Your favourite TMNT game?

[D-ray]

I know that there is not too much people who followed or atleast tried the TMNT videogames, but I'm curious anyway.
I'm a big fan of the Ps2 versions and some of the Arcade games (TMNT 2 Battle Nexus, TMNT 3 Mutant Nightmare, TMNT Turtles in Time, TMNT Manhattam Project).
If you have never played anyone of them, you didn't miss anything special tho. They are simple beat em ups usually in co-op.

But I think that the best thing of these games is, in fact, the cooperativity and the simple yet fun gameplay. Sometimes it's even the level of challenge some of them gives you!
What about you guys? There is atleast one game that you liked?

[Panther10]

Out of the Shadows is usually fun. I could play all three gameplay modes for hours on end. And the classic games all the way from the TMNT arcade, turtles in time, the 2k3 games and TMNT (2k7) were always fun

[pferreira]

The Snes version of Turtles in Time.

[D-ray]

Originally Posted by pferreira

The Snes version of Turtles in Time.

I like Turtles in Time too, but I slightly prefer the Ps2 porting on TMNT 3 Mutant Nightmare, just because it has a great OST.
Other than that, Arcade, Ps2 or Snes are all kinda the same so it's still a good game.

[frank_one]

My all-time favourite is Turtles 3: Radical rescue for the original Game boy. A tmnt metroidvania, nothing can top that.

[D-ray]

Originally Posted by frank_one

My all-time favourite is Turtles 3: Radical rescue for the original Game boy. A tmnt metroidvania, nothing can top that.

Never seen it.
Mind if I...

*downloads emulator*

[D-ray]

Originally Posted by Panther10

Out of the Shadows is usually fun. I could play all three gameplay modes for hours on end. And the classic games all the way from the TMNT arcade, turtles in time, the 2k3 games and TMNT (2k7) were always fun

Wow, a connoisseur I see!
The arcade games were pretty neat, but easily repetitive. The NES games were pretty fun! Like playing Castlevania with the TMNT (even tho Castelvania was a little easier in some parts). The 2003 Ps2 games were gold! Except for the first, downright boring and really repetitive. The other two had atleast some platforming, more combos, interesting bosses etc. Mutant Melee was good, but the characters choice was... eugh?

Sadly, the only 2007 TMNT game I played is Mutant Melee, which is a GREAT fighting game! Even tho the Ps2 version lacked of some special characters and online multyplayer.
Out of the Shadows is the only one I've never played, for the simple reason that didn't have local co-op (I used to play the TMNT games with my brother). I'm just abit afraid that I might have lost a nice game.

[Drose18]

mutant melee gives me the best memories so thats my answer

[D-ray]

Originally Posted by Drose18

mutant melee gives me the best memories so thats my answer

If my CD started to work again, I would definitely try to play it again.
Now I only play Smash Up as the PLayer vs Player TMNT Game.

[Leo656]

Well, after watching Season 1 of the 2K3 series again, I was inspired to go back and give the first two Gamecube TMNT games a spin and see how they hold up. I hadn't played either in a long time but have played the first more often and more recently.

The first one is okay but really nothing special, it's a passable beat-em'up. I remember it feeling pretty cutting-edge in 2003 but a hundred better beat-'em-ups have come out since then so it definitely feels like a relic. I still had fun with it, but again, it's impossible to ignore how simplistic and "bare-bones" it is compared to just about everything else that's come along in the genre since then. Run right, clear the screen, run right, sometimes you fight a Boss and sometimes the level just ends. And it's pretty short. I did like how they encouraged replay value by making you beat it with all for Turtles, to unlock hidden characters and also get the real final stage and Boss Fight; I'd already completed it ages ago, so I just did a quick run-through with Leo and found it a lot shorter and easier than I remembered it being. Not a bad game at all but it probably would feel comparatively ancient to most people giving it a try now. I can say it's worth a look but mileage will definitely vary on it because it's very dated and simplistic.

I don't have a ton to say about this one, because it's Just Fine and nothing more or less than that. I've beaten it several times and I'll continue to play it again every few years since it's something you can get through in a day or so without investing too much energy.

(Cont.)

[Leo656]

TMNT 2: Battle Nexus... oof. I'm not gonna lie, it's a little bit better than I remembered, kind of, but I remembered it being terrible and I wasn't altogether wrong. It's a very flawed, pretty much broken, and regularly frustrating experience and one of the least fun times I've ever had playing a video game.

Just to get it out of the way, there ARE some improvements over the first game which I appreciate: The 3D cinematic cutscenes that occur between some levels are much better than the flat, static, poory-rendered ones from the first game, even if they are very blurry and washed-out. Being able to switch between each Turtle on the fly is cool, and some areas needing a certain Turtle's unique skills is a nice idea but they do almost nothing with it at all. It's a much, much bigger game than the first, with lots of levels and some decent level variety, and even a rare few hidden paths to find. There's a Tournament mini-game and hidden collectibles to find and a few "vehicle" levels that switch the gameplay up a bit by putting you on a hoverboard or something; oddly enough, those levels end up being some of the most fun and least-annoying things in the entire game. There's even more Boss fights, something the first game was pretty lacking in. So there's some nice improvements and you can tell that there was a real effort to improve the overall experience.

The thing is, it's just a "bigger, but worse" game than the first one. It really starts with two major problems: The gameplay is broken, and the controls are also kinda broken. I've talked about this before, but in Battle Nexus, despite it ostensibly being a beat-'em-up, you spend about 90% of your time avoiding every enemy on screen at all costs to try and save as much health as possible for the Boss fights. You're literally an idiot if you ever stop to actually fight anyone in this game, and that's just a bad decision for this type of game. On the other hand, it's good that you can get through most of the game by simply running away, because the AI enemies in this game are some of the most frustrating I've ever dealt with. EVERY enemy you encounter takes way too many hits to kill, and some of them block almost constantly. There's very little "difficulty curve", outside of the last few Boss fights being really hard; the enemies you face on the first level are just as irritating as the ones you fight near the end, and some of the earlier levels are somehow much harder than the later ones. In a lot of ways, this game feels like an overreaction to the last game; one of the complaints about the first one was that it was a bit easy, so in this one they make the enemies way too hard to kill and overwhelm you with numbers of them who love to surround you. There's a Block button, but like most of the controls, it takes your input as a mere suggestion, so you spend most "fights" getting triple-teamed or running away. You can fight, but... it doesn't make any sense to. Very, VERY rarely do you have to kill all, or even most, or even ANY enemies to beat the level, and the enemies are irritatingly cheap anyway, so why bother? So you can play on the "honor system" and fight, but lose lots of health for no reason and thus die against the Boss, OR, you can run away from everything. Neither option feels satisfying. You feel weak as hell and severely under-powered in this game and it never gets any better. You find "crystals" that are supposed to increase your stats and abilities but I never felt any difference.

The Boss fights aren't too bad, but they're a little annoying. Once you figure out that they're all vulnerable to the same one move, though, it's a snooze. Like every other enemy, they're super-cheap, blocking too much and taking way too much damage, but like everything else in the game, they're weak against Leo's Running L-Trigger Attack. Sure, you can TRY other moves that actually do more than 1% damage, BUT, you'll get Blocked and countered almost every time, ending the fight in about three hits. So what do you do? Run at them and hit the L-Trigger. It does sh*t damage, but every single enemy and boss is weak against that move and ONLY that move, or at least, it's the one move they almost never bother to block. So every single Boss fight takes a goddamn half hour as you run in circles and cheese the hell out of the L-Trigger attack. It is NOT fun. Not one single enemy encounter in this game is "fun", they're a chore. Because if you play it fair, they just block you and counter or surround you, so you have to run away and use the L-Trigger attack to clear a path, anyway.

Basically, you can beat the entire game doing nothing but running away from bad guys and occasionally spamming L-Trigger. Nothing else works consistently, so if you deviate from this "strategy" at all you're kind of stupid. Broken, broken game.

The controls being broken is part of the issue as well. They're simply not as responsive as the first game's controls, with a very noticeable lag and sometimes they just don't respond. The "Weak-Weak-Strong Attack" combo that was invaluable in the first game often simply does not work, here. It's IN there, it just doesn't respond to your inputs. There's a "charge-up" attack you can do by holding down Strong Attack, but it's pointless because it leaves you vulnerable to attack and you're usually being attacked by a group, so you'll never pull it off. Also, the game takes the Block button as a complete suggestion at best because the lag is so terrible. Leo's jumping attack is totally useless, while Mikey's is the only one that works even a little against flying enemies; I like that they have their own strengths but it makes certain areas frustrating. OH, and to pick things up, you have to hold down two buttons, one of them being Strong Attack. If you think, "Boy, I bet that most of the time you just blow yourself up trying to pick up an explosive barrel", you damn well guessed right. The levels are filthy with things you CAN in theory pick up and toss at your enemy, but most often you just end up using it on yourself.

NO LOCK-ON and the camera is terrible in spots. Forget trying to focus on one enemy in a crowd, or even just throw your shuriken where you want them to go. You can be standing right next to a guy, and unless you're pressing the control stick exactly at them, your attacks will go right past them. TERRIBLE. Since you can't move the camera, you get hit constantly by off-screen enemies. The camera issue only hurts much when there's a godawful platforming section; in those, it swings around to the least-helpful angle possible, making it near-impossible to line up or gauge your jump with any accuracy. You can't jump as high as you should anyway, even with double-jump, so the platform sections are a mess.

It's like the entire game was trying to hit as many boxes on the Bad Game Design checklist as it possibly could:
- Annoying enemies that take too much work to kill
- One "life" per level, die and it's back to the menu screen
- Lots of platforming, with an awful camera on top of it
- Boring, repetitive "combat"
- Over-long Boss fights
- "Kill Every Enemy Within A Time Limit" levels, filled with enemies who constantly block
- Unresponsive, laggy controls that cripple the combat
- Jumping that feels like an invisible hand is pressing down on your character
- A "beat-'em-up" where the entire point of 90% of the game is to avoid fighting at all costs. There's not even a "stealth" component, it's just a running away simulator.

I have to be honest... I really do appreciate the things they TRIED to improve, but the bad controls and annoying enemies and awful platforming just overwhelm everything else. TMNT 2: Battle Nexus is one of the least-fun games I've ever played, and if I've ever played a worse beat-'em-up, I cannot recall. I've never seen one that punishes you so much for actually trying to play the game properly, and rewards you for trying to just race through it instead.

The good news is, I finally beat the damn thing. So I never have any obligation to play it again.

I still think the first one, while bare-bones by comparison, is simply more fun overall because the controls work better and it's less frustrating to play, and those two things are related. Battle Nexus had a lot of ambition but they utterly failed to execute in any satisfying way because the controls are busted and the enemies swarm you. It really doesn't matter what they tried to improve or add because the game simply isn't fun. I really had a bad time playing this one, and I almost never have a bad time playing games.

I remember the third game, "Mutant Nightmare", being much better. I can't check for myself at the moment but I can't imagine it being as bad or worse, no way in hell.

As of now, I maintain that "Mutants In Manhattan" is probably the best 3D TMNT game by a substantially wide margin. And Battle Nexus is probably the worst TMNT game, period. I gave it a shot, and I finished it, and I'm glad I can finally cross it off my list, but damn, I didn't enjoy the experience at all. Not the worst game I've played, but the worst TMNT game I can remember off the top of my head.

[Whatswiththeheadbands?]

Peblak Alley is probably the worst level in video game history

[D-ray]

Originally Posted by Leo656

TMNT 2: Battle Nexus... oof. I'm not gonna lie, it's a little bit better than I remembered, kind of, but I remembered it being terrible and I wasn't altogether wrong. It's a very flawed, pretty much broken, and regularly frustrating experience and one of the least fun times I've ever had playing a video game...

...

(can't quote the whole post or I reach character limit)

I took some time to read carefully everything, and I can definitely say that Battle Nexus is NOT a real masterpiece in any means.
I due joke about it, because it's one of my favourite games, but it's far from a great game. Also, keep in mind that I played the PS2 version, not the Gamecube one, maybe there is a slight difference in performance or things like that.

But I have to say that some of the problems you encountered are really weird from my perspective. I mean, the whole "enemies are useless to attack" is true don't get me wrong, I mean more tecnical and gameplay problems.
Like, how did you find the game's enemies too strong? They have a pretty dumb AI, and their "constant blocking" can be easily punished by picking up the enemy and throw it away for example. Yes, the long range enemies are abit of a cancer, since most of them use to spam their attacks, but they are way weaker than the normal ones, so you can easily waste them by avoiding one or two shots by dashing in the right position.

The crystals not only give a nice upgrade to the turtle, but some of them even give you combos, that can be freaking overpowered (just saying, the charged combo can instakill some bosses). Also, there is even a "parry" ability, not only the "block", and can be unlocked pretty early in the game. And you might say "I'm sure that the game never gives you the option to parry certain attacks". I played this game countless of times, and from Hun, to Traxiums, to even freaking Shredder you can parry.

Another thing you mentioned are the controls, but again, I never had any problem with them, they were responsive for me. I heard about alot of complains from Gamecube users, so it must be like that. I even have the PC version of this game and it's completely fine with them.
About the camera, I got nothing to say. It's pretty limited in some levels, but again, I never had any problem with it in platforming parts, and I still play the game to this day sometimes.

The bosses are rather fun for me! Except the Spasmosaurous, that is just annoying as a boss, but due to it's design. I guess I see this game so good just because I had so much time put into it to appreciate even the smallest things of it. That's probably because I like it.

But in the end, as I said in the beginning, is absolutely not even close from being a great game, it's "MEH".
One of the biggest problems of it, is the "I don't get it" feeling. ALOT of the game's mechanics are very poorly explained (or maybe it's just the translation), for instance how to do the combos (I took years to understand the the double punch symbol meant that you had to use both heavy and light attack at the same time).
Another things for instance, can be the Fugitoid thing as Whatswiththeheadbands? said, just because the game NEVER explains to you, that you can do a guaranteed critical attack to the enemies if you take them from behind, resulting in you trying to pick up Fugitoid but seing the turtles only flipping it instead.

The only thing I can't complain for sure, are the "I take them all" levels as I call them (the "vehicle" levels with coins), the little features like the Antique Shop and the Bonus Materials, and the freaking soundtrack (I just love it).
The rest can be seen from alot of different perspectives, but sure never lead to thinking into a completely great game design.
Mutant Nightmare is actually pretty good considering for what you are looking for, and I do like it alot! Except the dumb behaviour of the bots helping you sometimes.