Tuesday, March 3, 2009
Billy's Favorite (Comic Book!) Retro Games! (Part 8 of 200)
It's Watchmen week and this video game dork must don the comic book geek hat to bring you some fave retro games...with a TWIST! Comic book related games! Today? Perennial favorite Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Arcade Game!That's right. Not the arcade original, the NES port of the arcade game. When I was a kid I and all my TMNT/video game obsessed chums thought that this game really WAS a sequel to the awful first NES game. Of course it's not. The arcade game was made by a different team within Ultra Games/Konami and came out in the arcades a little bit later than TMNT.
As kids we spent many quarters on the arcade cabinet whenever we saw it. It fun and had beautiful graphics. For kids weened on the Nintendo Entertainment System, TMNT: The Arcade Game was like a dream. Our favorite cartoon come to video game life.
So, of course when we heard that the game was being ported to the NES we were ecstatic. Many, many things could go wrong porting such a vibrant game to the 8-bit system and to be honest, the graphics did take a big hit.
It went from THIS:
To This:
For an NES game it doesn't look too bad, but comparatively... whoo boy. What a difference.
Now, Donatello looks super lonely in the NES photo and one of the reasons for that is another arcade-to-NES tradeoff. The arcade version had four player co-operative game play. The NES didn't. I know, sucks, right. But don't fret, the game still included two player simultaneous gameplay.
It's not all bad news for the NES version. One of the best reasons to play the home console version is that nearly all of the levels were lengthened for the NES. Yes, Konami was polite enough to make the game longer! Not to mention the addition of an entirely new level: Snowfield
Apparently Shredder took time out of his plan to kidnap Master Splinter and created a weather control device and for one level he freezes New York City and yep, that's a mutant polar bear wearing a leather jacket. That ALONE makes this game worth playing. Man, things were so cool in the late 80s/early 90s.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
1 comment:
Go Ninja! Go Ninja! Go!
Post a Comment