NES #36: Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!!

Developer: Nintendo

Publisher: Nintendo

Release Date: 10-18-87

When playing Fight for Life I was disappointed by the game’s conspicuous lack of ropes. So, I decided to make up for it this time around and play one of my favorite games that prominently features ropes. Okay so ropes don’t make or break the game, but they do help illustrate how much a game can be improved with a strong sense of self. Nintendo decided to license Mike Tyson’s likeness for their American release of Punch-Out!!, but Tyson stands out as an odd beacon of reality inside a zany cartoon. And Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! never lets you forget that it is a zany cartoon even when it supposedly takes place in the real world. The characters are exaggerated, oddly colored giants with unique characteristics and personalities. Some of them have aged better than others, but they all help to make the game memorable. There were many boxing games released in the 80s, but this is probably the only one most people have heard of. That might not be the case if Little Mac fought generic muscle men in black shorts. Mike Tyson is still quite famous so that might help, but it’s just as well known in the later versions that have him taken out. What makes Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! special is the way it turns the whole concept of boxing on its head.

(I always felt like a Glass Joe in a world of Super Macho Men)

 

Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! is a master class in waiting. Most boxing games are all about aggression. You can get by in many of them just by punching a whole lot and ignoring what your opponent is doing. In Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! you have to wait for the right moment to strike. Typically, your opponents will attack first, and your strategy is all about reaction. You wait for them to twitch their eyes and do an uppercut so you can get in three or four punches and then wait for their next tell. Random punches will be blocked just about every time, and every missed punch will deplete your hearts until you are a worthless purple blob unable to fight back. So, you really have to know your opponent. This kind of personality was a revelation after years of sports games featuring stick men and nameless bald white guys. I’ve heard Punch-Out!! referred to as the original rhythm game because of its punch and wait gameplay with predictable moves from the opponents. Of course, famous firsts are rarely the actual first, and there are some earlier sports titles that employed similar mechanics. There were probably even earlier ones that have ropes. Punch-Out!! made it all memorable and fun however, and that’s the most important thing.

I originally played through this game maybe twenty-five years ago, so it’s surprising how well I still remember it. I felt like I could play through parts of it with my eyes closed. I even still remembered the password for the world circuit. I was hopeless against Mr. Sandman back in the day, so I entered that password dozens of times. You know it’s a good game when you can pick it back up after years away and still remember how to play. It’s not perfect of course. Three of the fighters are recycled in the world circuit, and while I enjoy the second Bald Bull fight, the other two don’t add much. The second Don Flamenco fight can even get downright annoying. It’s also rather short and can get repetitive. These are minor complaints, however. I always have fun going back to this game.

 Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! is a standout of gaming’s big comeback year. It’s hard to find a more important year for gaming in America than 1987. It would see many of the ultimate franchises that have shaped gaming forever. That’s when we got The Legend of Zelda, Castlevania, Mega Man, Metroid, and many of the other most iconic NES games. Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! is one of the games that shaped 1987, and it’s hard to think of the NES without it. I still like Ninja Gaiden a little better, but I’m putting it above the excellent but less playable SMS Sonic the Hedgehog to give up a new #10. That gives us 20 good NES games so far which means I’m well on my way to proving to the world that there are more than 100 good NES games. It’s a responsibility I take very seriously, and I hope I am remembered for it in the future. What’s more important than Nintendo?

 

NES Quality Percentage: 20/36 or 55.55%  

Ranking List.docx

Atari Jaguar #6: Fight for Life

Developer: Atari

Publisher: Atari

Release Date: 4-19-1996

 

The other day I was thinking about bands who ended their careers on a low note. I’m thinking of bands like Creedence Clearwater Revival whose final album, Mardi Gras, saw John Fogerty barely participating and instead featured Doug Clifford’s bland country rock and Stu Cook’s angry gargle of a voice. Or how about The Clash’s infamous Cut the Crap which saw Joe Strummer trying and failing to get back to basics awash in a sea of keyboards, drum machines, and anonymous back-up singers. These albums are so bad that they’re practically disowned by fans and creators. Most people will tell you that the final Velvet Underground album is the classic Loaded when it is technically the album Squeeze. Hey, want to hear a Velvet Underground album that only features their second bassist? Neither did anyone else. Even the Beatles couldn’t get it quite right. For their final statement they created the masterpiece Abbey Road with one of the all-time perfect second sides. It would be the perfect last album if not for the fact that they released the difficult-to-make, band destroying Let it Be eight months later. Still most people consider Abbey Road their final album no matter what the truth actually is. My point is that bands don’t usually break up when all is well. They more commonly end when everything is falling apart. Atari was in a similar situation in 1996. Unable to compete in a world with PlayStation and Nintendo 64 they were out of options and finally had to close up shop for good. However, they still needed to recoup whatever money they could get. That brings us to Fight for Life. Although the Atari name would live on and Jaguar would still be supported by Telegames for a while, Fight for Life ended up being the final game released by the original Atari Corporation. One would hope that Atari would go out with dignity or at least something passably fun. Sadly, this was not to be the case. Fight for Life is the perfect example of a company limping to the finish line. But it’s a 3D fighter, right? Doesn’t that count for something?

(Yes, it is funny that this game is from 1996 and the character's name is Pog)

 

Strangely, the fact that it was a 3D fighter somehow got it some decent reviews back in 1996. It makes me wonder if their reviews stopped at the box art. How could anyone play this game and not see it as a total disaster? I like to be thorough in these reviews and play the games for a significant period of time. When Playing Fight for Life I kept looking at the clock and wondering how long was long enough. It is one of the most boring games I have ever played. It should’ve come with a Fight for Life branded blanket and sleeping cap because playing it instantly makes me tired. It’s the slowest a fighting game could possibly be without the two characters being completely stationary. I’m not sure if it’s even possible to make a game go slower. You really gotta be ready to inch along and spam some moves at the outset. You are able to steal the moves of defeated opponents, but in the beginning you are basically just slowly kicking and punching. Normal attacks do very little damage, so you’re going to be there for a while. If you’re lucky you can land some jump kicks, but the move is tricky to pull off. There’s no clock, so rounds can last several minutes. It’s just as well because if the clock lasted a typical 60-90 seconds than every match would end in a damage-free draw. This is probably a bit of an exaggeration, but it doesn’t feel that way when I’m playing. It feels like every round lasted ten minutes with victory only achieved because the other fighter died of old age. But no, I really did play this game, and I really did fight my opponent until they were knocked over, and it didn’t take so long that I had a ZZ Top beard by the end of it. The rounds were probably more like 2-3 minutes each, but when they’re so slow and boring they feel like an eternity.

 The finished product definitely reflects the troubled history behind Fight for Life. The development cycle was almost as long as the Jaguar’s lifespan, and employee turnover was high. There was plenty of meddling on Atari’s end and unrealistic goals on the developer’s side. I highly doubt it was actually finished when it was finally turned in, but Atari didn’t have any more time to wait. None of the Jaguar’s strengths are on display in Fight for Life despite it being one of the last games for the console. The character designs are boring and chunky while the graphics are spare and generic. It’s just a big, empty square with maybe some hazy buildings far off in the distance. If you wander too close to the edge of the square you will get electrocuted, but this electric barrier is merely implied. They couldn’t put in a rope or fence to indicate a border? That would at least be something to look at. Image a game so bad that I wished I was looking at a rope. That’s Fight for Life. Even most of the stinkers on Jaguar had good graphics. Atari Karts might’ve been a bit dull, but the backgrounds were almost distractingly good. Even Club Drive was more detailed, and the graphics in that game were almost completely comprised of blocks of cheddar cheese. Fight for Life truly is a failure on every level. The best thing to do with Fight for Life is to play it with your friends for a half hour and then spend the next ten years talking about how bad it is. At least in that case you can take comfort in the fact that you have friends.

(Just imagine a rope back there. That would certainly improve things)

 Like so much that Atari tried to do past gaming’s second generation, Fight for Life is a disaster. It’s long been a game that has gotten merciless reviews, and for once I have to agree with snarky internet commentators. In fact I think I became one just for this review. Hopefully I can snap out of it, but Fight for Life changes a person. In fact I think I’ll take the Velvet Underground route and just pretend like it doesn’t exist at all. What was the game they released right before it? Oh, Attack of the Mutant Penguins. Well maybe I’ll go even further back. Hey, Ruiner Pinball was pretty good. That’s now the game that will live in my brain as the final original Atari release. At least it will be until I have to review all the other games. Life isn’t easy for an obsolete technology reviewer. So it’s no surprise that Fight for Life is going low on the list. It’s the bottom Jaguar game, and it may stay that way for a long time. It’s #135 out of #145 overall which honestly a little higher than I expected. All things considered it’s still a better fighting game that Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em robots. I swear that someday I will review a good fighting game, but until then bring on the dregs. I can handle it.

 

Jaguar Quality Percentage: 1/6 or 16.67%

Ranking List.docx

Atari Jaguar #5: Ruiner Pinball

Developer: High Voltage Software

Publisher: Atari

Release Date: 11-6-95

One fun thing about the Jaguar is that the library of games is very small and new enough to be well documented. It’s a little tricky doing a chronological run of Odyssey 2, but with Jaguar it’s easy to know which game was released when. Ruiner Pinball was the 34^th Jaguar game released, just ahead of Atari Karts. That puts it close to the end of Jaguar’s relevance being released just a few months before Atari’s demise. Six games would officially be released after Atari bowed out, but when you talk about games like Ruiner Pinball you are really starting to look at the end of the original Atari company. By this time things were getting desperate, and people were really hoping some game would come along and change the narrative. That might explain the bad reviews Ruiner Pinball got upon release. They were looking for something bigger and flashier than a humble pinball game with modest graphics and not much to do outside of getting a high score. More recent reviews have been much more positive. Long after the dust has settled, we can look at the library as a whole and appreciate each game without trying to help consumers decide which console to buy for Christmas in 1995. Wait, 1995? That’s when PlayStation came out. It had more games in the first three months than Jaguar had in the first three years. Jaguar really was doomed from the start, wasn’t it?

 Of course, I am a modern reviewer who doesn’t have to worry about which mid-90s console people should buy, and I can definitely say that Ruiner Pinball is a pleasant underdog. It might fade a bit behind some other prominent 1995 releases, but it’s a quality pinball game with good replay value. The two tables are interesting and appear to be aimed more at adults. The name Ruiner even comes from a Nine Inch Nails song. Ruiner will also likely appeal to Stanley Kubrick fans as it’s a cold war satire in the vein of Dr. Strangelove. Who knew pinball tables could be satirical? It has a mid-century look complete with pin-up girls and mushroom clouds, and there are frequent barrages of bombs and missiles. A few of these stunts couldn’t be done on a real pinball table, but mostly it does a good job simulating the real thing. There’s not an overabundance of video game gimmicks. The physics are a little bit off, but not so much to ruin the experience. I just wish it was a little slower. It moves faster than an actual pinball machine, and this causes the ball to get lost occasionally.

 

The second table is called Tower, and for such a generic title it’s a weird machine. In fact, it straight up takes place in Hell. That’s a bit much for a pinball table! They were likely inspired by Devil’s Crush on the Turbografx-16, but Tower goes even further. It’s a multi-leveled table that is full of devilish horrors. It features a buxom demon woman and a poor soul trapped on a torture device among other vivid images. It’s not the most high-definition game on the system, but I like the interesting color palate full of purple and green. Tower is strange looking and very large, but it plays even more like the real thing than Ruiner. It’s focused on familiar pinball goals such as drop targets and rollovers. If you enjoy lighting things up and knocking things over than Tower is a good machine for you. Despite its disturbing appearance it is oddly comforting. My son certainly enjoyed it, and you don’t have to worry about it warping his brain because this game got a K-A rating. This was the early version of the E rating, which means that Ruiner Pinball is appropriate for everyone. I imagine it would get at least an E10+ today because I could see it being a little bit too mature for the younger crowd. It’s like the movie world before PG-13 existed. Sometimes a movie that was a little too violent for little kids would slip through.  

 So Ruiner Pinball is a low-key game that probably won’t end up on too many “best of” lists, but It’s a fun game for pinball fans. Since I am a pinball fan and the ranker of games that means that we finally have our first good Jaguar game. It’s also the even rarer, good Jaguar game that’s only on Jaguar. Many of the better Jaguar games are familiar titles that were ported to several other systems. NBA Jam TE is a good game, but it’s on about a dozen more popular consoles. My memories are a bit hazy so it will be interesting to see how many good Jaguar games are exclusive to the system. Of course, if you want to play Ruiner Pinball now you can do so on Atari 50. I am ranking it at #68 of 72 good games. That’s not super high, but you have to start somewhere. Here’s to the weird and interesting world of Atari Jaguar. There are plenty of famously bad games, but there are a few hidden gems that you’ve never heard of.

 

Atari Jaguar Quality Percentage: 1/5 or 20%

Ranking List.docx

Atari Jaguar #4: Atari Karts

Developer: Miracle Designs

Publisher: Atari

Release Date: December 1995

 Atari Karts is another example of a Jaguar game that started out with potential but ended being kind of sad. The name makes it sound like it’s going to be a celebration of Atari in  the vein of Super Mario Kart. Sure it could be derivative, but there’s nothing inherently wrong with copying a great game. Sadly, most of the Atari references were left out in favor of generic tracks with your typical 90s wacky racers. There’s a rooster wearing sunglasses! There’s a skeleton dude! There’s a woman! They did leave in Bentley Bear from Crystal Castles and a few references in some hard-to-read 90s text, but it’s mostly just generic racer. Working titles for it included Kart and Super Kart so I suppose it could’ve been worse. It really shows that by this point Atari had practically given up. With care and effort this could’ve been something special. Instead, it’s another sad chapter in the Jaguar saga quickly rushed out in time for one last desperate Christmas. By this point distribution was shrinking, so Atari Karts is now quite rare. I will admit that I played this on the Atari 50 collection on my PlayStation 5. If I ever do track down an original copy and discover that it plays different, I will amend this article, but I don’t think it would change my opinion much. Atari did an excellent job porting their Jaguar games even though it’s an extremely embarrassing moment in their history. They somehow knew that there were people like me who were buying Atari 50 basically to play less-than-stellar Jaguar games. I still feel like a richer human being because of it.

 Before I say too much, I would like to state that I am honestly not trying pile on Jaguar. I hate to pick on a console just because it has a bad reputation. Picking on easy targets adds nothing to the conversation, and I try not to do it on here. However, I have to admit that Atari Karts is not a very good game. Like all Jaguar games I’ve reviewed so far, it has nice visuals but doesn’t quite know what to do with them. It just has such a haphazard feel to it. It is set up like Super Mario Kart with different cups and a championship race against a boss at the end. However, unlike Super Mario Karts’ distinct personality-filled tracks the courses in Atari Karts are just curvy roads. They are nameless and interchangeable. The same layouts are used in multiple races, and I honestly haven’t been able to figure out if there are any repeating tracks or just very similar ones. I’m not even sure how many races were in each cup because they all go by so quickly without much fanfare in between. I think there are seven, but I could be wrong about that.

 

It is at least fast and fairly smooth. If you like short races than this is a good game for you. Each race is five laps, and I rarely had a lap that lasted more than twenty seconds. It does help speed things along, but twenty seconds isn’t long enough to connect with a track. You just drive on by and move on to the next one. Of course, laps last a little longer if you get hung up on the scenery or crash into an invisible wall. In a good racer the boundaries are clearly marked, but in Atari Karts it can be a bit arbitrary. Sometimes you can drive off the road and sometimes you can’t. There are also power ups just like in Mario Kart, but they range from useless to detrimental so be careful. I was never more annoyed than when I got a “power-up” that reversed my controls and made me crash into an invisible wall off the track. That’s just about the worst thing that can happen to you in a racing game. Then in the last second of the race I hit a speed boost and passed everybody to finish in first place. Hey, the game isn’t all bad.

 

Miracle Designs, the developer of Atari Karts, is the strangest part of the whole story. I noticed that Atari Karts felt familiar and noticed that Miracle Designs also made Miracle Space Race on PlayStation. It’s basically Atari Karts in space. Then I noticed that they made XS Airboat Racing. That’s basically Atari Karts in the water. Apparently, they kept making variations on Atari Karts over and over again. Of their nine games, seven of them are racing games, and I can probably imagine what they play like. For a mediocre racer that sold about 10 copies it sure got around. They showed up in odd places too. Merlin Racing is one of the handful of games released on NUON. Most of their PS1 games were released at the very end of the system’s life when no one was paying attention anymore. Somehow Miracle Designs limped along for almost a decade releasing basically the same game that nobody liked and didn’t sell. Then they released a couple of non-racing games and quickly disappeared. It’s a shame they couldn’t hold on until Wii came out. They probably could’ve done half a dozen Atari Karts variations on Wii.

 

I ended up having an okay time with Atari Karts which has been the story for the whole console so far. They could get developers who knew how to make games, but not very many who knew how to make games well. It’s a bit hard to rank because I had the same mediocre time with Cybermorph and Trevor McFur. I’m going to put it just under those two because at least an okay shooter is a little rarer than an okay racing game. So, of the four Jaguar games I’ve played none of them have made it into the green yet. I hope I find some soon because there are only 50 games. That’s like playing 80 bad NES games before finding my first good one. I can’t wait to see which Atari games has the worst good to bad ratio. It’s pretty stiff competition for every console they released after 1981.

 

Atari Jaguar Quality Percentage - complete lack of quality. Not even a little bit. 

Ranking List.docx

 

NES #35: Ninja Kid

Developer: TOSE

Publisher: Bandai

Release Date: October 1986

 1986 is probably the least important year for Nintendo first party releases between 1985 and now. This has much to do with the slow method they went about releasing the console naturally. After the test market in 1985 they spent the first half of 1986 slowly rolling it out all over the country. Because of this there is a big gap between releases. After the October 1985 launch there weren’t any games released at all until June of 1986. That’s almost eight months of the console’s life with no games being released. Even when they did start to release new games, they weren’t exactly new. 1986 is when they released most of their arcade backlog. Sure, it was nice having high quality console ports of Donkey Kong and Popeye, but these were games that had already been ported to death, and other than a few oddballs like Donkey Kong Jr. Math and Gumshoe there wasn’t much to pick from if you wanted something new. Luckily, in October the very first batch of third-party games started to come out. Other companies were encouraged by Nintendo’s growing success and wanted to get a foot in the door before Christmas. There were four games released in October 1986: Data East’s Tag Team Wrestling plus three published by Bandai and developed by prolific underdogs TOSE. M.U.S.C.L.E. was based on a popular toy line and made sense as an NES release, but the other two, Chubby Cherub and today’s entry Ninja Kid, are such kooky games that they could’ve only come out at a time when a console was starved for games. Ninja Kid is fairly well known, but it sure is one of the odder action games to ever grace the NES. Everyone has played, some people like it, and almost nobody understands it.

 Ninja Kid is a strange one. At a time where home players were starting to desire straight-line games with definite beginnings and ends, Ninja Kid boldly goes nowhere and has no point. Alright so that’s a little bit unfair because there is the goal to get a high score, and of course to have fun. It’s just set up to look like a game that has and ending but never gives you one. In it you get to traverse maps with a random layout of temples which each contain one of four levels with one of four layouts. It’s a game full of contradictions. It’s complicated and simple, random but repetitive. You could play this game for a long time without knowing what it was even about. I think most people still probably have no idea. The manual isn’t much help either because it makes the game sound like it has an ending. I imagine countless kids renting this game in the pre-internet days and playing it for hours trying to find the point. I love kooky arcade-style games, but it’s hard to rank a game particularly high when you can’t even figure out what you’re supposed to be doing.

I will say that at least the game controls well. There are four different types of levels that are all fairly self-explanatory. In Dog Fight you fly and shoot things. In Guerilla Warfare you run and shoot things. In poison fields you run and collect things, and in Blazing Inferno you light candles using a floating flame. None are particularly memorable on their own, but they have a certain early NES charm. They still don’t make a lot of sense though. The powerups aren’t much help considering most enemies die in one hit. It’s also full of weird collectibles that seem to do nothing but raise the score. When you complete the goal of each level two doors will appear. One takes you back to the map while one takes you to a boss fight. Ninja Kid is such an odd game that I have no idea if I want to be fighting the bosses or not. They can impede my progress, but they are worth a lot of points and there’s not much progress to be made in the first place. They are at least worth seeing because they are so large and strange looking. I’d say the graphics are the game’s best feature. It has a such a vibrant early NES look that couldn’t have existed on any other system. It’s a game that will give you instant nostalgia even if you never played it back in the day. It just has such a distinct NES look and feel that you may play it just to feel like a kid again for a few minutes. It’s a shame about the music though. It’s a constant loop that lasts at most three seconds. It’s better than silence and not overly annoying, but certainly lazy.

 So how do you rank a game like Ninja Kid? It’s certainly a singular game. It’s a weird, pointless action game that was both timeless and obsolete even in 1986. It’s certainly not what people were looking for. It was a year saturated with arcade game. Ninja Kid is an arcade game disguised as an action game, but it didn’t really fool anyone. If you play it, enjoy the old school look of it, but don’t expect to feel like you accomplished anything after playing it. I liked Fester’s Quest better because at least I felt like I was going somewhere. So that’s where Ninja Kid is going. It’s right under Fester’s Quest at #89 overall and #24 on the NES list. It stays out of the red, but it’s certainly not one I overly recommend.

NES Quality percentage: 19/35 or 54.28%

Ranking List.docx

NES #34: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Developer: Konami

Publisher: Ultra

Release Date: June 1989

 If you’re pushing forty like me than it’s likely Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was a big part of your life. I know it certainly was for me. In fact TMNT and Nintendo were probably my two favorite things at the time. The first TMNT game also came out at just about the perfect time to be very well remembered. 1989 was the peak popularity of the console, and it would be the one of the last holiday seasons before Super Nintendo came out. This makes TMNT one of the most famous games on the console. It’s right up there with Duck Tales as most famous game based on a cartoon. Since just about everyone who has ever played NES knows this game it certainly garners some strong opinions. Even if you haven’t played it you probably know that infamous underwater level with all the bombs and electric seaweed. It stands as a symbol of overly hard NES games. It also received more attention when the Angry Video Game Nerd did a video on it back during his peak popularity. It was a good video, and many of his points were valid, but it definitely increased the game’s reputation for being bad. Well I’m here to rehabilitate the game somewhat. Sure, it’s too hard and at times unfair, but Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is a good game that everyone interested in classic games should play. Hey, you can still enjoy a game even if you can’t finish it.

 

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles already has one strike against it for being a game based on a tv show. Games based on existing properties were usually thought of as quick cash grabs. The main goal behind them was to pump them out quickly while the IP was still hot without much regard for quality. It was a strategy that was depressingly successful. The Simpsons managed to have four games on the NES, and at least three of them are awful. Bart Vs. The World isn’t a very good game, but I owned it and played the heck out of it because I loved The Simpsons so much. So it’s a bit of a surprise just how intricate Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is. This is no quickie cash grab. It’s big, it’s complicated, and it never gets repetitive. It’s full of strange, unique enemies yet still manages to feel like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. They could’ve just filled the game with Foot Clan mooks and been done with it. Instead, we get a world filled with flaming humanoids, clay monsters that turn into smaller clay monsters when hit, crawling robotic eyeballs, and all manner of strange creatures. It makes for a much more memorable experience than the typical tv show game.

 And for what is essentially an action platformer, the gameplay is almost as complex as the enemies are strange. It’s a game full of sprawling levels that require careful planning to complete. You switch between turtles at will, and each has their own life bar. When their life runs out they are captured, and while there are a couple opportunities to save them it’s really important to keep them alive. This makes for a game that’s almost as much about party management as it is about fighting giant bugs. Donatello is the most powerful character by far, so he’s the one most in need of protecting. Only in a video game can a stick be more powerful than a sword. Keeping the turtles alive between power-ups is so vital that it becomes a game where every decision matters. It’s not a game that you can sleepwalk through. I can’t think of another NES game where every power-up means so much. You have to know when to use each turtle too. Raphael and Michelangelo might seem useless at first, but they are vital to the swimming and driving sections where less combat is needed but lives can still be lost. You’d hate to lose Donatello to electric seaweed.

Of course, your enjoyment of this game might come down to whether you truly have to finish a game or not. I’m a mediocre gamer with a touch of ADHD, so I can usually enjoy a game even when I don’t finish it. TMNT really is as difficult as its reputation suggests. The second level is the most infamous, but I don’t even think it’s the hardest one. The underwater section is probably the single hardest section, but the later levels are all so large and maze-like that it’s easy to get lost and lose lives. It’s something I love about the game personally, but I can see why it might turn some people off. I don’t think I’ve ever made it past the fourth level legitimately, and even using save states I’ve never gotten through it all the way. I enjoyed just about every attempt however, so it’s one I still go back to when I need fuzzy NES memories.

 Of course, if this game was a bit easier than more people would’ve seen its brief but bonkers ending. Skip this part if you don’t want it spoiled, but it’s an ending fit not just for the game but the franchise as a whole. You defeat Shredder, and Splinter just decides that he can now turn back into human form. No other media as far as I know give Splinter the ability to transform at will. So Splinter turns into Buster Keaton, the turtles celebrate with a pizza, and it is implied that this is the true ending for all their adventures. It’s funny that they would do this in a game that no one ever finished, but that was probably intentional. Hey, if you played this game long enough to become and expert and actually finish it you might be done with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles as well.

 

So the difficulty is certainly going to knock it down a few places, but I still think Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is a good game. It’s one that made it on the IGN list that I fully endorse. At least I don’t think there will be 100 games on the console that are better. It’s also fun to write about, and anyone who played it as a kid has a story about it. It’s one of those great community games that made video games blow up in the early 90s. As for my rankings it ended up even higher than I expected. I put it right between the infinitely playable Qix and the NES version of Galaga. TMNT is obviously not a better game than Galaga, but I will concede that it will always be best at the arcade. That puts Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles at #20 on the overall list and #5 on the NES specific list. I was thinking it might be a bit of a stretch, but maybe finding 100 good NES games isn’t as hard as I expected.

 

NES Quality Percentage: 19/34 or 55.88%

Ranking List.docx