Despite what it looks like, there’s a very good chance you’ve never seen this one before.
If you had an NES game growing up, there’s a good chance you played at least one Ninja Turtles game. The second and third games are both great, and do a solid job of emulating the super-popular arcade games of the same era. The first in the series is among the best-selling games in the console’s history, despite the game’s maddeningly high difficulty.
Fun fact – while the jump above is a huge pain in the NES version, due to a programming error, the DOS port of the game makes the jump literally impossible. That has nothing to do with this week’s game, but it’s too great to not share. It blows my mind that the game shipped that way.
If you’ve played a TMNT game on NES but haven’t seen this one before, it’s likely because this was released in 1994. If that sounds unusually late for an NES release, you’re absolutely right – this is one of the last licensed titles released for the console, and as a result, it’s very hard to find. It’s one of just 11 licensed NES games rated by Nintendo Age as having a rarity of 7 or higher:
The fourth game to feature the turtles, Tournament Fighters, was Konami’s attempt to capitalize on the general popularity of the Ninja Turtles as well as the absurd popularity of fighting games in the mid-90s. This version is a simplified port of the original game, which was released on SNES and Genesis a year before this one (as was the case with a surprising number of titles of the era, those two versions are surprisingly different from each other). Due to its release at the end of the NES’s life cycle, it’s also pretty darn impressive graphically.
Seriously, for an NES game this looks amazing. It’s impressively colorful, the animation is smooth, and the characters are highly detailed. The controls are pretty responsive, and there’s a solid number of modes – there’s even a story mode in which the turtles fight amongst themselves to determine who is worthy of fighting shredder (I guess teamwork wasn’t an option, for unclear reasons). There’s also a decent variety of characters to choose from:
While the game looks great and plays pretty well, there are a few things that definitely leave something to be desired. Save for a single special move each, the turtles themselves are basically all identical – the turtles’ unique weapons are largely absent as a result. Some of that can certainly be owed to the fact that it’s an NES port of a newer game, but this feels like such a huge thing to miss out on. The boss characters, while certainly cooler, are also grossly overpowered compared to their heroic counterparts, to the point where fighting them isn’t especially fun.
Hothead is seriously the worst. He’s just an absolute unit. He’s pretty fun to play *as*, though, so it’s at least somewhat redeemable, especially in two-player games.
Overall, I still rather enjoy Tournament Fighters – if you go in with the understand that this is a simple fighting game, there’s plenty of fun to be had and a good number of ways to play. Having said that, you’re probably better off seeking out either of the 16-bit versions of the game instead, as they’re also pretty fun and have a more extensive feature set. To make matters worse, due to its high rarity cart-only copies of this version of the game have run between $100 and $150 in recent years. It’s fun, but probably not $100 fun.
Next week, for our 60th game, we’ll be looking at another NES sequel, part of a much less beloved but still enjoyable series. Join me then as I aim for victory.