Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (Xbox 360)

Just in time for the brand-new CG-animated Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles flick hitting theaters, Turtles nostalgia has hit the Xbox Live Arcade in the form of the titular arcade beat-'em-up classic. In a rare showing of marketing synergies, Ubisoft, the current Turtles license holder, copublished this rerelease with Konami, the original maker of the game. Throw in emulation wizards Digital Eclipse to make this game work again, and what you've got is a faithful update of TMNT (original music and voice acting included), with online, four-player cooperative play. Of course, the big question, as is the case with any of these games, is the game every bit as great as the impossible ideal that nostalgic fans remember? The answer is no--like so many other classic arcade games, this one hasn't aged all that gracefully, but that doesn't mean the game isn't still fun in a lot of respects.

TMNT was mechanically a pretty standard arcade beat-'em-up for its time, letting up to four players pick one of the famous Ninja Turtles (all the smart kids picked Leonardo) and jump into battle against the evil forces of the Foot clan, including that dastardly evil ninja Shredder. Along the way, you rescue your master, Splinter, and your best friend, April, and eat a fair amount of pizza. What really stuck out about Turtles in its heyday (apart from its rather unforgiving difficulty level) was both it being one of the first of the four-player arcade beat-'em-ups, and how well it emulated the original cartoon. Not only did it include several authentic voice samples and the original theme song, but the look of the game was pretty dead-on to the cartoon's style as well. Those graphics don't hold up nearly as well in this day and age, but this is still a decent-looking game, and unlike the unlockable version included in one of Konami's more recent Turtles games, this has all the original music and voices. Still, some kind of graphical update would have been a nice touch.

The gameplay is extremely straightforward. Each Turtle has an attack button and a jump button, and often those can be combined into jumping attacks. Enemies pour out of every crevice of a level, from standard grunt Foot soldiers to a variety of evil robots, and there are some rather tricky vehicular attackers. You'll also fight memorable bosses such as the evil brain creature Krang, the mutated twosome of Bebop and Rocksteady, and, of course, Shredder himself. As tended to be the case with arcade beat-'em-ups of this genre, the difficulty level is pretty over the top, as the maker of the game wanted to get you pumping quarters in as frequently as possible. That's not so much a necessity here, and when playing offline, you get unlimited continues, so a good chunk of that difficulty is negated.

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