GAME CLEAR Special -- Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Cowabunga Collection

Heroes in a full package.

Well, it’s time to talk about The Cowabunga Collection. I knocked out a few of its games recently, and I think it rocks. It’s another great effort by Digital Eclipse, a studio that is just so good at this sort of thing. It does what a compilation of this kind should do as bare-minimum, which is to faithfully emulate a bunch of ROMs from years past with some QOL features like save states and rewind. But it goes above and beyond with a bevvy of extras, including manual, box, and magazine scans, as well as bespoke strategy guides for each game that are formatted and illustrated in the style of a ’90s magazine. It makes for a package that is as fun for people that grew up with the Turtles and/or these games as it is for those of us that grew up with neither.

I mostly bought this game because I love a some good local co-op beat ’em ups (although it bears mentioning that they support online play as well), but I’ve found myself enjoying the single-player Game Boy titles as well. It wouldn’t surprise me if, eventually, I finish every game on this disc. They all have something to offer.

Collected below are GAMEs CLEAR 122-124. All games originally developed and published by Konami and cleared on the PS5 version of the Cowabunga Collection.

GAME CLEAR No. 122: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time (1991, Arcade)

Clear Date: 3/4/23

Turtles in Time probably needs the least introduction of any game on the collection and probably sold a lot of units on its own. It’s a classic, smash-hit arcade game from the height of the Turtles’ popularity, and its SNES port has received praise as one of the all-time great arcade ports. Until I got my hands on the Cowabunga Collection, I had only played the latter version, and I’m glad to now have the arcade original so faithfully preserved. There are differences in content that make it difficult to say that one version is objectively definitive over the other, but the arcade version certainly has the upper hand on graphics and sound. Plus, since it’s the only one that supports four-turtle simultaneous play, it does provide the purest TMNT experience in that regard.

And indeed, the reason I picked it first was because I played it with two friends. Live, in-person co-op. After a certain age, you just don’t get so many opportunities to do that anymore. Turtles in Time is a cute, colorful, well-animated beat ’em up that does a great job of capturing the vibe of the animated series, but more importantly, it was a chance for me to play some video games while hanging with my adult friends. Can’t put a price on that.

GAME CLEAR No. 123: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Fall of the Foot Clan (1990, GB)

Clear Date: 3/8/23

When you don’t have any friends to game with, though, at least you can take your Turtles on the go. Fall of the Foot Clan was the first of a Game Boy trilogy, and frankly it shows lol. Konami didn’t quite have their Game Boy chops developed in 1990. Fall of the Foot Clan is one of those Game Boy platformers with huge character sprites that take up too much screen space and level designs that similarly do not always really fit on the low-res dot-matrix display. Nevertheless, it does feature loads of familiar enemies and bosses (including Bebop, Rocksteady, Shredder, and Krang), the theme from the animated series, and you can play as all four Ninja Turtles. The Turtles act as your lives, as the active Turtle is “captured” if he loses his life bar.

Walk to the right, jump sometimes, and kill droves (and droves) of bad guys. It’s basic and sometimes annoying, but it’s got a simple charm to it. I liked it enough to do a no-death run. It won’t take more than an hour or two of your time to finish it, tops. Give it a shot.

If nothing else, I hope you’ll agree that the Turtle sprites are super cute.

GAME CLEAR No. 124: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: Back from the Sewers (1991, GB)

Clear Date: 3/11/23

Where Fall of the Foot Clan showed Konami’s early growing pains with adapting to the Game Boy, Back from the Sewers was a great sophomore effort from the then-reliable game shop. It’s better than its predecessor in just about every way. It’s got cleaner animations, better enemy variety, more exciting (if occasionally more confusing) stages, and a bit longer runtime. It still probably doesn’t deserve to be mentioned among the very best classics of the Nintendo handheld, but it’s a decent platformer. I’d write more about it, but you probably get the picture. Press B on mooks, get a little more clever against bosses, and clear some basic platforming en route to a showdown with Krang and the Shredder. Inessential, but inoffensive.

My understanding is that the third Game Boy game is genuinely quite good, so I look forward to playing it. It’s fun to play through series like these and see how they improve with each iteration. That’s part of why collections like these are so valuable!

I’ll be sure to let you know what I think of that one right here on nixon dot computer one of these days.