The Closeout Warrior

I kind of wonder how many people played the original Turtles game because they thought it was going to be based on the arcade game. They were probably more than a little surprised when they got it home, because the games are nothing alike.

The original game was an action-adventure kind of thing, and was super tough. The arcade game was a generic brawler. You know the kind: you take your turtle of choice up against wave after wave of semi-easily defeatable foes and every so often have to face a much tougher foe. It goes on like that until you beat all the guys there are to beat, and you win the game. Like fighting games that are all extremely similar with the exception of the roster, these games are very similar with the exception of setting.

One of the best features of the arcade version of this game is that four people could play the game at the same time, each taking on the role of one of the hero turtles. This made it a lot of fun to play with friends, and only a little less fun to play by yourself. The game, though, is designed to feast on quarters. You get a sparse amount of life points, and enemies will deplete them at a slow and steady rate for all but the best players. That’s not really a problem for an arcade game, but when it’s brought home and you don’t have the luxury of throwing days’ worth of lunch money at it, you start to run up against the challenge pretty quickly.

You’re also limited to one or two players instead of the four offered in the arcade game. This is probably due to hardware limitations of the NES, but I don’t know for sure, I’m not an NES programmer. But, we live with what we can get. And what we get is a series of ports of arcade games that have a numbering scheme that’s offset by one when they make it to the home systems.

And that’s not confusing at all.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 14th, 2008 at 6:39 pm and is filed under Arcade, NES. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.