Thank you, Cowabunga Collection!
 

Oh my God...after more than 30 years I finally beat that ****ing game (first NES game)! Took me about 3 hours of work at it.

Hudson River Dam
 

I can't even make it past the Hudson River Dam.

For 30 years people have talked like that damned swimming level is so hard. It's not, really. Maybe 2 or 3 practice runs and once you have the basics of swimming (how lightly to tap to not hit the stingy stuff) it's easy. It's the stuff later on that I'd always die on.

I have a feeling most people were playing this level like game journalists of the modern year: swimming right into dangerous stuff and being surprised why the game is so hard.

I think that timer and the thought of an explosive Game Over screen really stress people out. More than likely, you die from loss of life due to stage hazards, or you grind your way through it but quickly lose all turtles in Stage 3 due to being so low on energy.

Yeah, that timer in the Dam always was a stressful part for me. Got past it the second try the other day (with low health on the Turtles). Spent a little while making sure they were all well fed as soon as I could.

The ability to save and go back as much as 10 seconds to correct mistakes are invaluable current features to beating it!

For sure. But welcome to what readily available emulators have done since about 1997.

I don't think late-90s emulators had yet to master that fancy "rewind" effect seen in the Digital Eclipse collection. It actually is way more convenient for correcting mistakes than relying upon strategic save-states.

True. The soft "rewind" feature is pretty damn handy and sleek. I can't think of any emulators that had that, typically just the 12 standard save state slots.

Spamming that Rewind feature might be the only way I end up beating that ridiculous "Tournament" mode in Sega Tournament Fighters where you battle 88 opponents with one life gauge.

Funny thing: since all powerups reset on exiting and entering a building, you can farm lives and missiles infinitely in this level.

Same here, though I used save states.
The fact that all you receive for completing this mode is "Congratulations!!" is an insult to injury.

Video gaming has... barely been a thing for me when it comes right down to it. Probably only started hearing about emulators 10 maybe 15 years ago. And didn't ever care much to figure out how to upload to a computer.

Hell, even a main game system that I've ever owned is at least a generation behind for the most part. Just barely got an Xbox One last year and ONLY because of the TMNT games! Had an Xbox 360 as a hand-me-down and a PlayStation 2 as the "main" system pretty much since that system came out.

Movies, television, and reading (not comic books) have been my main focus.

I am always fascinated by the sewer part where you spent hours as a kid trying to jump over the single missing block in the walkway when you could basically just walk forward over it.

Oh yeah! I remember that.

As a kid, I suspected Krang, Triceraton, and Karai were unlockable because of the screencaps on the rear-cover art, so I figured the only way to achieve that would be completion of Tournament Mode, but never could succeed on original hardware and cart.

I suspect they were at some point, but given how sloppy game is, I feel they were locked and forgotten...? I think CC made them playable.

Have you ever seen Mike Matei's tweet where he said "if you use the rewind feature, that's now standard on many NES and SNES games available on the Switch, you DID NOT by any stretch of the imagination beat the god damn game."? :lol: Man, he caught so much heat for that hot take.

I can agree with that, since most of those games was not meant to be played like that.
Not to mention most games of the 8bit and 16bit eras were pretty short, bar RPGs. On average you can beat most games from that era in 1,5 hours or less, unlike most modern games, which require 20+ hours just to finish main story.

But I can see some people being angry about this take since not everyone want to grind those games (especially due to the fact, that most of the modern games much easier and have a lot QOL features, like saves) and spend several hours per day just to get through one 5 minute long level.

Yeah, I mean, that Mike Matei guy is right. Beating a game means playing by its rules and completing it. Using save states/rewind function is no different than putting in an invincibility code into a Game Genie 25 years ago.

Speaking of which, that's one thing Cowabunga Collection can't do -- enter Game Genie codes. You can totally enter them on pretty much any emulator, and that's a ton of codes.

I appreciate that they added online play to more games, but its pretty much a lost cause the online is pretty bad and no one is ever on and I don't have many friends who would want to play turtles. I really wish they would have made the arcade games not lock you to one turtle till you quit. Just have the shoulder buttons be insert coins for each turtle so I can switch on the fly like most emulators do, or even the original arcade cabinet. I like playing as all the turtles so when I am about to sleep sometimes I enjoy playing beat em ups and they made playing on an emulator much more appealing then their collection for the arcade games, which is a shame.

As someone who plays TMNT TF not having a spectator mode is a crime though, can't even use the collection for easier tournament running.

This collection is good as now I can easily play the console and handheld games whenever I want rather easily, they made some mistakes that kept the collection from being a must buy, not that my opinion matters much they sold over a million copies.