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[Icebot]

Been playing Splatoon 2 Ranked battle Splat Zones. I made it to S+0.

[shredder orokusaki]

Since 4 days ago i started playing Eastern Exorcist which is made by a Chinese company and is another ninja game for NINJAS LIKE ME. It is about a man and woman who fights demons lin ancient China . I just finished half of the game(it has two campaigns one with the man one with the woman) and now i started the other half. A must play!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IriZWaY7pP4&t=1s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gbg4mt5a1C8

[shredder orokusaki]

Yesterday i started playing Pumkin Jack. One of my friends played it and told me few weeks ago it is good so i decided to play it. What more impressive that is game is made by only one person. It is 3d platform game where it takes place in hell and the enemies are demons.
It has ray tracing too that again shows the power of my monster pc as it makes lighting and shadows like real

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUw6Xtxi1OM

[shredder orokusaki]

i JUST finished Eastern Exorcist! It was GREAT another very good ninja game fo true ninjas like ME THE SHREDDER THE LEADER OF THE FOOT NINJAS!!

[Icebot]

I just completed Super Mario 3D World on the Switch, beat every stage with all 5 characters and got all the stamps. It took me over a year but I finally got it done!

Now I’m starting to play Bowser’s Fury.

[shredder orokusaki]

I started playing The House Of The Dead Remake that released yesterday! It is very good!I already have played it with my friends many times on a cafeteria and in a mall that still has it but now on PC iplay it the way it emant to be played! Graphics are 1000 times better and i kill all the zombies and make them suffer !!!


Seee here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZpJ2-lZKIA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3D-qa5W3cm0&t=4s

[shredder orokusaki]

i started playing Dolmen since yesterday! It is the first game of a new company called Massive Work Studio. And is like dark souls but with aliens. A realy hard core game for ninja masters like me! There is no diffulty settings you just lose with one or two hits! After the success of Elden Ring i believe this is a very good game!
see it here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iudQrI-kT7w&t=1s

[shredder orokusaki]

I started playing the amazing Sniper Elite 5 that released 2 days ago! It takes place on world war 2 and kill Germans in very brutal ways! You see me here as i tear them apart piece by piece! It is one of the best if not the BEST stealth action/stealth series!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2VJP457ARI

[Leo656]

So I did finish up my Arkham games run a few weeks ago - I've been too lazy to put my thoughts down, but I will in the thread for those games - but after that I wanted to do something completely different for a while before jumping into another big series. Preferably some older, smaller games.

I hadn't hooked up the ol' Genesis in a while, and there's a whole stack of games I never got to play for that one, so I decided to jump in and try out Dick Tracy (Sega Genesis). I owned the NES version and played it a ton as a kid, even though it has some huge problems. I did manage to beat it, once, but since I never had a Genesis as a kid this version was completely off my radar. As a huge fan of the movie as well as the franchise in general, ever since I found out that the Genesis version was entirely different I've been anxious to give it a shot.

Overall, it's pretty good for the most part... except for one thing, which I'll get to. It's not quite enough to ruin the entire experience, but it does come close.

The graphics are really great for 1989/1990. The foreground character sprites are huge and colorful. The backgrounds tend to be a bit repetitive, but a lot of old side-scrollers are like that, and at least everything is nice to look at. The still-image "cutscenes" between levels are pretty simplistic, but they're still a nice touch. They're a little rough around the edges in spots, but again, by 1989 standards they do the job. The Bosses get the worst of it, being represented on-screen by rather tiny sprites, but they're all still pretty well done and it's fairly easy to tell who's who.

The music isn't bad, it's not incredibly memorable or anything but it doesn't get on your nerves. The NES version had memorable music, but more in that it was rather obnoxious and irritating. In this case, it's pretty middle of the road. More than anything you'll hear the sound of gunshots and that becomes more memorable than any of the game's music.

Gameplay-wise, it's kind of interesting. It's a side-scrolling arcade shooter but has both a foreground and background aspect, so you're constantly switching between shooting at stuff right next to you and stuff in the background plane. It all works surprisingly well, since one button shoots the foreground enemies and another shoots the background ones, and the rest is just aiming. It's pretty hard to actually miss your targets since the game has a loose "auto-aim" thing going on; it's pretty easy to just start firing into the background, then pan left-to-right and swiftly clear the entire screen without taking a hit... at least early on.

Most of the stages are just like that; walk left-to-right and shoot everything that moves. Some levels take your gun away, and you're stuck having to punch your way through, which automatically makes things quite a bit harder. Each of the six Levels has three Stages, two regular ones and then a Boss fight. Several of the levels have a "driving level" midpoint stage that sees Tracy hanging off of a police car and fighting off enemies during a high-speed chase. That's always a fun change of pace; the stages all rotate enough so that it's never boring and you're never doing the same thing for two stages back-to-back.

The Boss fights are all the same, more or less; the Bosses show up in the background plane and either shoot at you or throw explosives, and you have to make your way to the end of the stage while fighting both them and any common enemies that show up along the way. You end up fighting Itchy, The Brow, Lips, Pruneface, Flattop, and Big Boy; they all play pretty much the same with some minor variations in how they attack or use the environment against you. So it's all mostly the same, but not exactly the same.

After every Boss fight, there's a Target Practice mini-game where you can earn extra Continues. Pretty neat, if easy. Shoot the targets that look like the bad guys, avoid the ones that look like cops and civilians. It gets harder as you go on but never gets actually "difficult"; by the end of the game, you should easily have over a dozen Continues stockpiled.

It's a pretty short game, or rather, it can be. Each stage is timed, and most of them are capped at around three or four minutes. So if a person was flawless and had the games' enemy patterns memorized, you could beat the whole game in an hour. But that's not a bad thing for a game like this. By definition, "Arcade Style" games aren't meant to be 40-hour epics.

The ONE thing that almost ruins the entire thing, though, is the insane difficulty spike in the very final stages. The "curve" on this game is more like a straight line shooting up in the air, starting with the Flattop fight. The first 2/3s of the game are so easy you could breeze right through it, but all the challenge is back-loaded. I've gotten to Flattop several times without even dying once, but after that stage, Good Luck. There's not a ton of stuff on this game online - I'm guessing not a ton of people played it, since it was a pre-Sonic Genesis game and most of those were ignored and forgotten by most people - but of what exists, there's a LOT of people ranting about the insanity of Stage 6-B, for example.

Firstly, the Flattop fight cheats, there's no other way to put it. When you get him down to almost no health, he starts cutting the lights off and on and you have a fraction of a second to hit him wherever he appears before he hits you. Whether you succeed or not is all completely random and up to the game. I've lost ten straight Continues on this one fight; other times, like the last time I played it, I somehow won without taking a single hit. There's no rhyme or reason to it; if the game says you took a hit, you did. You just have to keep trying it over and over until you get lucky, but you never feel like you earned it.

But then Level 6 happens. And suddenly ONE mistake means you may as well just jump in a hole and start over, because if you don't have full health for the end-of-stage enemy blitz you're f*cked. You need to play the stages (and die countless times) until you have every enemy, every bullet, every pattern completely committed to memory and can avoid them before they happen. This is the only place where the time limit becomes a factor, because you have to slowly inch forward while shooting at enemies that aren't onscreen yet; because by the time they appear it's too late, you're gonna get hit, so you have to remember where they're ABOUT to show up and shoot them with perfect timing so that they'll die as soon as they appear. I lost once when the time ran out, despite having full Health and being just inches away from the end of the level. I only needed maybe five more seconds. 6-A is aggravating because you don't have the gun and can only punch; 6-B gives you the gun back, but makes up for it with tons more enemies. It's f*cking relentless. I can't even remember how many times I died over the weekend I spent with the game. A f*cking LOT. All on the Flattop fight, 6-A, and 6-B.

By comparison, the Big Boy fight is pretty easy. The game ignores the movie's plot altogether, but it does keep this one similarity in that you have to chase Big Boy through a warehouse full of gears. The only real challenge to it comes in avoiding the gears when he sends them flying at you, but if you can get to the end of the stage with full Health it's not too hard at all to just grind it out. It only took me a few tries to beat it, once I FINALLY got that far. Compared to the hundred or so tries it took me to get through 6-A and 6-B, it felt like a breeze.

(Cont.)

[Leo656]

Overall, I'd say that Dick Tracy is a pretty good game, but holy SH*T is that difficulty spike some bullsh*t. I'm all for games getting gradually harder as they go along, but if you play it you'll know what I mean. The first 2/3s has a very gentle rising slope of challenge, and then out of nowhere it just becomes completely unforgiving. And playing those last couple of levels SO many times to memorize the patterns becomes completely mind-numbing after a while. You only get three lives, and however many Continues as you can stockpile, generally about a dozen. And when you run out, you start the entire game over. Which I must have done about a half-dozen times. And the lack of challenge in the first part of the game compared to the end of the game means that your entire flow is thrown off, and by the time you get back to level 6 you have to memorize it all over again after sleepwalking through the entire first chunk. And then right when you're finding your groove, you run out of Continues again!

Original cartridge copies of this game have a Level Skip cheat, which could alleviate some of the annoyance of starting over. However, I own a repro cart, and supposedly no repro carts or emulated versions of the game have the cheat enabled. Bummer.

The thing is, it never feels totally unfair or unbeatable, and the gameplay is addictive enough that it draws you back to it even when it's pissing you off. It got to a point where if I didn't finish it, I'd feel like it was a waste after being so close to the end, so I made it a point to beat it even though I was pretty aggravated at one point.

It would have been really easy to fix it without even changing the difficulty; just make Continues unlimited and have the Bonus Stage be for extra lives. Remove having to start the entire game over, and it all becomes a LOT less annoying. I know that's just how games were back then, but it does make going back to some of those older games a lot more frustrating than it ought to be. Stuff like Lives and Continues... that's not stuff in games that I honestly miss. SO many of these older games, if you could just continue right from where you died instead of having to do the whole game over, almost all the frustration evaporates.

I do get it, since once again it's only an hour long game if you don't end up playing the final stages 500 times. But I mean, that'd suit me fine. I hate the "artificial padding" older games have by using cheap difficulty spikes to stretch things out. I'm fine if a game is only an hour long, so long as that hour is nonstop fun and minimal aggravation. As it is, in the future if I think about revisiting this game, the insanity of 6-A and 6-B combined with that totally random Flattop Boss fight is going to give me second thoughts.

It probably won't stop me from playing it again, though. It's generally fun, and it's got that "I just need to try ONE more time and I can beat it!" factor a lot of older games have, where it walks the line between pissing you off but still pushing you to try again. And when you do beat those last few Stages, it feels like a real win. Aside from the difficulty spike, the only other thing I could say is that it's a little slow in the early going.

Overall though, it's a decent arcade shooter; in fact, it feels very much designed to be a coin-op experience and so I'm shocked it never came to that. The endgame definitely feels like it was built to steal quarters. Had such a cabinet existed, I definitely would have spent a lot of money on it as a kid. Had I owned this cartridge Back Then, I definitely would have played it a ton and loved it. But I don't think I ever would have had the patience to beat it. As it is, the last couple of days with it, I kept walking away from it only to sigh and try again, until I finally beat it. Kid Me wouldn't have managed it, though. Kid Me had a lot less patience and wasn't as good at memorizing patterns. Those are two things you absolutely need if you ever wanna see the end of this game.

Worth a look if you're a Tracy fan, or a fan of obscure Genesis shooters. It's good, and it's fun, just be ready for that insane endgame spike. F*cking brutal. I'm glad I finally played it, though, and even more glad that I managed to finish it. Kinda didn't think I would, at one point.

[Leo656]

So after Dick Tracy, I wanted to run through a few more "retro" games, so I decided to try out Boxing: Legends of the Ring (Genesis). I'm not a huge boxing guy, but I've always liked messing with boxing video games all the way back to Mike Tyson's Punch-Out! on the NES, so I picked this one up cheap a while ago. So far, it doesn't disappoint, although it's a bit dated.

One cool thing is that it was officially licensed by The Ring magazine and HBO, and features a nice selection of real-life boxers. All the fights take place at a casino in Las Vegas, so there's a nice "real world" feel to the game that's missing from stuff like the Punch-Out series, which was pure cartoon arcade style action. For some reason, you only get to play as Middleweight boxers, but I assume it had something to do with who they were able to license. There's some rather famous names such as Sugar Ray Leonard, Roberto Durán, Thomas Hearns, James Toney, Marvin Hagler, Jake LaMotta, Sugar Ray Robinson, and Rocky Graziano. I know very little about any of them, but they're all people I've at least heard of, so that's neat.

There are three game modes, regular Exhibition, Career, and Legends Fight. I know nothing about Legends Fight because when you select it you're asked to input a password; I guess there are different passwords that enable different preselected classic fights, but you can just as well do that in Exhibition. If I ever come across any passwords I'll try it out, but I'm not overly concerned. Exhibition is self-explanatory.

In Career, you create your own fighter using a very limited set of sprites (some of which are identical to actual in-game characters; my guy looks just like Jake LaMotta) and just customize their name and stats. It's incredibly basic, but for 1993 it's pretty novel. When you win fights, you get to up your stats. You start at the bottom of the Top 10 and have to fight your way up the ranks through all the real-life fighters and a couple of fake ones; it alternates between ranked fights and grudge matches against guys you've already beaten. So there's at least 20 fights in the Career mode, and after each fight there's a password so you can save your progress; each fight takes quite a long time, so this is necessary as it would otherwise take a whole day or so to get through Career. There seems to be a glitch, though, at least in my copy; the first time I used a password, my Power stat was not only maxed out, but it went beyond the limits of the stat bar. I can't tell if I'm actually hitting guys harder or not, though, it just won't let me move the Power slider up or down anymore, but I can still adjust the other stats.

The graphics really make the game stand out. The camera is zoomed way in and shows the fighters from the waist-up, and the gigantic sprites take up 2/3s of the screen. The boxers look really crisp and well-detailed, and the colors are really vibrant; it's really a great-looking game even though there's not much to see. The boxers themselves don't show damage, but their portraits in the upper corners change based on how much of a beating they're taking, and act as a "health meter". When they're all puffy and bleeding and their portrait box turns white, you can knock them down. It's a nice feature, more dynamic than a standard health bar. Movement is a bit stiff, but the huge sprites and bright colors make up for it.

Gameplay-wise, it's much more of a simulation than a typical "arcade style" boxing game, so that might not be for everyone but I'm having fun with it. It's definitely not a button masher; if all you do is frantically mash buttons, you'll get creamed, even on the lowest difficulty setting. You have to watch for situational openings and block correctly in order to force your opponent to be open to an attack. It's not too complicated - if their hands are up, hit the body, and if they're weaving around you can hit them with an uppercut, and so on - but it takes a bit of practice to get used to. Each boxer has their own signature combinations they like to use, just like Punch-Out!, so you'll probably take some damage in the first round until you've seen everything that they do, at which point you can adjust accordingly. Once you know their pattern, all you have to do is block every strike and then counterattack. Each fighter has unique combos but they also don't change up their strategies much during a fight, so it actually gets pretty easy to win if you pay attention. If you play smart, you can trap a guy on the side of the screen and just hammer them relentlessly with right hooks, sometimes.

One thing is, it's a bit slow and clunky. The hits have decent weight to them, but it takes FOREVER to actually knock someone down, and if they get back up they regain a TON of health. So after the first few fights in Career mode, most of your victories will probably be via decision rather than knockout or TKO. It's definitely not like Punch-Out! or Fight Night with a lot of rapid-fire combos and one-hit KOs. It's much more strategic and drawn out. It can be a bit tedious after a while, and it's not uncommon at all for a single fight to last upwards of 15+ minutes or more. Each round is a legit three minutes, and I've had a lot of fights go to a 10-round judges' decision, which means the fight took an entire half hour. So yeah, definitely not a fast-paced arcade experience. BUT, a pretty fun strategic boxing sim. You just have to know what you're sitting down to play.

All in all, I'm having a lot of fun with it; so far I'm ranked #3 in Career mode and haven't lost yet. It was definitely a different kind of game than what I'd expected, since most boxing games I've played were a lot more fast-paced and frenetic, but this type of style is certainly a lot more realistic, for better and worse. I can see it being a bit boring for some people and it's probably best played in short bursts of one or two matches at a time. You'll never finish Career in one sitting, so don't even try, even if you get there you'll probably be a bit tired of it by then because there's not a ton of variety. Even though the fighters all attack uniquely, the way you beat them is always the same, so it can be a bit tedious over longer play sessions.

If you like boxing games and want to try something a bit different from Punch-Out!, I definitely recommend checking this out on the Genesis or SNES. Just be aware going in that it's a sim and not a button-masher. It's not a hard game, but expectations can skew the experience with this kind of thing. I really dig it a lot.

[Prowler]

I've finally decided to give the 3DS Fire Emblem games a try.

I started out with Fates: Birthright. Solid game. A good introduction to the series for a newbie like me. It got a little repetitive after a while since most battles were about routing the enemy with the occasional beating the boss chapter. But overall, I had fun. And also married myself Kagero, a big boobie ninja girl.

Now I'm playing Fates: Conquest. It's definitely more varied in terms of battle strategies and objectives. Chapter 10 has proven to be quite difficult!

I know Nohrians are technically the bad guys, but they seem to be more fun to play as so far than the Hoshidans. After all, it's mostly the King of Nohr who's a belligerent asshole. The characters you play as are generally nice and likeable enough.

And yes, I know I should have started with Awakening, since that's the go to Fire Emblem entry for newcomers. It whatever. I'll get on to it after I'm done with Fates.

I had been curious about Fire Emblem since Marth and Roy in SSB Melee. It never had played it until recently. I like the series so far.

[Leo656]

So I had to give up on Boxing: Legends of the Ring. Turns out the Stats glitch is actually game-breaking. If you have unspent Stat points, you can't move forward out of the Upgrade menu. Since all my Stats were maxed out (I was ranked #3 by this point), I couldn't get out of the menu and had to just quit the game. That is SUCH bullsh*t.

I'll probably pick it up once in a while to do an Exhibition match but I can't see myself doing Career Mode again. I'd already had 14 fights averaging about 30 minutes each, so I spent around SEVEN HOURS playing the game only to not be able to complete it. There's nothing online about this glitch, either. What a pile of ass. It'd take about 9 or 10 hours to do Career Mode without taking a break and using a Password to continue, and yeah, nah. Oh well. Fun while it lasted, I guess.

Next I decided to try Batman (Genesis), another game I never played, and so far... Well, I admit I wasn't in the best mood after the previous fiasco but so far aside from the graphics it's pissing me off. Right at the start of the second level there's a really annoying jump where you have to grapple up to a pipe - the game gives you NO indication that this is what you have to do - and then jump over a tall stack of crates. And of course, it's one of those "It works when it feels like" type of things, where you can do the input correctly every single time and it won't work, and then suddenly it just works by magic even though you did nothing differently. I HATE that sh*t, especially since missing the jump means taking damage from the enemies below. You also die way too easily and can barely take any damage. I got to a part on Level 2 where the floor collapsed under me and left me in a spot it was impossible to continue from without falling to my death - which is obviously what happened - and at that point I just had to walk away. I might try it again later. So far, not impressed, only annoyed. It's very nice-looking, though, and the music is cool.

Another huge gripe is that A throws Batarangs, B punches, and C jumps. A and C NEED to be swapped, and you can't change it in the Options menu. So what happens is every time you try and jump, you waste Batarangs, which you only have a couple of anyway.

I'm getting rather fed up with old-school game design in my old age, not gonna lie. The whole "We need to make games hard and annoying so nobody notices there's only one hour of content" is f*cking aggravating, since nowadays developers figured out that no, games are not supposed to be hard, they're supposed to be FUN, and even though modern games are "too easy" it doesn't affect them in any negative way at all. People to back to them over and over again even though they can sleepwalk through them.

It's like Turtles In Time. It's 24 minutes long on the hardest setting and you can beat it with your eyes closed... But that's WHY people still play it and love it. There's no "wall" where the game needlessly wastes your time just to pad the length. You play it, you love it, you beat it, you put it down and pick it up another day, secure in knowing you will NEVER be beating your head against the wall. SO many older games that I love, I almost never play anymore because "Oh, yeah... That ONE part... Eehhhhh, I can't be bothered." Turtles In Time has NONE of that, which is why it's so beloved. Yeah, it's "too short" and "too easy". But I'll take something like that over the alternative any day. I've never had any patience and I have less than ever at this point in my life.

After hearing my whole life how awesome Genesis Batman is, I'm annoyed by the ten minutes I spent with it so far. Sure seems like just another "bust your balls" type of game. Maybe I'll play it later when I'm in a better mood.

[Leo656]

So I went back to Batman (Genesis) in a bit better mood after a less-aggravating day, and as I figured it wasn't AS irritating... but still a lot of that old-school "goodness" that just had to be in every single game from the pre-Xbox era. Hard to believe I ever had the patience necessary to put up with all of the "F*ck You" gameplay that most older games had.

Anyway, so I went back to Batman and did manage to beat it. But it's VERY obvious that they made a lot of the choices to disguise the fact that it's a 30-minute game. If I had a time machine, I'd go back and tell 80s and 90s game developers, "If you only have 30-60 minutes of gameplay, instead of putting in a bunch of cheap deaths and limited Continues so your 30-minute game takes 5 hours to finish, just MAKE MORE GAME."

So okay, right upfront, the graphics are beautiful, actually the game looks absolutely incredible for 1989. I'm kind of shocked that this game didn't move a ton of Genesis consoles back then, and that it's considered so obscure compared to its NES cousin, which everyone either has or has heard of. But, like a lot of the other pre-Sonic Genesis games, the NES had such a stranglehold on the gaming market in America that nobody could be bothered to care. It's weird; Dick Tracy, Batman, and Ghostbusters all had games that came out on both NES and Genesis, and the NES ones are all rather famous despite being of mixed quality (by "mixed", I pretty much mean Dick Tracy and Ghostbusters were lousy on NES while Batman was pretty decent), while the much better Genesis versions are all but ignored, and were even in their day. Very strange!

Anyway, like I said, the graphics are pretty great. Batman himself looks great, the backgrounds look great, and the Batmobile and Batwing stages look absolutely fantastic. Again, for as great as this game looks I'm shocked it didn't get more attention in its day. During the pre-game intro and occasionally during the game itself, there are some digitized screenshots of scenes from the movie, specifically close-ups of the characters' faces, and it's all really well-done for 1989.

The music is also quite good. There's no music from the movie, probably due to licensing issues, but what they came up with is good. Pretty catchy, nothing that will make you get sick of it.

Plot-wise, this game follows the movie MUCH more closely than the NES version did, albeit still rather loosely. But whereas the NES game threw in a bunch of comic book villains and barely addressed the movie at all outside of the ending, this one sticks pretty close. You get to knock Napier into the acid, shoot down Joker's balloons in the Batwing, climb the Cathedral and all of that good stuff. I like the NES game just fine but it's nice that this one is so faithful, in its way.

The general gameplay is good, you could tell that they didn't want it to get repetitive and so made a decent attempt at mixing up the gameplay. It's mostly a side-scrolling beat-'em-up, but there's some rather weak platforming mixed in along with some really fun but also slightly annoying driving and flying levels. The controls are responsive, it's all really smooth except for as I mentioned the Jump and Batarang buttons really should have been switched around. You can adjust to it, but it never really feels right using C to jump and A to fire.

The BIGGEST problem with the controls - and I find this to be a VERY big deal - is that it's VERY easy to accidentally kill yourself in platforming sections. Mainly, if you duck and press Jump you'll drop to a lower level, but the controls being so responsive means that even if you just graze the C button with the side of your thumb while ducking you'll just take a leap to your death. Or like, if you're holding the jump button when you land and accidentally press down without letting go of C, it'll do it. This is actually where I lost most of my lives, being perfectly situated on a platform but then duck a bullet, punch a bad guy, and then slightly, barely graze C with my thumb... Dead. You'll also waste Batarangs the same way while trying to do a Jumping Punch, the side of your thumb will graze A and you'll throw a Batarang even if you didn't mean to. If the button layout was swapped, these wouldn't be issues. But all the button inputs are in the wrong place, that's what messes it up. Otherwise, the platforming isn't SO bad, other than platform jumping in a beat-'em-up never really feels "right" and this game is no exception. The worst is the falling chandeliers while you're jumping between floating platforms; they can knock you to your death really fast, and you can "trick" them into falling and then try and pull back so they miss you, but it's hard to time it right without getting hit. Most of the platforming is on the Cathedral level near the very end of the game, and it's really easy to die here thanks to the accidental drop-offs. There's lots of enemies throwing dynamite, so a lot of times you'll try to duck it and then punch them but accidentally kill yourself.

The driving and flying stages are the next place where you're most likely to lose a bunch of lives. They're very fun, and a nice change of pace from the regular levels in that they play like side-scrolling shooters, but like most shooters there are several spots where it's just plain impossible to avoid taking damage and most of the enemy tanks can kill you in two hits. At which point you'll respawn right in the middle of another cluster of the same enemies, and unless you're very fast, you'll likely die again in short order. You really need to spam missiles, but the game is rather stingy with these and it's easy to miss the ones in these stages because they go by so fast. You mostly have to grind through and just accept losing a few lives along the way; every time you die, you respawn with five missiles, so even if you keep dying you can still make progress by inches just by spamming the missiles.

The game really could have used more Health and Weapon power-ups. They generally refresh you right before a Boss fight, but a lot of the times in the regular levels they're placed in a spot where you're almost guaranteed to either take damage or die while trying to get to them. There are hardly any Extra Lives, at least where you can reach them; there are a lot of "trap" power-ups like Health and Extra Lives deliberately placed in spots where even trying to reach them means falling to your death. F*ck You, game!

Dying is an annoyance for two reasons. Firstly, for whatever reason, you start with only HALF a Life bar although you can fill it up all the way if you find a Heart power-up. But if you die, you only start with half a life bar; you take a ton of damage from everything, so if you spawn in a bad spot you can easily die again within 3-5 seconds. Also, you start with 5 Batarangs (or missiles in the driving/flying stages), and get 5 more with every power-up. BUT, when you die you always respawn with 5 no matter what! There's been times when I had like 15 Batarangs or Missiles saved up, only for one cheap-ass death to wipe it all out and make me start over with 5. What the hell, man?

Any extra Health and Batarangs you have at the end of a level carry over to the next one, though, so that's nice.

It's a very short game, only six stages; the driving and flying ones are the longest. The Cathedral is pretty long but it's broken into two sections, and then the Joker fight, so it almost feels like two stages rather than one. There's some good variety between them and each stage has its own enemies. So there's a lot of different enemies altogether, but only like two different types per stage, usually. But since every stage has its own bad guys you still get some good variety that way.

The Bosses all attack differently, but you beat them all pretty much the same way - jump over them and punch from behind. It can still be a little tricky because they don't give you a lot of time before they turn and attack you again. It takes some practice to get the timing right, but worst case you can spam Batarangs until you run out, die, then respawn with more Batarangs, repeat. Even the Joker fight can be over in just a few seconds, if you have lives to spare and use this strategy. I'd just used a Continue and had full Lives, so I just spammed Batarangs and didn't even try to dodge his attacks. Beat him in about 8 seconds. Kind of a bummer but eh.

What sucks is, you only have four Continues but the game doesn't tell you this. Since there was no counter, I assumed they were infinite until I eventually died and had to start the entire game over. That was super annoying. Just tell me how many Continues I have, game!

(Cont.)

[Leo656]

All in all, it's a fun game and very good for its time, but it has a lot of the same problems with cheap deaths and such that most games back then did as a way to hide its short length. Like in a few stages there are spots where it's just impossible to progress without taking several hits and losing at least a couple of lives, thanks to all the enemies grouped close together in between tiny platforms and spike floors; all you can do here is grind, taking out a few enemies before inevitably dying, and then using your brief respawn invincibility to rush past a bunch more. Once you know where all the "traps" are, it's actually a pretty easy game, but the first time through can be very aggravating since you won't know where those traps are until they spring on you and kill you. Once you do know, it's easy to grind through the game very quickly and only dying in the spots where the game "forces" you to die.

I believe I encountered an annoying glitch. After I beat it, I decided to run through it another time just because it's so short. But then when I eventually lost all my Lives, it sent me back to the Title screen when I should have had full Continues. At that point I just decided to go play something else since I'd beaten it already. Still, annoying.

I definitely recommend checking it out. It's fun and the presentation is spectacular, just be ready for some cheap deaths on the first playthrough. It's definitely good though. Just short, and needlessly cheap in a few spots. But worst-case it still doesn't take long to get through. All it really needed to be a lot better was more Health power-ups, letting you respawn with full health, and letting you keep any extra Batarangs/Missiles when you die instead of resetting you to 5.

I've heard that "Batman Returns" on Genesis is horrible, so I probably won't be checking that one out anytime soon. Not that I own it, anyway, but the urgency on that one is pretty low.

[CyberCubed]

Yeah I don't really play NES games or older without the modern suspend/checkpoints anymore. The modern Castlevania and Contra collections for example let you save anywhere so if you die you can just load up where you saved and "undo your mistake." It'll also be great when TMNT 1 comes out on the TMNT Classic Collection soon, you'll be able to save and rewind at any point of the game so all the cheap sections people complained about will be over when the collection comes out.

Weirdly enough I think Nintendo's NES games aged the best. Even though parts of Mario 1 are still hard, it's still perfectly beatable. Same with Mario 2 and 3. Metroid 1 has some repetitive level design though, but Zelda 1 is also beatable.

Super Nintendo games as a whole were always easier than NES games, as by the 90's game developers learned how to make most games playable without being cheap, and you always have cheat codes or level skip codes to get back to where you were up to if you do get a Game over.

[Leo656]

To a point, yeah, but every now and then I still hit a wall with games like "Bugs Bunny's Rabbit Rampage" for SNES, which is actually shockingly difficult for a "kids game" on SNES, especially since the game itself gives you no help whatsoever as far as what you're supposed to do most of the time. I beat it once or twice, very long ago, but for some reason whenever I play it these days I can't manage to beat it. It's fun, and looks fantastic, but it's unreasonably difficult for what it is despite having some really great ideas.

So yeah, "Nintendo Hard" mostly only applies to games in the pre-SNES era (even on other, non-Nintendo consoles), but it still crept in once in a while.
-----------------

Thankfully, there were NO such issues in the next game I decided to check out, that being Ghostbusters (Genesis). Now, as a huge fan, you'd think I would have played this one at some point, since I played the 2600 game to death as a kid (never beat it, lost the manual so had no idea how to win) and even put up with the not-so-good NES games for Ghostbusters and Ghostbusters II. But just like with Dick Tracy and Batman, since I didn't have a Genesis as a kid and most of my friends only got one to play Sonic on and ignored anything that came out before that, this game completely flew under my radar until I saw AVGN talk about it in his "Ghostbusters Games" review. I only bought a Genesis for the first time in 2001 or so, and I remember picking up and putting down the Ghostbusters cart a hundred times when it was $5, but I never jumped on it. Mostly because, not having ever seen any footage of it, I'd just assumed it was just like the NES game with nicer graphics (the Master System version was basically what I'd imagined). The fact that I didn't know a single person who'd ever played it also made me not care so much.

I really regret that, because this game's a lot of fun!

As mentioned, the first time I saw this game in action was in the AVGN video a few years ago, and right away I couldn't believe I'd never seen it before. It's a run-n'-gun platform game with six levels; the first four Levels are haunted houses and apartments which can technically be played in any order, but they also get harder as they go along so your best bet is to play them in the order the game presents them to you. Each stage is full of respawning low-level ghosts that you just zap into oblivion, between one and four "mid-level" ghosts that must be trapped for a cash bonus, and one main Boss at the end. You can explore the stages at your leisure, but some areas are blocked off until you bust the mid-Boss ghosts. Occasionally Slimer shows up in certain preprogrammed spots, and if you zap him he'll drop either Health or Energy power-ups; these come in handy, because the enemies and stage hazards can be pretty relentless. When you finish a level, you get a large cash bonus that can be used to buy power-ups and equipment.

In-between each Level, you can go shopping for things like Health power-ups, Night Vision Goggles, Ghost Bombs, and various new weapons. Some of these are more useful than others; the Goggles are only useable in one stage (but they're absolutely essential in that part), and I only found the 3-way Shot and Phaser weapons to be of any real use against the Bosses. The rest of the weapons seem pointless, except for the Special Suit which gives you a force field that cuts down on enemy damage. There's a Barrier power-up that reflects all damage but it's insanely expensive so I never managed to obtain it. I had no real trouble beating the game without it, anyway.

The game has an adjustable difficulty setting, but you can also choose between playing as Peter, Ray, or Egon, and that acts a bit like a difficulty modifier in itself. Each Ghostbuster has different Speed and Health stats; Peter is slower but has the most Health, Egon is faster but has low Health, and Ray is right in the middle. I played with Peter, even though Egon is my favorite, because the game can be a bit relentless so having the extra Health is definitely pretty useful. You can buy a one-use power-up that refills your Health during the Level, but you can only carry one at a time; after that you either need to run out of lives and Continue, or exit the Level and go back to the Shop in order to buy another one. Past that, there are three Extra Lives hidden in the game that are pretty tough to find. If you're having trouble in a Level, if you survive you can leave and go back to the Shop to refill on power-ups and buy new weapons if you have enough money; all the mid-Boss ghosts will remain busted, even if you use a Continue or leave and re-enter a stage. On Easy and Normal, the game gives you 10 Continues, which should be plenty enough to get through the game as long as you play it smart.

As usual, Winston gets left out entirely. Never appears, never mentioned, the game itself even mentions at one point that there are only three Ghostbusters. It really is pretty jarring how Winston just didn't exist outside of the movies and the cartoon, back then. People must have either been pretty racist, or assumed that all kids were.

Supposedly, the game is presented as a sequel to the first movie, even though it came out a year after "Ghostbusters II" was released in theaters. The story plays out in short cutscenes between levels, which are pretty simplistic. The biggest tie-in to the movie is that you fight Stay-Puft after Level 4, but no references to Gozer or anything like that. One of the mid-Boss ghosts does bear a strong resemblance to Dana as Zuul, but is not named as such; point of fact, none of the ghosts or Bosses have names, except for the final Boss. So I guess you can pretend the mid-Boss is Dana/Zuul, if you want to. I mean it looks just like her. All the other ghosts and Bosses are unique to the game.

So, you go around these haunted houses busting ghosts and doing a lot of not-too-tough platform jumping; when you bust the Boss ghost, you get a scene of your Ghostbuster on the front page of the newspaper, and also collect a piece of a Stone Tablet which unlocks the last two levels of the game once all four pieces are collected. The second-to-last level, you rescue the other two Ghostbusters from being possessed by ghosts, and then in the final level you descend into a pit that acts as a bridge between the human world and the Dark World, where you fight the final Boss. Once you beat the game, you get an awful ending where your Ghostbuster stands in the center of the screen while a goofy parade goes by in the background.

The graphics are pretty good; some people say they're "too simple" for a 1990 Genesis game, but I think they're really good for the time, very slick, bright and colorful. The Ghostbusters themselves are presented in a super-deformed "chibi" art style, which is an interesting choice but works well for what the game is. I think it all looks really great.

The music is also pretty good, nothing incredible but nothing that will make you want to Mute the TV either. Although when you start it up, the "hum" of the intro to the Ghostbusters theme song will have you thinking something is wrong with your TV speakers. The Genesis really had some subpar sound capabilities, but once the actual music kicks in it's all pretty good. Each level has its own "theme" and they're all pretty nice.

Altogether, I really like this game a lot! I'd heard that it was really hard, but I didn't find it all that difficult at all. It just takes a little practice to find out the enemy placement and figure out which weapons work best on which Bosses. Once you figure out that the 3-Way Shot is your best bet against most Bosses, the game gets pretty easy. There are a lot of spots in the environment where it's almost impossible to move around without taking damage, especially in the final Level, but if you play it smart there's no reason you can't complete it, especially with 10 Continues. The controls are very responsive, which is vital during Boss fights when the screen is filling up with things that can hurt you; it looks chaotic, but you're able to jump over, duck and dodge almost everything coming at you while only taking minimal damage. Once you know what you're doing, you can easily beat the game in about an hour or so, which is just about right for this kind of game. After which, there's some replay value in trying to beat it with each Ghostbuster and on higher Difficulty levels.

I definitely recommend it for any Genesis or Ghostbusters fan. After the 2008 game, this is easily the best Ghostbusters game although that admittedly isn't saying much. It's a fun little arcade platform shooter, lots of fun with minimal frustration. Even though I lost a lot of lives as I was figuring it all out, I never had any moments of "WTF" like I had with Dick Tracy or Batman, where it felt at times like the game was blatantly cheating to pad the length. This is a short, easy-ish game, but it's constantly fun and never frustrating or tedious. Perfect for a weekend afternoon.

[Leo656]

So I've been continuing my time with my long-neglected Genesis. After doing a bunch of games in a row I'd never played before, I decided to spend some time with an old favorite, the legendary Golden Axe (Genesis). This was one of the few Genesis games I did play as a kid; my younger cousin had it, so whenever I'd stay over at his house for a few days we'd usually rip through that one and Bonanza Bros. on two-player. I've beaten it a couple of times, both with him and on my own, and most recently had played it on the Genesis collection that came out for Xbox 360, which would have been several years ago by now. Beat-'em-ups were always one of my favorite types of game and this is considered a seminal classic in the genre, especially as it was one of the earliest Genesis games and one of the first arcade-to-home ports that expanded on the coin-op original.

It's still worth some time, but unfortunately, having played so many more games since the last time I'd really spent a lot of time with it, a lot of annoying things show up that betray the game's age and a few of them pop up immediately.

Right off the bat, the hit detection and reach of your player character is some of the worst I can recall of a major release in this genre. It's nearly-impossible to attack even the simplest enemies head-on, as every single enemy has a longer reach that you do, somehow, and will almost always hit you before you hit them. So what you have to do is kind of quarter-circle around them and then approach from either just above or just underneath, at which point you can usually unleash a decent combo without them being able to hit you, but attacking head-on is just nuts. It becomes a bit tedious because it never feels like you have the reach you should, enemy attacks constantly have priority over yours and since you're almost constantly being flanked it always feels like a risk to unleash a combo. A lot of the enemies feel like they take too many hits to kill, also. There's a running attack that does some good damage, but they can do it, too, and they seem to again have priority in unleashing theirs; the safest way to do it is to knock them down first, and then unleash it while they're getting up. Otherwise, I spent most of my time doing jump attacks, which seem to have more range than standing attacks and also help you avoid getting flanked. Also, if an enemy is a little bit off-screen but still visible, you can't hit them (your weapon will visibly pass right through them without dealing any damage) but they can, and will, beat the living crap out of you in that moment.

Also, there's no brief moment of invincibility to regroup yourself as there is in most games of this genre; therefore, once you get hit, you're locked in place to helplessly suffer a Combo of three-to-five hits, costing one or two bars of Health. This gets pretty annoying, especially late in the game where the Skeleton enemies love to team up on you; one wrong move, and you'll be taking 5-hit Combos from both front and back and lose almost your entire Life bar in seconds. And there's NOTHING you can do about it! No Block button, can't jump out of the way, you're completely locked into taking damage until the enemies stop hitting you. By the end of the game, especially during the Final Boss, this becomes supremely frustrating.

However, once you adjust to these problems, the game is still fun, and a great look back at the history of the genre (as well as the early Genesis library). The graphics aren't arcade-perfect but are pretty close, and for the time are very colorful and detailed. The sprites are fairly large and the Boss and mid-Boss characters are about as tall as half the screen, which I always love to see. Magic attacks fill the screen with fire and explosions, especially when the final Boss summons a dragon, and it all looks really cool. The game really nails the whole "Dungeons & Dragons"-style, swords-and-sorcery motif. The backgrounds look great with each stage being distinctive. Character movement is a bit stiff but it's all par for the course. I think it looks great compared to the arcade version, and definitely very good for one of the very first Genesis games.

The music is pretty great, too, nothing that will blow you away but again, it fits the overall aesthetic perfectly.

I addressed the problems with the combat, but at the same time it has some good things that make it stand out for its time. Combo attacks, running attacks, and even a throw move that looks like a body slam all add some variety beyond "just mash B to attack" and were pretty novel additions to the formula back then. It's fun to use the layout of the stages to your advantage sometimes as well, tossing enemies off of ledges and into the abyss below.

One iconic mechanic of the series is being able to steal beast mounts such as dragons from enemies and use their high-powered attacks, yet another addition that was pretty unique for its time. However, this can also be a bit of a pain since you move much slower while riding a beast and it can be very difficult to line up your attacks with the enemies both moving much faster and trying to flank you; there were a few times when I snagged a beast only to immediately get knocked off and lose it, without getting off a single attack. You do more damage using the beasts' attacks, but sometimes it's barely worth trying. You're also not protected from damage while riding a beast; in most later beat-'em-up games, having a mount of some kind acts like a one-hit "shield" where if you get hit, you won't take any damage, but in this game you still get hurt. So sometimes it feels like it's not altogether worth it to snag a beast. When it works, though, it comes in handy.

A lot of the time, enemy AI in these games is pretty brainless, but in this case it's rather the opposite. Enemies are very aggressive and require some thinking and strategy to beat. There are usually only two or three enemies onscreen at a time, and most of the enemies are just palette-swaps of the same handful of sprites, but it really doesn't matter and was again par for the course at the time.

As mentioned, this was one of the very first arcade-to-home ports that expanded on the original game, in this case by adding two extra Levels exclusive to the cartridge (although it's technically one full level and the Final Boss fight being its own stage, but either way it's usually spoken of as "two extra Levels"). It's a nice bit of extra stuff, and I'm glad that they bothered, but it feels a bit rushed and not fully tested. The extra Level is basically just one long corridor with a lot of pits to fall into, which means most of the enemies you encounter will just kill themselves and the rest you can easily knock into the pits. Even the Boss fight of this level is neutralized by this, and can infamously be beaten in seconds by knocking both of the armored knights into the pit.

And then the Final Boss fight against Death Bringer and two un-killable Skeletons, feels very unfair to the point where I feel like no play-testing went into it at all. The Skeletons will constantly flank you, making it near-impossible to get near the Boss, and while you're fighting them off he'll attack you with a magic attack that destroys almost your entire Health bar. The only way to beat the game is to essentially hold onto ALL of your Lives and Continues and then just grind it out at the very end. It doesn't particularly take a lot of skill, just endurance. The visuals of the Final Boss attacks are cool, but you can't really appreciate it while you're being mercilessly knocked around.

I feel like the Boss fight could have been easily fixed if the Skeletons dropped Magic pots when knocked down. No other enemies drop power-ups, BUT no other enemies are invincible, either, and I feel like this one little change would have given the player much more of a fighting chance during the Final Boss fight. At least that would take the Skeletons out for a few seconds and give you a free shot to attack Death Bringer. As it is, you have to constantly be moving and dodging attacks which doesn't leave much time to get off any of your own. The Death Adder fight is admittedly too easy - just trap him in the lower corner of the screen and unload on him - but the Death Bringer fight, by contrast, is needlessly frustrating.

You at least get a much better ending than a lot of other older Genesis games, with a full cast of characters rundown during the credits and some fun animations of the hero characters.

Overall, I still like the game and it's a classic of the genre, but it definitely shows its age in a lot of ways, mostly by being frustratingly cheap. But it's nothing you can't adjust to. Like most games of this type, it's not a very long game, and should only take about 30-40 minutes to complete.

I'll always recommend checking it out and I'll always go back to it, but it can feel VERY dated if you're used to playing anything that's more in the Final Fight or Turtles In Time vein, with all the little gameplay improvements that go a long way towards improving the fun factor of those games. Still, this is one of the classics of the genre and anyone with a sense of history should run through it at least once.

[Leo656]

After that, I decided to split the difference by playing a game I technically never played but is near-identical to one I've played hundreds of times. That's right, I FINALLY got around to playing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Hyperstone Heist (Genesis)!

As mentioned, I never had this game as a kid, and oddly, neither did any of my Genesis-owning friends. I picked up a very snazzy reproduction last year, complete with box and manual, since authentic copies are ridiculously priced nowadays. I would have played it earlier but just didn't have my Genesis hooked up until a few days ago, and I wanted to cross a few other games off first. That said, I'm really glad to finally have played this one!

All told, it really is just a "remix" or "ROM Hack" that combines bits of both Turtles In Time and the original TMNT Arcade Game, but there are some nice things that make it stand on its own. I honestly like the graphics in this game a lot more than TiT on the SNES; The Genesis has a more limited color palette than the SNES but the colors they picked for this game simply fit better, and the sprites have much better shading which makes the details much sharper and more crisp. Visually, this game has a lot more "pop" than TiT on the SNES; I wasn't expecting that, since generally, most "multiplatform" games look better on the SNES.

The music plays a bit faster than the SNES version, but the sound effects and speech samples are worse. It seems to be a toss-up for most people as to which game has better audio; I prefer the SNES for this.

Gameplay-wise, the biggest difference is the addition of a dedicated Run button, some new running attacks such as a baseball slide and a charging kick, and the removal of the ability to throw enemies at the screen (BOO!). I'm split on the Run button; most people seem to prefer it, but I'm so used to just tapping Forward twice to run that I was constantly having to get used to the new mechanic. It definitely changes the gameplay significantly, though, since enemy attack patterns are different in this version and the enemy AI is faster and more aggressive. You need to use the running attacks very frequently to avoid taking damage, so I guess having an actual Run button is beneficial; I'm just so used to the other system's mechanic that it was a bit of an adjustment.

Aside from the graphics, the other big improvement for me was the additional cutscene bits at the beginning and end of the game; it would have been awesome to see that shot of Shredder falling to his death in TiT, but I guess they only thought of it after the fact and decided to include it in this game as a "better late than never" kind of thing. The amount of reused cutscene graphics from TiT is downright laughable - it's 99% the same thing! - but at least they look sharper and more crisp, here.

As for the game itself, it's all been said before. Fewer levels than TiT, but longer ones, with some stuff from the first Arcade Game added in for the same of variety. It gets called a "bastardized port" of TiT a lot of the time, but I'd say it's more of a mash-up of both TMNT arcade games that just leans more heavily on TiT for assets. It's different enough from TiT, outside of cutscenes and sprites, to not be considered a "port"; the levels and Bosses are almost entirely different, after all, and if it didn't blatantly reuse the cutscenes and Final Boss I don't think it would be strictly associated with TiT as much as it is.

The levels are pretty cool and I like the length, they make up for the lack of them by having each level mostly go through several different visual stages, but again, its nothing that hasn't been seen before, it's all mostly borrowed from other TMNT games with only a little bit that's actually new. The Boss selection is... interesting. I know everyone raves about Tatsu, and that is a nice bit of uniqueness since he never gets used or referenced outside of the movies, but I don't know, it didn't wow me much, and it feels like they got lazy by just tossing in Foot Soldiers to fight at the same time to get around making the actual Boss fight better. Like with Death Adder and Death Bringer in Golden Axe, most of the challenge in this fight comes more from avoiding the underlings so you can get hits in on the Boss; otherwise, it's a cakewalk. It's also very weird that you fight Rocksteady twice, but never Bebop. Pre-Fly Baxter showing up during the Boss Gauntlet feels oddly out of place; again, it comes off like they just ran out of time and copy/pasted him in from the original Arcade game. All of the Bosses are pretty easy, although Krang feels a bit more difficult than the SNES version, like the attack window is more narrow and he counterattacks more quickly. Super Shredder feels even easier than the SNES version, despite moving a little faster. Only the Tatsu fight is challenging, and again, that's mostly because of how they flood the screen with Foot Soldiers, not because he's a hard Boss. A Boss Fight Gauntlet in a game this short with so few stages and Bosses just feels like bare-minimum effort, I can't lie.

All told, though, it's obviously a really great game. Going directly from playing Golden Axe, one of the first games to really use this gameplay formula, to this game, which along with Turtles In Time mostly perfected said formula, was really mind-blowing. Everything dated and frustrating about Golden Axe was completely fixed by the time this game came out; if anything, the hit detection is slanted in the player character's favor rather than the opposite, and you never feel like you're "trapped" or needlessly taking damage. There are no moments where you're thinking "This game cheats". Super-smooth from start to finish, with the fun factor making up for the short length.

I definitely had a lot of fun with it, and I'll definitely be playing it again and again, but it didn't quite knock Turtles In Time off its pedestal, for me. It looks better, and I like the extra attacks, but overall TiT comes off as a better overall package. I'm still more apt to play TiT over this, but this one holds up very well. I'm still perplexed by how nobody I knew as a kid had it or played it. I don't think it deserves its reputation as a "worse" TiT port. It more or less is that, but it's still fun and has a lot going for it.

Glad I could finally cross that one off my list after all these years.

By the way, can anyone tell me once and for all exactly why the Genesis got this game instead or a straight TiT port? I've heard several different reasons from "The Genesis couldn't handle TiT because of the sprite scaling" to "Konami's Nintendo contract wouldn't let them do a straight port on other consoles", and they all sound about 50/50 between plausible and flimsy. I've always been curious but all I see online when I dig is speculation.

[CyberCubed]

HyperStone Heist does come across like mixing TMNT II: The Arcade Game and Turtles in Time into one game. You can easily tell which levels/characters were pulled from which. I suppose Konami wanted a TMNT game on Genesis as quick as possible but didn't have the time to make everything from scratch, and since TMNT had never been on a Sega console before, it basically became a "Greatest Hits" version of what was on Nintendo consoles for years.

Not having Bebop in the game is odd as hell, it's the only time in TMNT history you ever see Rocksteady solo without any Bebop at all. I can't think of any other game, TV show, comic, etc. that had just one but not the other. I like Tatsu's inclusion to have a movie villain there, and including human Baxter is pretty odd too.

I look forward to playing it again when the TMNT Cowabunga Collection comes out with all 13 retro games together. It's basically almost like an alternate TMNT 5 from the Konami games universe.