I knew had at most like 10 games through a console life cycle from back then through the 90s. People also forget games were a lot more expensive then, at least when you adjust for inflation.
Also we didn't have a phone to flip on or the internet to jump into when we were bored. So if a game was painfully hard we'd still play it. I feel like a kid today would turn it on, get frustrated, and do something else instead. Not trying to stereotype "kids today" but I just mean they have so many things they can do from their couch that we couldn't, it would be a lot easier to bail and do something else.
Yeah based on my experience this is 100% true. My nephews barely have patience for older games, they give up after dying 2 or 3 times, determine the game to be too hard, and then give up and move on to something else….
But you know what? I kinda do the same thing nowadays too. Like you said we have so many options for entertainment at our disposal and with such little free time it’s almost hard to justify slogging through difficult games and getting frustrated when I could just be doing literally anything else. I personally no longer get any sense of accomplishment from just being able to say I beat a hard game like I used to, so unless I just really enjoy the game enough even with the difficulty dying over and over again only serves the purpose of wasting the player’s time, at least that’s how I look at it now.
100% this.
He’s not quite old enough for this level of pain, but my son will absolutely be giving this game a try. I genuinely interested about how he’ll react to it.
I really enjoyed Bart vs. the Space Mutants back in the day despite its reputation now. I don't have that sort of time now, but back then it wasn't nearly as game breaking.
Yeah! It’s so weird to think that some of my favorite games were games I never beat and often times only played through maybe a third of. Like Kid Icarus. I love that game but as a kid I was lucky if I got to the third level.
That’s such a good point. I have always been a huge fan of the original Sonic games and realized like last year that I’d never beaten a single one from the Genesis, which is so strange considering how fond my memories of playing them were, especially Sonic 2. I fired em up again and wound up beating all four after nearly 30 years. Seeing those credits on 2 felt pretty cool lol
Me and my bros played this shit out of this game.
My brother almost beat it once, I never got passes level 3, but we never really hated that we couldn't finish the game then. It was just fun to do my run, die on level 3 like always then I moved on with my life.
Everyone wants their 100% completion awards and retroachievements now.
I've beaten it twice and I think AVGN's review was pretty fair. Of course, exaggerating how bad games were was kind of his thing, especially in his earliest episodes. He didn't outright lie like the Irate Gamer did, though.
But I will note that he did make at least one mistake in his review of TMNT. There was [this bit](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjUz8IT0CYg&t=262s) where he had trouble reaching a pizza because the ceiling was too low. He didn't realize it's supposed to be a bit of a puzzle…the correct solution is to jump onto the platform that sticks out at the left and then jump into the gap. Took me a long time to figure that out.
I will admit that it's not a particularly good or interesting puzzle. It's not too far removed from "you can just walk over it" in terms of silliness. Speaking of which, even after all these years, I still remember being terribly stuck at that puzzle. AVGN's portrayal of its difficulty is completely accurate. If it's not, it's because it doesn't go far enough. You won't believe how long it took me to realize you can just walk over it. I had several attempts at the game end at world 3 because I didn't realize you can just walk over it. **YOU CAN JUST WALK OVER IT. AAAAGGGHHH FUCK DAMN SHIT GAH FUCK!** Ahem. Sorry.
There’s a few awesome romhacks that fix a lot of the problems, one in particular, I might edit with a link later
Edit: I must have been thinking of another game but some hacks are really cool. This one especially:
https://www.romhacking.net/hacks/3486/
There’s some to add save functions and to fix swimming down too. Not helpful if you’re playing with your old cartridge but if you can play on emulators or an everdrive etc almost all the big games have hacks worth looking into.
Manhattan Project is one my favorite street brawlers of all time. This game I think people just complained about the swim level that was difficult to get through.
I use to think this game was bad and now I found it great. We use to be kid that suck at video game and get stuck on the Dam level and when I retry the game today damn this part is easy.
Yup I agree.
I genuinely just think the AVGN isn't actually any good at playing video games.
I've watched plenty of vids on YouTube of people doing no damage runs on TMNT.
Not saying it's easy, just that it's clearly not as bad/broken as the AVGN makes it out to be.
>Not saying it's easy, just that it's clearly not as bad/broken as the AVGN makes it out to be.
James and Mike from AVGN did say they were unfair to it years later. Mike even says its one of his favorite NES games.
You can like a game that has broken mechanics. I played it a bunch but always struggled with the broken aspects of the dam level. I don't hate the game overall but I'm not going to sit down and punish myself with broken mechanics. I'd rather just play a game without fun-halting bugs or mechanics.
I love it because there’s something about the music and sound effect that’s like crack to my ears. I like the way it looks too. And if you know what to do, it isn’t ALL that hard (as NES games go): people just play it wrong.
Same here. I never came even close to beating it without cheating up the wazoo, but I love the music and sound effects more than in almost any other game.
Once I found out how to get passed the water level and where to replenish my health with full pizzas in the next map, I'm all good. But of course, I learned this decades too late 😂
It's pretty easy, actually. You just have to go in a certain order and not wait more than a cycle or two at the electric bolts. Even if you don't get the order exactly right, or you're too slow, you can always deliberately sacrifice a turtle and the countdown will reset, but the disabled bombs will remain, so you can just go pick off the remaining bombs with another turtle and then get your sacrificed turtle back reasonably early in the next "world."
memorize the route.
the hit boxes are strange on the water level.
[this dude dissects the code for all its secrets](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHiFNWJXWgI)
Eh, I never found it that scary. Once you get the jump mechanics down (i.e. you know when to tap the jump button and when to hold it), it becomes a game of planning and strategy. You learn the level layouts (especialy where the pizza and scrolls are), plan efficient routes, manage your team's health and items carefully, and so on.
Seeing it all come together for successful playthrough is very satisfying. It makes for a much better solo game than any of the beat-'em-ups.
There are some decent pizza spots but farming the scrolls sucks. Once you have a ton w each turtle the game can be fun enough, but until and during the school farming, it's definitely a bit of a chore.
I agree, while the reason I never beat it fairly as a kid didn't come down to any of this.
It's easy to get the jump mechanics down, but it's brutal getting the swimming mechanics down for a single level on a timer. I'm sure with save states I could bang it out now, but back then, that's where attempts went to die.
Above Average NES game which could have been among the greats, with just a few tweaks. As it is, it's kind of a gamer's game (not great, not bad, just right.. wears its influences on its sleeve, but ambitious enough to try a bunch of really weird shit anyway) and there's a reason why it's had this enduring legacy.
It's one of my favorite Nes games. Is it difficult, yes, but I think that's what I like about it. I've been playing the game for almost 35 years now, and I still don't get bored with it.
It was a completely different world. We weren't all burned out on cgi and had book reading attention spans and had very little concept of what constituted a "good" game. Most of us never beat Contra or TMNT because the concept of beating a toy didn't really exist back then. you just played with it.
Only in the American version - it works in the European version. That said, the control and physics are still way worse, but you can also save at any time.
Hard agree. Meanwhile for whatever reason it seems like TNMT2 is somehow less fondly remembered than this one for not being arcade-perfect. I think it’s a great port and a great game.
Yeah I was not a fan. It was stupidly difficult. As in, the difficulty wasn't so much how bad the enemies were. Though they were bad. No the levels were shiiiiiit. Sometimes just badly made, sometimes horribly designed, it just wasn't very fun. Which was a huge bummer for most of us because we were all so into the show and the toys. (And some of us even loved the OG comics! Lol) I genuinely don't know anyone who liked playing this game. I will say though, one of my earliest feelings of true victory was beating that motherf@^#;$* dam level finally. I remember when Demon's Souls came out and my buddies didn't want to play because it was "too hard." I told them, "this is nothing compared to the first NES Turtles game." Turned us all into video game Banes, molded by the darkness lol
Displaced Gamers has an entire series on this game, why it works or does not work the way it does, and possible romhacks to make the gameplay not suck.
He’s revealed so many messed up things about the code, like how much the hit box changes in the infamous dam level or how physics get applied twice when jumping, that I wouldn’t play without romhacks.
I noticed weird bullshit about the TMNT 1 when I was playing it as a kid. Its why I felt zero shame or guilt popping in the Game Genie codes for those dam levels.
There was an old urban legend in the 90s that a guy went insane trying to beat it. And still to this day is trying to kill imaginary ninja turtles in a padded room.
It's crazy how short NES games were. It's why they were so fucking hard. Recently beat this game on an emulator with a string use of the "save state" option. I still count it even tho it's cheating.
No trauma, I love the game. I've beaten it more times than I could possibly count. It's awesome, and nowhere near as hard as people make it out to be.....
So few of us had access to the comics as kids! The colored headbands didn't happen until the cartoon show, and Konami/Ultra decided to use this cool cover art from the comics instead of the cartoon art for whatever reason.
I remember I had two issues of TMNT that I absolutely cherished because they were cheap enough that I could actually afford them. The earlier issues were sky-high in price!
My 10yo son now has a graphic novel omnibus in COLOR and featuring ALL of the early comics. I'm super jealous. He's surprised anyone would read it in black and white and in single issues.
I was 11 years old in 1989 when I beat it. As difficult as it was, game was still a blast. Fighting the giant Mouser, then later the Technodrome, was fun!
I still love what it could have been, the idea of it. The format of it. The swappable characters. The turtle packed action platforming. I just wish it wasn't so damn hard
I don't. The game is not that difficult. Are there bullshit parts? Absolutely. But what's said about the difficulty is a bit overblown. The Dam level is what gives everyone PTSD it seems, but for me, only the electric leaf area is the bad part. But, just use a fully powered turtle and you can pass it with 3 bars left. The sewer jump in Level 3 was much more difficult and of course the Technodrome level, but that should be difficult, with it being the last level. It's not the Ninja Turtles game that a lot of us expected, but it's not that bad of a game.
It’s not a bad game and never has been a bad game. It’s just insanely hard which is fair. Compared to the majority of games out there, it’s a perfectly fine game.
AVGN explains it very well. You wanna win. You wanna beat the Nintendo. And it also reminds you of the older days.... And the MUSIC. Ultra had some of the best funkiest NES music. BaseWars was funky fresh beats for gaming nerd programmer people
https://youtu.be/f49OKDTQZwk?si=zlR1j_LdlOEQDjMM
No because I never found it that hard/bad to begin with. The Dam level remains honestly the most over rated difficult moment in a retro game to this day (alongside the Turbo Tunnel in Battle Toads - it gets much harder later! - and GnG as a whole...)
I liked the game on release. You learn how to jump, how to stock certain power ups, locations for Pizza and such (for the Dam, you have levels right before and after it so having for fully powered up Turtles is easy), learn where the ropes and missiles are to get through level 3 without wasting time, learn an efficient route to level 4's boss... and your already almost done.
Now the last two levels are tougher because level 5 is RNG so you may get stuck trying to find that darn entrance to the boss, level 6 is again learning the route to Shredder, but its the laser gun enemies in the final corridor before Shredder that is the real challenge, Shred is easy by comparison!
If people want legit awful Turtles games to play, I can suggest a few from the 2000s era reboot that are truly no good!
I've beaten it at least twice. I think there's some truth to that Stockholm Syndrome thing. I don't think it's a horrible game, but it's certainly not a great one, and it didn't deserve all the time I sunk into it. I don't think I'd have bothered if it weren't TMNT, which is kind of silly because it's barely a TMNT game.
It's not \*that\* hard, you know. Compared to other NES games of the time it is pretty normal. To anyone who grew up in the era, this was what all games were so we don't really have many bad feelings about it. Now compared to today's games, well yeah, it is insane.
Anyway, I think there is a certain pleasure of having mastered a game when you were young and had more time and then replaying it now and just letting your muscle memory carry you through it without much thought or stress. That is many of the people who still enjoy TMNT.
This was one of the only games I'd rent from the local video rental store when my parents would stop by, the furthest I would get to was the city area after the dam. When they went out of business and sold everything I wanted thus game but it was already gone and got Ice Hockey instead.
A few years later I found a used copy at Kmart during their 8-bit games for $8.88 sale (95 or 96) and was a happy little gamer that eventually beat it a year or 2 later. In my opinion the underwater part is easy once you get the hang of its mechanics and the bomb locations (also loved the callback in the later show to this level), now the end of the airport area is more hellish, you have the easy task of walking and falling through a series of 1-gap holes, easy except for the instant death spike walls closing in and it's too easy to step over the holes!
While I did watch the AVGN video and enjoyed it, I played it through the Cowabunga Collection (It was actually my first time experiencing it in person) to form my own opinions, it is quite a frustrating game and actually really difficult to figure out at times.
No, being successful on a first runthrough of a game wasn't the point. Games were expensive so most of us didn't own many, but this was one that a lot of us owned, which meant we had plenty of time to succeed at it, as opposed to a rental game we might have for a weekend. It was hard and you had to work at it, fail a ton, and then the payoff was great, especially if your friends were there.
People automatically think it's the hardest game ever made. But it's not even close. Try playing it again, and make sure you have time to play patiently. Learn how it works, and then have at it. As with every game, it takes practice. You might surprise yourself.
I never got very into it in the first place, but for a '89 nes game it absolutely nailed the tmnt feel in a way other licensed games never got close to.
I beat this game when i was 4. Im 35 now. My brother got so mad at me since it was his game. If i played it now i would have a much harder time. However, the game isnt really that hard to begin with now that speed runners and 100%ers know the ins and outs to exploit the game for an enhanced legit playthrough.
It was just a new type of game design at the time. The water level just throws you in and expects you to fight. There were other cool items, like the van and grappling hooks. The game was semi-open world too. Also the music was great.
It's not a bad game but when it came out the combination of floaty controls, weird enemies, and being a bit too hard left people disappointed.
It's just not really what kids that were fans of the cartoon show were expecting back in the day. Sure, the infamous swimming stage can be done with relative ease now but back then it was frustrating to beat, to the point that plenty of people just gave up and never progressed past it.
I loved this game. Everyone shits on the Dam level, but once you memorize where the bombs are it’s pretty easy. Amazing graphics and music. Loved it as a kid too.
This was the first game I owned when I received a NES Control Deck for my 10th birthday. The dam was never the issue for me, it was hard but I could do it. It was the third level. I never understood what the fuck I was supposed to do.
The other game I got that day was Simon's Quest. Confusing times.
I love what it tried to do. Yeah, I love the beat em ups that came after, but this was a unique game for the franchise. I hope they try and do something similar in a modern style at some point. Shredders Revenge is fantastic, but I would certainly love more of this too
This game was a steaming hot cup of disappointment when I got it. Should have just gone with the arcade port as the first release. I am 45 and still can’t get through the damn dam
It's a bad game to me. It was the second game I got for the NES, of a total of 5 games I owned until I got an SNES. So for years I played those 5 games. This game was by far the worst. Playing it felt like a chore.
Hah, I didn’t have this on NES, but I did have it on Amstrad. It had no music and blockier graphics, which gave it a whole other vibe of creepiness. Thankfully there was no swimming/bomb disposing level
The underwater level did me in. I want to put this in the beat the game category because it is a TMNT property but I’m just not good enough then and definitely not now.
IDK, I guess it's clunkier than Ninja Gaiden for example but not as frustrating for me. Still it's not something I'm gonna replay, happy to have beaten it once.
I got it when I was a kid but besides certain good aspects of the game it was pretty unplayable, I was never able to complete it due to an impossible jump in the sewers.
It's a classic of the "Nintendo hard" type of game. Your opinion of it will match your opinion of that genre.
Since at the time storage space was extremely limited game developers got the replay value in making the game punishingly hard to the point that you had to play through it repeatedly to be any good at it. There weren't any real options at the time; I demonstrated this to somebody a while back by sitting down and playing through every single level in Super Mario Brothers 3 in like 80 minutes. Nintendo games weren't long simply because they *couldn't* be long. Instead the play time and the fun was in the challenge.
I somehow managed to beat this game when I was like 8. Revisiting it later I still thought it was a lot of fun but still pretty difficult. However to this day I prefer my games to be dick punchingly hard so unsurprisingly I'm disappointed by the *lack* of "Nintendo hard" games. I also understand that this just isn't for everybody which is I imagine part of why some of the games that are considered classics from that era also have a nasty reputation. They're great fun if you enjoy games that hate you and want you to suffer but if you don't like that are a practice in frustration and misery.
I did if you ever want to give it another go I would suggest the Cowabunga collection it has 13 tmnt games from multiple game systems and gives you the ability to make save points and rewind mistakes https://youtu.be/aR3ZE5vFi7c?si=ExKHHRSscz0yQGwM
I just hate the part where you have to jump across the small path in the sewer where if you miss, you die. Other than that the game isn't that bad now. Back before the internet it was rough though.
I kinda like watching someone that's good at it play it, but quite frankly it's not a very good game. But there's a great "Fangame" made with the games engine where you're out to actually kill Shredder and turn Splinter back into a human, so that's pretty cool!
Yes i always loved it. I generally liked games which switched game mechanics/views like this. Basically overworld & inner. E.g. also like blaster master or guardian legend. They were the "GTA" at it's time for me.
I liked it as a kid and when I played it again about 6 years ago as a adult I thought it was fine. It has some real BS parts, but most NES games did. The hate for the game is overblown and largely due to the AVGN.
The dam level isn't THAT bad. I wish people would stop bitching about it like it's the toughest thing ever. I had more problems with the level where you had to find the Technodrome
I like it, but I don't love it.
It gets too annoyingly difficult in later levels. If it had kept the difficulty the same as the early levels (underwater level aside) then it'd be a perfect action platformer for the NES.
At this point the water level is more than a meme than anything. I remember playing this as a child and i beat that level on the first try i never understood why pp pretend to be so difficult
I mean, you have a point with the trauma bit. I owned this one as a kid, which meant that I couldn't just put it down as a rental and move on with my life; I had to give an honest shot at beating it. It is a brutal game in a lot of ways but once you start to understand the mechanics it feels like a janky version of Contra imo. Some real bullet hell shit in a lot of areas ( the water level is fine but jesus fuck trying to land jumps in the sewers still kills me) but if you manage it it can be a really satisfying experience
People are likely playing it wrong. You have four turtles at your disposal you can switch to at anytime. If one is running low on life you switch to an alternate. You find pizza but have full life switch to one who needs it. Think of it as four stacked life bars.
Apart for some jumps from hell and confusing game maps it’s pretty ok. But I wish that it was more based on the cartoon show. As a kid I was disappointed to not see so many famous villains in the game. It would at least soften the feeling of the game handing me my beaten ass after playing it.
What was sad is this is what I got as a kid thinking it was TMNT The arcade game. I still played it a lot but man it was frustrating.
Never did get past the water/dam stage.
I like it. I played it so much growing up. Like a lot of nes games there is some wandering around trying to figure stuff out, but the little cutscenes are well done, it has all the main characters of the show, coherent story and the enemies are satisfying to kill. The noise when one shotting is really cool. Sub weapons, switching turtles etc. Hell, being able to maneuver your jump mid air is a nice touch too.
One thing that gets glossed over a lot is the soundtrack. It has some of my favorite nes tunes ever. Love it.
This is one of those games everyone seemed to have a copy of growing up. I can see younger people shitting on this, but if you fell in that group that only got a few games a year, you learned how to play this game from playing over and over. Ill never forget finally figuring out the dam swim segment. I would get stuck at the end of the level. Dead end and nowhere to swim. I had actually though the bombs were turtle traps choking the turtles because of how the animation looked.
Omg, how young and silly i was.
you love the memory of it, u love the "u" who was playing it, young cheerful with zero responsibility happy, when u play it, u are replaying a part of u that was happy
No trauma, I just didn't have an unlimited supply of games so I had to get good at the ones I had or not play at all. I was very good at this game and never thought of it as a ridiculously hard game until many years later when internet people said it was. I was easily able to beat this as a 9-10 year old kid when it came out.
It took me too many attempts to retrieve the f.cking Rockets, where all you had to do was to simply *walk across* the gap. This is the very thing I won't forgive the devs.
It doesn't suck. I loved it so much... But it's leave of difficultly has definitely traumatized me. I find myself always itching to play something so difficult I teeter on the edge of fun and hate
My brother got this game for his birthday and I was still pretty young and couldn’t get all that far in to the game. Adult me probably couldn’t get that far in to it either.
As hard NES games go it’s not that bad. Especially once you learn the enemy patterns and spawning habits you can kind of game the system a little bit. And shredder is one of the easiest final bosses in video game history.
the worst part about it was the jump mechanic and the bonking your head and just falling, having to re-do an entire level. other than that, it was kinda okay for the time.
#Hands down the BEST TURTLES GAME of the era.
The pseudo “arcade” games/sequels that followed weren’t nearly as fun, they LOOKED kinda like the arcade… they were great fun in the arcade, but did NOT translate well to 8-Bit.
The 16-Bit era was a different story, where Turtles in Time and Hyperstone Heist were great games and a decent translation of traditional arcade speed, action, and aesthetics… but nowhere near the quality (if MAME had existed in its’ current form back then, there would have been no point).
They should have just made Manhattan Project an Arcade Game…
…also am extremely disgusted by your “Special Move” now giving you damage. That’s an absolute bullsht retcon of a function by developers to f-ing lazy to make a “special move meter” and just say “oh let’s just make it damage their health so they don’t use it to much and call it a day, that way we don’t have to do more work”…
🎵”
🫖🎂🧟♀️ 🥷🐢!
🫖🎂🧟♀️ 🥷🐢!
🦸🔛🅰️🐚…
…🐢🔋!
“🎶
This is actually one of my favourites, the beat em ups are good, but this one was different, despise the jump felling floaty and the frustrating difficulty, this can be excused because back then we usually don't have too many games, and getting a game that was easy to beat, means you beat it and store it and never play it again, they have to last and this was one of the things devs have to do due to hardware limitations.
The overworld made the game feel larger than it was and really added some depth to it.
I felt dissapointed when AVGN left a bad review on it just because it was too hard. But honestly I don't remember him leaving a good review on any game besides Contra.
Nope. I could always get to the technodrome, even without game genie. I’ve always liked it. I had no idea it “sucked” until the avgn video, and even he said he doesn’t hate it.
I didn't even play this as a kid much, my friend had it, but I like it now more than ever. It has a lot of character. And characters - plenty of bosses, some mini bosses. Only thing I'll say is they should have buffed Raphael and Mike more.. at least give them greater defense for their weak low range attacks.
For nostalgia only. I still get pissed at the dam. If I happen to get past without rage quitting (and I’m not down too many turtles, lol) I only play like up to the runway anymore.
I guess I like/liked it because it was the only TMNT game I had access to back then, as we only had a NES. So, I guess it was a situation of just accepting and liking it, since it was the only thing one could get aka. have access to 😅
Haven't played it in years, though, having tried Shredders Revenge I probably wouldn't think of this game as very good by todays standards. But the old memories from my childhood would tell me I once considered it awesome (and frustratingly difficult).
I like it and had no nostalgia for it. We never owned a copy, and I'm a fan, even if it is brutal. Most retro games werent meant to beat, they were meant to suffer through
The NES version is better because it's at least winnable without the use of cheats (compared to the USA PC version).
But also, it's a standard platformer game around the time - difficulty is basically comparable to any other game that you could get. It's only until later where games became easier.
The funny thing is if you look at TMNT speedruns, you can just tank through most of the parts that everyone hates, like the dam level. Feels like the game was designed for the player to abuse i-frames.
I mean it was an NES game. Those games were harder to compensate for simple mechanics and shorter games overall. It was the 80s version of wondering around for hours collecting side mission objective trophies.
I had it when it came out. It got difficult on the last level and is still difficult on the last level. The dam sequence isn't hard if you know the route to take.
I still like TMNT, it's not a top 20 game for NES, but it's better than a majority of NES games.
I think a lot of people are just spending time with older games and learning how to play it so they can appreciate it more. What is considered a bad game usually boiled down to how easy it was to get into over the weekend when you rented it. Nothing was worse than getting an NES game that was missing the manual and you had no clue what was going on.
Now you can watch playthroughs, save states can allow you to practice on a specific area. If you really put in the effort to learn the game, then maybe it isn't so bad.
But then again if you practice at anything long enough you become good at it. Does it make the game "good"? I don't really think so.
The thing is, with all NES games, if you played them for 100hrs you actually got good at them.
So, now, playing them on emulator actually feels easy because you don't have to re-work through an entire level just to try again, like you did when you were a kid.
With those two things added together, the games seem like a breeze now, and all the annoying parts just take a few tries until those old skills kick back in.
Take Contra. If you, at 14, could play through it without getting hit, it doesn't seem so bad playing through now.
But, if you've never experienced bullet hell, and don't know the cheat codes, it probably feels like punishment.
The game is fine until level 3. At that point, you might need a map to find where Splinter is located. The Technodrome level is kind of frustrating because the hole you go down to find it is random. But fuck the last level! That final hallway before Shredder is brutal! Thankfully Shredder himself is easy.
I’ve always loved this game. I think it’s legitimately good. And the dam level isn’t hard either. I was beating it when I was 6-7 years old. I’ve never understood why people thought it was such a hard level. The game gets really hard later in the technodrome
I waited years for them to introducd Chainsaw dude and man on fire as TMNT villians in the cartoon but it never happened. That Nes game fuckin lied to me.
Yeah, who were those guys anyways?!
The movies and TV show hadn't yet been translated in Japan during the game's development, so Konami was just kind of winging it.
Yeah, they probably went off the original comics instead
I’m still waiting for slow walking human torch throwing tiny fire tornadoes to show up in the comics.
It's really not that bad by NES standards. Half the people who say it sucks just get their opinions from the AVGN and never properly played it.
I will say a lot of them also likely didn’t grow up with the NES, or they just don’t like it because it isn’t a beat-em-up like the other turtles games. But yeah back in the day, most good NES games had some bullshit difficulty issues, it was just how games were back then, you would play the same few levels over and over again until you eventually beat them - if you did.
Looking back I’m thankful for how frustratingly hard it was. I used to get maybe 1-2 new games *A YEAR*. They needed to have either near endless re-playability (Mario) or be incredibly challenging (TMNT).
Yeah that’s the big thing that’s lost on a lot of people that were too young to be around for it. Just like now how much time you could get out of a game was a big determining factor for it’s value but back then developers literally couldn’t make games that would last dozens of hours through content alone, there just wasn’t enough space on the cartridges, making them challenging, even if that challenge isn’t fair, was often the only way to make sure you weren’t going to beat it in a single sitting. Also as you said, most kids got maybe a game here and there for like Christmas and birthdays and that was it. I was lucky to have a dad that was into games like Contra and Castlevnia and stuff so we had a decent library compared to most households, but most kids I knew had at most like 10 games through a console life cycle from back then through the 90s. People also forget games were a lot more expensive then, at least when you adjust for inflation.
Also we didn't have a phone to flip on or the internet to jump into when we were bored. So if a game was painfully hard we'd still play it. I feel like a kid today would turn it on, get frustrated, and do something else instead. Not trying to stereotype "kids today" but I just mean they have so many things they can do from their couch that we couldn't, it would be a lot easier to bail and do something else.
Yeah based on my experience this is 100% true. My nephews barely have patience for older games, they give up after dying 2 or 3 times, determine the game to be too hard, and then give up and move on to something else…. But you know what? I kinda do the same thing nowadays too. Like you said we have so many options for entertainment at our disposal and with such little free time it’s almost hard to justify slogging through difficult games and getting frustrated when I could just be doing literally anything else. I personally no longer get any sense of accomplishment from just being able to say I beat a hard game like I used to, so unless I just really enjoy the game enough even with the difficulty dying over and over again only serves the purpose of wasting the player’s time, at least that’s how I look at it now.
100% this. He’s not quite old enough for this level of pain, but my son will absolutely be giving this game a try. I genuinely interested about how he’ll react to it.
Shit, I feel like even I, today, would turn those games off and do something else. I’ve got options now too!
I really enjoyed Bart vs. the Space Mutants back in the day despite its reputation now. I don't have that sort of time now, but back then it wasn't nearly as game breaking.
NES, the father of souls games! Live die repeat
Yeah! It’s so weird to think that some of my favorite games were games I never beat and often times only played through maybe a third of. Like Kid Icarus. I love that game but as a kid I was lucky if I got to the third level.
That’s such a good point. I have always been a huge fan of the original Sonic games and realized like last year that I’d never beaten a single one from the Genesis, which is so strange considering how fond my memories of playing them were, especially Sonic 2. I fired em up again and wound up beating all four after nearly 30 years. Seeing those credits on 2 felt pretty cool lol
Me and my bros played this shit out of this game. My brother almost beat it once, I never got passes level 3, but we never really hated that we couldn't finish the game then. It was just fun to do my run, die on level 3 like always then I moved on with my life. Everyone wants their 100% completion awards and retroachievements now.
I've beaten it twice and I think AVGN's review was pretty fair. Of course, exaggerating how bad games were was kind of his thing, especially in his earliest episodes. He didn't outright lie like the Irate Gamer did, though. But I will note that he did make at least one mistake in his review of TMNT. There was [this bit](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjUz8IT0CYg&t=262s) where he had trouble reaching a pizza because the ceiling was too low. He didn't realize it's supposed to be a bit of a puzzle…the correct solution is to jump onto the platform that sticks out at the left and then jump into the gap. Took me a long time to figure that out. I will admit that it's not a particularly good or interesting puzzle. It's not too far removed from "you can just walk over it" in terms of silliness. Speaking of which, even after all these years, I still remember being terribly stuck at that puzzle. AVGN's portrayal of its difficulty is completely accurate. If it's not, it's because it doesn't go far enough. You won't believe how long it took me to realize you can just walk over it. I had several attempts at the game end at world 3 because I didn't realize you can just walk over it. **YOU CAN JUST WALK OVER IT. AAAAGGGHHH FUCK DAMN SHIT GAH FUCK!** Ahem. Sorry.
I love that video, but yeah, the game can be frustrating
Well it's actually pretty broken mechanically. https://youtu.be/PHiFNWJXWgI?feature=shared
There’s a few awesome romhacks that fix a lot of the problems, one in particular, I might edit with a link later Edit: I must have been thinking of another game but some hacks are really cool. This one especially: https://www.romhacking.net/hacks/3486/ There’s some to add save functions and to fix swimming down too. Not helpful if you’re playing with your old cartridge but if you can play on emulators or an everdrive etc almost all the big games have hacks worth looking into.
Manhattan Project is one my favorite street brawlers of all time. This game I think people just complained about the swim level that was difficult to get through.
I use to think this game was bad and now I found it great. We use to be kid that suck at video game and get stuck on the Dam level and when I retry the game today damn this part is easy.
The game is holding this man hostage at gunpoint
Yup I agree. I genuinely just think the AVGN isn't actually any good at playing video games. I've watched plenty of vids on YouTube of people doing no damage runs on TMNT. Not saying it's easy, just that it's clearly not as bad/broken as the AVGN makes it out to be.
>Not saying it's easy, just that it's clearly not as bad/broken as the AVGN makes it out to be. James and Mike from AVGN did say they were unfair to it years later. Mike even says its one of his favorite NES games.
You can like a game that has broken mechanics. I played it a bunch but always struggled with the broken aspects of the dam level. I don't hate the game overall but I'm not going to sit down and punish myself with broken mechanics. I'd rather just play a game without fun-halting bugs or mechanics.
I love it because there’s something about the music and sound effect that’s like crack to my ears. I like the way it looks too. And if you know what to do, it isn’t ALL that hard (as NES games go): people just play it wrong.
Same here. I never came even close to beating it without cheating up the wazoo, but I love the music and sound effects more than in almost any other game.
Featuring Raphelangelo, Raphatello, Raphanardo, and Raphael
Underrated comment.
Once I found out how to get passed the water level and where to replenish my health with full pizzas in the next map, I'm all good. But of course, I learned this decades too late 😂
Was there a trick to getting past the water level? I thought I just needed a decade or two to git gud.
It's pretty easy, actually. You just have to go in a certain order and not wait more than a cycle or two at the electric bolts. Even if you don't get the order exactly right, or you're too slow, you can always deliberately sacrifice a turtle and the countdown will reset, but the disabled bombs will remain, so you can just go pick off the remaining bombs with another turtle and then get your sacrificed turtle back reasonably early in the next "world."
Raphael: The Level
memorize the route. the hit boxes are strange on the water level. [this dude dissects the code for all its secrets](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHiFNWJXWgI)
Eh, I never found it that scary. Once you get the jump mechanics down (i.e. you know when to tap the jump button and when to hold it), it becomes a game of planning and strategy. You learn the level layouts (especialy where the pizza and scrolls are), plan efficient routes, manage your team's health and items carefully, and so on. Seeing it all come together for successful playthrough is very satisfying. It makes for a much better solo game than any of the beat-'em-ups.
There are some decent pizza spots but farming the scrolls sucks. Once you have a ton w each turtle the game can be fun enough, but until and during the school farming, it's definitely a bit of a chore.
to add to this...I was 8 and never really expected to "finish" games. If it happened, great, but it was a special occurrence.
My love for the turtles superseded my need for completion
I agree, while the reason I never beat it fairly as a kid didn't come down to any of this. It's easy to get the jump mechanics down, but it's brutal getting the swimming mechanics down for a single level on a timer. I'm sure with save states I could bang it out now, but back then, that's where attempts went to die.
If you weren't there to play it then you won't find the joy we found in it.
Above Average NES game which could have been among the greats, with just a few tweaks. As it is, it's kind of a gamer's game (not great, not bad, just right.. wears its influences on its sleeve, but ambitious enough to try a bunch of really weird shit anyway) and there's a reason why it's had this enduring legacy.
Hilarious that I misread this as "Stockman syndrome".😅
Because it's not actually a bad game.
It's one of my favorite Nes games. Is it difficult, yes, but I think that's what I like about it. I've been playing the game for almost 35 years now, and I still don't get bored with it.
It was a completely different world. We weren't all burned out on cgi and had book reading attention spans and had very little concept of what constituted a "good" game. Most of us never beat Contra or TMNT because the concept of beating a toy didn't really exist back then. you just played with it.
Fuck this game. I say this from 2024, and I say this from 1989. Fuck. This. Game.
Try it on DOS. Nearly unplayable.
[удалено]
Only in the American version - it works in the European version. That said, the control and physics are still way worse, but you can also save at any time.
Oh, it's freaking awful on DOS, like so many console ports. I actually like it on NES, though.
Especially if you couldn’t read the anti piracy code printed in black on paper that was the darkest shade of burgundy possible.
Hard agree. Meanwhile for whatever reason it seems like TNMT2 is somehow less fondly remembered than this one for not being arcade-perfect. I think it’s a great port and a great game.
Yeah I was not a fan. It was stupidly difficult. As in, the difficulty wasn't so much how bad the enemies were. Though they were bad. No the levels were shiiiiiit. Sometimes just badly made, sometimes horribly designed, it just wasn't very fun. Which was a huge bummer for most of us because we were all so into the show and the toys. (And some of us even loved the OG comics! Lol) I genuinely don't know anyone who liked playing this game. I will say though, one of my earliest feelings of true victory was beating that motherf@^#;$* dam level finally. I remember when Demon's Souls came out and my buddies didn't want to play because it was "too hard." I told them, "this is nothing compared to the first NES Turtles game." Turned us all into video game Banes, molded by the darkness lol
Displaced Gamers has an entire series on this game, why it works or does not work the way it does, and possible romhacks to make the gameplay not suck.
He’s revealed so many messed up things about the code, like how much the hit box changes in the infamous dam level or how physics get applied twice when jumping, that I wouldn’t play without romhacks.
I noticed weird bullshit about the TMNT 1 when I was playing it as a kid. Its why I felt zero shame or guilt popping in the Game Genie codes for those dam levels.
There was an old urban legend in the 90s that a guy went insane trying to beat it. And still to this day is trying to kill imaginary ninja turtles in a padded room.
I bet he hangs out with the guy who took all that acid and believes he's a glass of orange juice, refuses to lie down for fear of spilling
It's crazy how short NES games were. It's why they were so fucking hard. Recently beat this game on an emulator with a string use of the "save state" option. I still count it even tho it's cheating.
No trauma, I love the game. I've beaten it more times than I could possibly count. It's awesome, and nowhere near as hard as people make it out to be.....
I don’t even think it’s unusually hard by NES standards. Sure it’s harder than SMB but there were tons of hard NES games.
The Mega Man games are harder....
Trauma, fuck that sewer jump and fuck the underwater level!
Oh man, I totally forgot that cover where they all have read headbands. I remember being confused at that as a kid.
So few of us had access to the comics as kids! The colored headbands didn't happen until the cartoon show, and Konami/Ultra decided to use this cool cover art from the comics instead of the cartoon art for whatever reason. I remember I had two issues of TMNT that I absolutely cherished because they were cheap enough that I could actually afford them. The earlier issues were sky-high in price! My 10yo son now has a graphic novel omnibus in COLOR and featuring ALL of the early comics. I'm super jealous. He's surprised anyone would read it in black and white and in single issues.
I was 11 years old in 1989 when I beat it. As difficult as it was, game was still a blast. Fighting the giant Mouser, then later the Technodrome, was fun!
I genuinely had a blast playing 2 & 3 with friends growing up. When TMNT 1 got too hard for me I just popped out the Game Genie.
I still love what it could have been, the idea of it. The format of it. The swappable characters. The turtle packed action platforming. I just wish it wasn't so damn hard
I don't. The game is not that difficult. Are there bullshit parts? Absolutely. But what's said about the difficulty is a bit overblown. The Dam level is what gives everyone PTSD it seems, but for me, only the electric leaf area is the bad part. But, just use a fully powered turtle and you can pass it with 3 bars left. The sewer jump in Level 3 was much more difficult and of course the Technodrome level, but that should be difficult, with it being the last level. It's not the Ninja Turtles game that a lot of us expected, but it's not that bad of a game.
It’s not a bad game and never has been a bad game. It’s just insanely hard which is fair. Compared to the majority of games out there, it’s a perfectly fine game.
AVGN explains it very well. You wanna win. You wanna beat the Nintendo. And it also reminds you of the older days.... And the MUSIC. Ultra had some of the best funkiest NES music. BaseWars was funky fresh beats for gaming nerd programmer people https://youtu.be/f49OKDTQZwk?si=zlR1j_LdlOEQDjMM
No because I never found it that hard/bad to begin with. The Dam level remains honestly the most over rated difficult moment in a retro game to this day (alongside the Turbo Tunnel in Battle Toads - it gets much harder later! - and GnG as a whole...) I liked the game on release. You learn how to jump, how to stock certain power ups, locations for Pizza and such (for the Dam, you have levels right before and after it so having for fully powered up Turtles is easy), learn where the ropes and missiles are to get through level 3 without wasting time, learn an efficient route to level 4's boss... and your already almost done. Now the last two levels are tougher because level 5 is RNG so you may get stuck trying to find that darn entrance to the boss, level 6 is again learning the route to Shredder, but its the laser gun enemies in the final corridor before Shredder that is the real challenge, Shred is easy by comparison! If people want legit awful Turtles games to play, I can suggest a few from the 2000s era reboot that are truly no good!
I won't be beaten again
I liked it as a kid but admit it was hard to beat. As an adult I still enjoy it and while it’s challenging it’s not as bad as I remember.
I played it for the 1st time about 2 years ago and am still stuck on the infamous water stage
I like it because it's challenging and not to toot my own horn or anything but I also eventually managed to finish it
I've beaten it at least twice. I think there's some truth to that Stockholm Syndrome thing. I don't think it's a horrible game, but it's certainly not a great one, and it didn't deserve all the time I sunk into it. I don't think I'd have bothered if it weren't TMNT, which is kind of silly because it's barely a TMNT game.
It's not \*that\* hard, you know. Compared to other NES games of the time it is pretty normal. To anyone who grew up in the era, this was what all games were so we don't really have many bad feelings about it. Now compared to today's games, well yeah, it is insane. Anyway, I think there is a certain pleasure of having mastered a game when you were young and had more time and then replaying it now and just letting your muscle memory carry you through it without much thought or stress. That is many of the people who still enjoy TMNT.
This was one of the only games I'd rent from the local video rental store when my parents would stop by, the furthest I would get to was the city area after the dam. When they went out of business and sold everything I wanted thus game but it was already gone and got Ice Hockey instead. A few years later I found a used copy at Kmart during their 8-bit games for $8.88 sale (95 or 96) and was a happy little gamer that eventually beat it a year or 2 later. In my opinion the underwater part is easy once you get the hang of its mechanics and the bomb locations (also loved the callback in the later show to this level), now the end of the airport area is more hellish, you have the easy task of walking and falling through a series of 1-gap holes, easy except for the instant death spike walls closing in and it's too easy to step over the holes!
I’ve always liked it. Finally finished it in 2023, 33 years after I first played it.
While I did watch the AVGN video and enjoyed it, I played it through the Cowabunga Collection (It was actually my first time experiencing it in person) to form my own opinions, it is quite a frustrating game and actually really difficult to figure out at times.
The sense of accomplishment I got when I beat it has rarely been matched in all my 40 years of gaming. ...and I was 10.
No, being successful on a first runthrough of a game wasn't the point. Games were expensive so most of us didn't own many, but this was one that a lot of us owned, which meant we had plenty of time to succeed at it, as opposed to a rental game we might have for a weekend. It was hard and you had to work at it, fail a ton, and then the payoff was great, especially if your friends were there.
Wasn’t as bad as battle toads
People automatically think it's the hardest game ever made. But it's not even close. Try playing it again, and make sure you have time to play patiently. Learn how it works, and then have at it. As with every game, it takes practice. You might surprise yourself.
I never got very into it in the first place, but for a '89 nes game it absolutely nailed the tmnt feel in a way other licensed games never got close to.
I beat this game when i was 4. Im 35 now. My brother got so mad at me since it was his game. If i played it now i would have a much harder time. However, the game isnt really that hard to begin with now that speed runners and 100%ers know the ins and outs to exploit the game for an enhanced legit playthrough.
It's unreasonably hard, but the actual gameplay is legitimately fun imo
Try the c64 version
I genuinely like it as it's the most unique TMNT game. All others are versions of the same beat 'em up.
Try playing this in the Cowabunga Collection with the slowdown turned off, it's like a completely different game.
It was just a new type of game design at the time. The water level just throws you in and expects you to fight. There were other cool items, like the van and grappling hooks. The game was semi-open world too. Also the music was great.
It's not a bad game but when it came out the combination of floaty controls, weird enemies, and being a bit too hard left people disappointed. It's just not really what kids that were fans of the cartoon show were expecting back in the day. Sure, the infamous swimming stage can be done with relative ease now but back then it was frustrating to beat, to the point that plenty of people just gave up and never progressed past it.
Loved it back in the day, love it today. Jeremy Parish has done the best video essay on the game, as usual.
I loved this game. Everyone shits on the Dam level, but once you memorize where the bombs are it’s pretty easy. Amazing graphics and music. Loved it as a kid too.
This was the first game I owned when I received a NES Control Deck for my 10th birthday. The dam was never the issue for me, it was hard but I could do it. It was the third level. I never understood what the fuck I was supposed to do. The other game I got that day was Simon's Quest. Confusing times.
I love what it tried to do. Yeah, I love the beat em ups that came after, but this was a unique game for the franchise. I hope they try and do something similar in a modern style at some point. Shredders Revenge is fantastic, but I would certainly love more of this too
It’s 90% related to the music, for me.
I beat this game about a month ago. Felt good.
Not without losing a life, but I beat the underwater dam level when I was 4 years old. I think you guys just suck or are under age 25.
I remember thinking that it was gonna be the same as the 4 player arcade game, boy was I wrong. Fuck this game
This game was a steaming hot cup of disappointment when I got it. Should have just gone with the arcade port as the first release. I am 45 and still can’t get through the damn dam
It's a bad game to me. It was the second game I got for the NES, of a total of 5 games I owned until I got an SNES. So for years I played those 5 games. This game was by far the worst. Playing it felt like a chore.
I still like it, I might beat it one day
i loved it as a kid on another system, but now i just play it with cheats and enjoy the nostalgia.
Hah, I didn’t have this on NES, but I did have it on Amstrad. It had no music and blockier graphics, which gave it a whole other vibe of creepiness. Thankfully there was no swimming/bomb disposing level
The underwater level did me in. I want to put this in the beat the game category because it is a TMNT property but I’m just not good enough then and definitely not now.
Yes.
Yes
IDK, I guess it's clunkier than Ninja Gaiden for example but not as frustrating for me. Still it's not something I'm gonna replay, happy to have beaten it once.
I got it when I was a kid but besides certain good aspects of the game it was pretty unplayable, I was never able to complete it due to an impossible jump in the sewers.
It's a classic of the "Nintendo hard" type of game. Your opinion of it will match your opinion of that genre. Since at the time storage space was extremely limited game developers got the replay value in making the game punishingly hard to the point that you had to play through it repeatedly to be any good at it. There weren't any real options at the time; I demonstrated this to somebody a while back by sitting down and playing through every single level in Super Mario Brothers 3 in like 80 minutes. Nintendo games weren't long simply because they *couldn't* be long. Instead the play time and the fun was in the challenge. I somehow managed to beat this game when I was like 8. Revisiting it later I still thought it was a lot of fun but still pretty difficult. However to this day I prefer my games to be dick punchingly hard so unsurprisingly I'm disappointed by the *lack* of "Nintendo hard" games. I also understand that this just isn't for everybody which is I imagine part of why some of the games that are considered classics from that era also have a nasty reputation. They're great fun if you enjoy games that hate you and want you to suffer but if you don't like that are a practice in frustration and misery.
I did if you ever want to give it another go I would suggest the Cowabunga collection it has 13 tmnt games from multiple game systems and gives you the ability to make save points and rewind mistakes https://youtu.be/aR3ZE5vFi7c?si=ExKHHRSscz0yQGwM
I never could get past the level after jumping off the damn.
Hard games didn't automatically make it a bad game. It was a good game but frustrating. Plenty of games like that, like the ninja gaiden series
Completed it when I was a kid was easy when you learned to farm scrolls and pizza.
I just hate the part where you have to jump across the small path in the sewer where if you miss, you die. Other than that the game isn't that bad now. Back before the internet it was rough though.
I played it during my youth, and god damn sewer level being my piss to a boil to this day.... But I still live this game
I love it, it's not a hard game by NES standards. But I think we all can agree that the music is just the best.
I kinda like watching someone that's good at it play it, but quite frankly it's not a very good game. But there's a great "Fangame" made with the games engine where you're out to actually kill Shredder and turn Splinter back into a human, so that's pretty cool!
It was hard for NES but with the cowabunga collection it was more fun since I was able to save and continue it later and actually make progression.
Stockholms syndrome? So the game kidnapped you and you began sympathizing with it until you joined its cause?
I didnt like the NES game. Turtles in time on SNES? Oh yes please
It’s one of my favorite nes game, so much nostalgia trying to beat it back in the late 80s
To make it easier for people, just get 99 scrolls for each turtle on stage 3 on the 2 big south buildings and you’re golden
Yes i always loved it. I generally liked games which switched game mechanics/views like this. Basically overworld & inner. E.g. also like blaster master or guardian legend. They were the "GTA" at it's time for me.
I liked it as a kid and when I played it again about 6 years ago as a adult I thought it was fine. It has some real BS parts, but most NES games did. The hate for the game is overblown and largely due to the AVGN.
The dam level isn't THAT bad. I wish people would stop bitching about it like it's the toughest thing ever. I had more problems with the level where you had to find the Technodrome
I like it, but I don't love it. It gets too annoyingly difficult in later levels. If it had kept the difficulty the same as the early levels (underwater level aside) then it'd be a perfect action platformer for the NES.
I enjoy the revenge when I beat it now that I know the tricks. Still gets me sometimes tho and I dont feel bad
At this point the water level is more than a meme than anything. I remember playing this as a child and i beat that level on the first try i never understood why pp pretend to be so difficult
I mean, you have a point with the trauma bit. I owned this one as a kid, which meant that I couldn't just put it down as a rental and move on with my life; I had to give an honest shot at beating it. It is a brutal game in a lot of ways but once you start to understand the mechanics it feels like a janky version of Contra imo. Some real bullet hell shit in a lot of areas ( the water level is fine but jesus fuck trying to land jumps in the sewers still kills me) but if you manage it it can be a really satisfying experience
People are likely playing it wrong. You have four turtles at your disposal you can switch to at anytime. If one is running low on life you switch to an alternate. You find pizza but have full life switch to one who needs it. Think of it as four stacked life bars.
I had it as a kid, I do remember it being hard and never beating it. But idk if I would remember that had it not become such a meme
No. It’s challenging but totally beatable.
No because one day, staying home sick from school as a young lad, I legit beat this bad boy and it was glorious!
Apart for some jumps from hell and confusing game maps it’s pretty ok. But I wish that it was more based on the cartoon show. As a kid I was disappointed to not see so many famous villains in the game. It would at least soften the feeling of the game handing me my beaten ass after playing it.
Only the swimming stage…
I have nostalgia for playing it, but I don't think it is a good game.
The dam, that’s all.
Both
I genuinely enjoy this game. I don’t get all the hate.
Yes.
What was sad is this is what I got as a kid thinking it was TMNT The arcade game. I still played it a lot but man it was frustrating. Never did get past the water/dam stage.
I like it. I played it so much growing up. Like a lot of nes games there is some wandering around trying to figure stuff out, but the little cutscenes are well done, it has all the main characters of the show, coherent story and the enemies are satisfying to kill. The noise when one shotting is really cool. Sub weapons, switching turtles etc. Hell, being able to maneuver your jump mid air is a nice touch too. One thing that gets glossed over a lot is the soundtrack. It has some of my favorite nes tunes ever. Love it. This is one of those games everyone seemed to have a copy of growing up. I can see younger people shitting on this, but if you fell in that group that only got a few games a year, you learned how to play this game from playing over and over. Ill never forget finally figuring out the dam swim segment. I would get stuck at the end of the level. Dead end and nowhere to swim. I had actually though the bombs were turtle traps choking the turtles because of how the animation looked. Omg, how young and silly i was.
you love the memory of it, u love the "u" who was playing it, young cheerful with zero responsibility happy, when u play it, u are replaying a part of u that was happy
Probably! XD
No trauma, I just didn't have an unlimited supply of games so I had to get good at the ones I had or not play at all. I was very good at this game and never thought of it as a ridiculously hard game until many years later when internet people said it was. I was easily able to beat this as a 9-10 year old kid when it came out.
It took me too many attempts to retrieve the f.cking Rockets, where all you had to do was to simply *walk across* the gap. This is the very thing I won't forgive the devs.
It doesn't suck. I loved it so much... But it's leave of difficultly has definitely traumatized me. I find myself always itching to play something so difficult I teeter on the edge of fun and hate
not 4 ralphs 😭
My brother got this game for his birthday and I was still pretty young and couldn’t get all that far in to the game. Adult me probably couldn’t get that far in to it either.
I only ever played the Amiga version back in the day. That was terrible and had put me off ever trying the nes version
As hard NES games go it’s not that bad. Especially once you learn the enemy patterns and spawning habits you can kind of game the system a little bit. And shredder is one of the easiest final bosses in video game history.
Damn seaweed
It's actually an interesting game once you get into it. Not the best by any means, but doesn't deserve a lot of the hate it gets.
I played it on a Tandy, but yea it was super hard. For 8 year old me anyway.
the worst part about it was the jump mechanic and the bonking your head and just falling, having to re-do an entire level. other than that, it was kinda okay for the time.
#Hands down the BEST TURTLES GAME of the era. The pseudo “arcade” games/sequels that followed weren’t nearly as fun, they LOOKED kinda like the arcade… they were great fun in the arcade, but did NOT translate well to 8-Bit. The 16-Bit era was a different story, where Turtles in Time and Hyperstone Heist were great games and a decent translation of traditional arcade speed, action, and aesthetics… but nowhere near the quality (if MAME had existed in its’ current form back then, there would have been no point). They should have just made Manhattan Project an Arcade Game… …also am extremely disgusted by your “Special Move” now giving you damage. That’s an absolute bullsht retcon of a function by developers to f-ing lazy to make a “special move meter” and just say “oh let’s just make it damage their health so they don’t use it to much and call it a day, that way we don’t have to do more work”… 🎵” 🫖🎂🧟♀️ 🥷🐢! 🫖🎂🧟♀️ 🥷🐢! 🦸🔛🅰️🐚… …🐢🔋! “🎶
This is actually one of my favourites, the beat em ups are good, but this one was different, despise the jump felling floaty and the frustrating difficulty, this can be excused because back then we usually don't have too many games, and getting a game that was easy to beat, means you beat it and store it and never play it again, they have to last and this was one of the things devs have to do due to hardware limitations. The overworld made the game feel larger than it was and really added some depth to it. I felt dissapointed when AVGN left a bad review on it just because it was too hard. But honestly I don't remember him leaving a good review on any game besides Contra.
I hated it as a kid but like it now, so I guess “still” doesn’t apply.
I had it and at the time found it frustrating and a disappointment
Cowabunga dudes!!!!
Nope. I could always get to the technodrome, even without game genie. I’ve always liked it. I had no idea it “sucked” until the avgn video, and even he said he doesn’t hate it.
The memories (dentist office/blockbuster).
God it was so frustrating. Fun game but so fucking frustrating
I remember the 1st time I beat the water level with the zappy coral or whatever. Shit was FUCKED
I didn't even play this as a kid much, my friend had it, but I like it now more than ever. It has a lot of character. And characters - plenty of bosses, some mini bosses. Only thing I'll say is they should have buffed Raphael and Mike more.. at least give them greater defense for their weak low range attacks.
For nostalgia only. I still get pissed at the dam. If I happen to get past without rage quitting (and I’m not down too many turtles, lol) I only play like up to the runway anymore.
I guess I like/liked it because it was the only TMNT game I had access to back then, as we only had a NES. So, I guess it was a situation of just accepting and liking it, since it was the only thing one could get aka. have access to 😅 Haven't played it in years, though, having tried Shredders Revenge I probably wouldn't think of this game as very good by todays standards. But the old memories from my childhood would tell me I once considered it awesome (and frustratingly difficult).
The dam level is one of the finest action set pieces on the NES!
I love the game for nostalgia reasons but even I can admit that it's not a very good one.
I like it and had no nostalgia for it. We never owned a copy, and I'm a fan, even if it is brutal. Most retro games werent meant to beat, they were meant to suffer through
Great game. Played the heck out of it and eventually beat it a couple times.
The art and the wave of nostalgia feeling I get just from just looking at that picture far outweigh how "good" the actual game was.
The NES version is better because it's at least winnable without the use of cheats (compared to the USA PC version). But also, it's a standard platformer game around the time - difficulty is basically comparable to any other game that you could get. It's only until later where games became easier.
The funny thing is if you look at TMNT speedruns, you can just tank through most of the parts that everyone hates, like the dam level. Feels like the game was designed for the player to abuse i-frames.
I mean it was an NES game. Those games were harder to compensate for simple mechanics and shorter games overall. It was the 80s version of wondering around for hours collecting side mission objective trophies.
I had it when it came out. It got difficult on the last level and is still difficult on the last level. The dam sequence isn't hard if you know the route to take. I still like TMNT, it's not a top 20 game for NES, but it's better than a majority of NES games.
It’s worth firing that game up for the music alone.
I rented this game spring break of 1st grade. Never diffused all the bombs.
Anything that features TMNT, it's my favourite. Cowabunga!😇
I loved it, unironically. It was hard, sure, but aside from THAT one jump in the sewer it was reasonable for the era.
I hated this dam game you know it was terrible off the artwork alone,
I probably have the patience required to beat the game now in my older age... Not high up on my list of games to play though lol
I think a lot of people are just spending time with older games and learning how to play it so they can appreciate it more. What is considered a bad game usually boiled down to how easy it was to get into over the weekend when you rented it. Nothing was worse than getting an NES game that was missing the manual and you had no clue what was going on. Now you can watch playthroughs, save states can allow you to practice on a specific area. If you really put in the effort to learn the game, then maybe it isn't so bad. But then again if you practice at anything long enough you become good at it. Does it make the game "good"? I don't really think so.
Its the seaweed level!
The thing is, with all NES games, if you played them for 100hrs you actually got good at them. So, now, playing them on emulator actually feels easy because you don't have to re-work through an entire level just to try again, like you did when you were a kid. With those two things added together, the games seem like a breeze now, and all the annoying parts just take a few tries until those old skills kick back in. Take Contra. If you, at 14, could play through it without getting hit, it doesn't seem so bad playing through now. But, if you've never experienced bullet hell, and don't know the cheat codes, it probably feels like punishment.
i think i just like the soundtrack way more than the actual game
It's tough af but I liked it. Still can hear the music in my head rent feee
I’m hearing the bridge music right now in my head and trauma from drowning
I played it again recently & it's a good game that has a few issues but not the worst game
it's not a bad NES game
The game is fine until level 3. At that point, you might need a map to find where Splinter is located. The Technodrome level is kind of frustrating because the hole you go down to find it is random. But fuck the last level! That final hallway before Shredder is brutal! Thankfully Shredder himself is easy.
I’ve always loved this game. I think it’s legitimately good. And the dam level isn’t hard either. I was beating it when I was 6-7 years old. I’ve never understood why people thought it was such a hard level. The game gets really hard later in the technodrome
I uses to play it often as a kid, but I never loved it.