Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles IV: Turtles in Time

I guess after three games Shredder finally decides to not kidnap April as a part of his evil scheme. What he does instead is to kidnap the statue of Liberty… (?) Fortunately, this is all broadcast on live television, and elicits one of my favorite quotes from a game:

Hey Shredder, bring that statue back, you bloated bean bag!

So the Turtles wait until 3:00 AM the next morning to go and try to get the statue back. They eventually make their way to the Technodrome to confront Shredder, but what’s this? For reasons that aren’t exactly clear your turtles are sent hurtling through time to fight waves upon waves of enemy robots. But this time they’re riding dinosaurs, or in pirate hats, or riding horses! So it’s a completely different game!

This game is actually a lot closer to its arcade counterpart than the older games had been. I guess that’s because the Super NES was a bit more capable of pushing the totally rad to the max graphics. Oh, and there’s the other thing. You can grab the weaker opponents and throw them toward the screen, which looks kind of lame now, but was actually pretty awesome when it came out.

I actually first played this game in the arcade, only one arcade in my town got it in. Well, it was less of an arcade and more of an ‘indoor miniature golf-course that had an arcade game in the back’. In fact, I didn’t even play golf there. The sole reason I went there was to play this game. The friend that went with me and I would end up spending about $25 on the machine to play it all the way through, but it was totally worth it at the time. I ended up liking so much that when the game came out for my Super NES I immediately bought it.

Once I got the game home and was able to actually hear the sounds in the game, I was immediately impressed, and I decided that I needed to have some way to listen to it when I didn’t have my Super Nintendo handy. So I experimented (for the first time) with making my own video game music mix tape. I didn’t actually have a computer or any mixing equipment or anything at the time, but I did have a stereo with RCA inputs and a stack of blank tapes. That, and the game had a built in sound test. And since there wasn’t any way for me to get any soundtracks from games at the time, I thought making my own was the best things to happen since Super Saturdays at Putt-Putt.

Leave a Reply