Back in the days, the cool days, the ninja turtles were the shit!  With that came an handful of games during the NES and SNES era.  Most of them were fairly good, at least in their own way, even that Ultra one, kind of kicked ass for its time.  But the one I played the most back then was definitely Turtles in Time on SNES.  My cousins and I were playing this one intensively on the Christmas I got it.  Crazy story, the Easy mode turned out harder to beat for us back then than the Hard mode, as you had more continues or more lives (whichever went with difficulty level) on the harder modes.  While the versus mode was crap, and the Story mode lacked the 4-players mode of the arcade, it was a golden experience back then.

Now we’re in 2009, my beloved Turtles have seen multiple re-launched series, both in games and TV/Movie series.  By the way, the 2003 series up to before they go in the Future (I think it was called Fast-Forward, which kind of sucked) was kick-ass! Anyway, here we are with a remake of Turtles in Time Arcade.  Was it worth getting our shells back on our back alongside our ninja headbands? The answer is down here.

Developer: Ubisoft Singapore
Publisher: Ubisoft
Date of Release: August 5, 2009 (XBLA) / September 10, 2009 (PSN)
Platforms: XBLA / PSN

Genre: Beat ‘em up
Players: Up to 4

ESRB Rating: T (Teen)

Looks and Sounds

Standards for graphics and sounds have evolved a few hundred times since we last played Turtles in Time at the arcade.  This version re-vamped the whole game in 3-D and added the different green for each of the brothers in shells, just like in the SNES version.  That’s about all they took from that version.  The rest is the arcade version.  The voices were recorded using the voices of the Turtles from the 2003 series I mentioned earlier. I think that’s a great thing too. The younger ones that watched the 2003 series and never saw the old school cartoons, will more easily recognize these voices, and to be honest, they’re much better than the ones back in the day, with their low-bit noises-like voices.  On the music side, I don’t remember particularly the one from the arcade, but the SNES one was good. But here, it’s very much the other way around. Barely rememberable, even though it’s similar to the old music.

Gameplay

I’m not planning to go in-depth here.  It’s the same game as the over 15 years old Arcade game. So I’ll keep it at pointing out the differences.  First and foremost, you can now attack in all 8 directions.  That makes the easy gameplay, even more easy.  Another difference was that when you run out of lives when playing online with other people, you’ll only be able to hop back in the game at the end of the start of the next level.  This sucks. Not because of it makes it “harder”. But because in the instance where I found that out, I had no life left when we got to the last level, against the Shredder.  I was being punished because I didn’t Game Over at the end of the previous level instead of doing my best at staying alive as long as I could, and ended up dying fast against Shredder on my last life.  So I could not use any Continue because of that.  Moreover, there was the “Press Start” over the 3rd Player (I was fourth), which had left earlier, so I thought I could try and take this spot, so I light up my second controller and Press start, but it does absolutely nothing. Is that reserved for the host of the game? Anyway, that’s BS.

Finally, the only other difference is the health, which you have much more per life than in the arcade version, closer, or even more than in the SNES version.

Online

I’ve only played one full game so far.  But I’ve played the game so many times before, that I didn’t need much more to give it ultimate judgment.  Online didn’t seem to work for my friend I wanted to play with, he plays other game son his PS3 just fine online, but this one didn’t work at all.  But anyway, for me, it worked fast, I joined a random game, and we were 4 and going in a flash. I don’t know if the others were waiting for a while or if it was as quick as it was for me.  Anyway, the game lags up a bit when the first level starts, but after that, there’s not many issues I can speak of that doesn’t have to do with stupid players behaviors.  The same two guys (the ones playing Leo and Mike) were hugging all the pizza even though they didn’t need it.  I thought it was common knowledge in beat’em up that you pick up health restore items after beating the stuff around it, and you leave it to the one with the lowest life. No, not in their case. Oh well.  That just means, you’re better off just sticking for this game with friends, and talk on mic to decide on these things.

Overall

It’s been pointed out by a lot of people, the game isn’t bad because it’s a bad port, but because inherently it is a port of a badly designed game.  The SNES version was a hundred times better than the Arcade version, with its additional levels and more fun boss fights.  Here you don’t get to fight Rat King, you skip the Technodrome level, skipping the fun fight with Shredder where you throw foot soldiers at the screen to damage him, you don’t fight Slash, you fight Cement Man, so one-time villain instead, you don’t fight Bebop and Rockstead nor Super Shredder with his fun special moves.  You also don’t get the parts of Neon Night Rider level that made use of Mode-7 on the SNES.  It would have been fun if they would have mixed up a bit more the two games, to include those levels and boss fights, at the very least.

As for the blending in with the other turtles complaints, well, it isn’t so bad, though I did lose sight of my own turtles from time to time too.  But they’re each of different tones of green, and you can press/hold L2 to have a pointer show you where you are standing.

The Save Factor

So my final word is that it’s a fine, yet lacking port of a bad game. The Save Factor is $5, and only if you’re a TMNT fan.  Otherwise, just pass on it. You’ll want your time with the game back, most likely.

David A. Uncategorized