Board Thread:Questions and Answers/@comment-995426-20151123111537/@comment-995426-20151123121716

As strange as it may sound, my favorite TMNT video game was the MegaDrive/Genesis version of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Tournament Fighters back in 1993. I was 13 years old when it came out.

And yes, it wasn't actually that good a game. Some of the background designs were lazy for the era, the characters were badly imbalanced, and all around it was a really unoriginal knockoff of popular 2D fighting games of the era (Street Fighter II, Fatal Fury 2, etc.). And the game's story wasn't really any good either&mdash;a painfully facile plot about Karai kidnapping Splinter and heroes needing to fight eight evil clones of themselves on scattered Dimension X planets. And speaking of imbalanced gameplay, this game was often very difficult to complete even on easy difficulty, with Casey Jones being disproportionately harder than most other opponents. On top of that, Ray Fillet was actually something of a game breaker&mdash;I remember feeling shocked at how unexpectedly easy it was for me to finish the game on the highest difficulty by mostly just slide-attacking. (Though I may have also been lucky.)

So why is this mediocre game an old favorite? Mmmmmm...that epic soundtrack, composed by Ms. (who also composed and co-composed much of the  series along with the 1989 TMNT arcade game). I've still never heard TMNT music I like better. But then why don't I just listen to the music? It's not like the game's configuration menu didn't have a sound test. Well, because the music helped take an otherwise mediocre game and make it relatively enjoyable by creating enough of a salve to help me get past the things that made the game mediocre. And then, I was able to overlook many of the game's shortcomings and appreciate what they at least tried to do with the characters, the settings and the overall atmosphere. Though it was technically a "1987 video game" tying into the then-popularity of the 1987 TV series, the game itself borrowed heavily from Mirage TMNT and Archie TMNT. The game was also something that most TMNT games up to that point had lacked&mdash;it ditched the "party dude" atmosphere that pervaded the other games of the time, and managed to feel...relatively gritty, more like Mirage or Archie, but never completely lacking a hint of lighthearted whimsy. The stages (with the aforementioned lazily-designed backgrounds) still had a degree of personality to them, acting as atmospheric shrines to the personalities of their host characters.

Clone Leonardo's stage was...awful. It was just awful. His music was good, but that stage was a terrible design. As for Leo himself (player or clone), all his moves were platant ripoffs of Ryu's from the Street Fighter games.

Clone Raphael's stage was...part evocative, part ridiculous. It took place in the middle of a lavascape, with everything about it appealing to Raph's volatile bloodlust. There was also a giant lava monster standing still in the background for no reason (hence the ridiculous). And the music was...not uplifting at all. Yet after a while, I realized that lots of things about the setting (aside from the lava monster) fit Raph perfectly. It was supposed to make you uneasy, and it did its job well enough. This was in stark contrast to Raphael's stage from the Super NES version of Tournament Fighters, which appealed 100% to his 1987 TV series funny guy personality.

Clone Michelangelo's stage was...fantastically psychedelic. The fighting floor looked like a weird mesh of worms, there were gigantic water bubbles in the background, and there were giant flowers garnishing the arena, all for no apparent reason. It's like it was designed by someone on drugs. The music actually made it feel like it made sense, though&mdash;like a deep meditative zen trance...on drugs. It was equal parts fun and bizarre.

Clone Donatello's stage took place in a high-tech cityscape, which in a way isn't very creative. But that muzak&mdash;that fast-paced high-energy urban rhythm and blues&mdash;made it fun.

Clone April's stage took place on a deck of a spaceship for no apparent reason. And though April's design itself seemed to lift a lot from Aska in the Super NES game, she still managed to be a badass fighter. And her music&mdash;I still love that music, and it's still April's theme music in my head.

Clone Casey's stage took place in a frozen icescape, with a submarine parked in the background for no reason. It all appealed to Casey's relationship with the ice, and wasn't all that imaginative. The music gave it some zest, but none of that could outweigh just how badly unbalanced Casey was in a fight, having the furthest attack reach of any character in the game such that it was so much harder to attack him up close. Many a game over happened here.

Clone Ray's stage took place on what looked like an ocean platform, with a crashed ship partially submerged in the seawater in the background (again, for no apparent reason). But Ray was not just badass, but he also managed to be sexy. And that funloving optimistic (but still down-to-business) music was the bow on the whole package. Ray was a game breaker character if you abused slide attacks, but thankfully the enemy AI for Clone Ray wasn't written clever enough to exploit this.

Clone Sisyphus's stage was...spidery. Didn't like that. XD But the color scheme and music made me wanna mellow and chill, like with some good chocolate. Like jazzy house music, but slower in tempo.

The Triceraton was a surprise, because up until then (in 1993) I'd never seen a Triceraton character outside the Mirage comics. In retrospect he wasn't the most interesting Triceraton (not nearly as badass as, say, Traximus or even the much lither T'Zirk), but I still geeked out over his addition at the time.

Krang was...meh. Never really cared for him. It was an element from the 1987 TV series I could had done without.

This game was my first introduction to Karai. I'd read the Mirage comics, but I hadn't read far enough to see Karai, so I had no idea who she was. In this game she was written as a generic maniacal villain, which as it turns out was nothing like how she was in Mirage. But there was still a certain mystique about her character in the game, which was helped by and large by her stage and music: A very elegant traditional Japanese motif in both, with the music in particular composed to sound like it was played entirely on a Japanese acoustic koto. She was also an extremely badass (and frustrating) opponent.

THe game's music can all be heard here.