Let’s Play Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 1!
I ended Total Request July 2016 with a game which I’ve found daunting for nearly three decades in the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I couldn’t put it off any longer, though, and when I finally confronted it I found that like other games of TRJ 2016, it was as simple as figuring out the crack and working it.
Let’s Play Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 1:
In the case of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 1, my revelation was that you can leave and come back to a room with a pizza after you’ve eaten it and the pizza will reappear.
This makes it possible to keep your entire team healthy every time you come across a conveniently placed pizza.
What made this game impossible for me as a kid is that I didn’t know that, and as such I would lose a turtle or two on each level. And the more turtles that die, no sorry, get “captured” (come on developer, just say Mike is dead, we can handle it), the steeper the climb forward because you have less fresh turtles to switch to when you start to inevitably take damage.
The infinite pizza trick, though I’m hesitant to call it a trick as I’m sure the developers planned for that for the more clever players who thought to check back as a kid (i.e. not me), vastly levels the playing field in this game.
The other half of the battle is to use the same logic behind reappearing pizzas to stock up on the scroll weapon when it’s available in a couple of spots. Spread out a couple of hundred scrolls between two or more turtles, use them on every boss or any dude who gets in your way, and go to town.
Beau Bridges was right kids, it’s all about the scroll weapon.
And I can’t finish talking about this game without mentioning how interesting I find it that they completely scrapped this engine/game design for the subsequent turtles games. Whenever anyone thinks of the TMNT games for Nintendo from back in the day, they think arcade action.
TMNT 1 did its own thing with seemingly random enemies for much of it and what just felt like a lot of “I just had an idea for this level, let’s do this without thinking if it makes sense” mentality behind the design. Don’t get me wrong, it worked and it’s a classic game, but the arcade was such a smash hit I guess that it left this very unique game design and play in its one off state, making it all the more memorable.