Podcast: Heroes in a Half Shell
You can’t have grown up in the late 80s and not been struck by the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. It apparently transcends geographic location as co-hosts Fred (@spydersvenom) and James (@Jamalais) both had similar experiences growing up in different parts of the world. In this episode we dissect TMNT’s roots, marketing, and obvious integration into video game culture, covering the games that made the surfer-style pizza-eating New York crime fighters a pop culture sensation.
Gaming History 101 
I don’t get why everyone hates on the C64 conversion of the TMNT arcade game so much. I got this back when it was originally released in 1991 and despite the complete absence of a two player mode, it was still a great conversion, the graphics looked far better than the blocky Amstrad version with well defined player and enemy sprites that were easily and instantly recognisable, a nice background tune throughout and great sound effects, and great gameplay with nice smooth animation and scrolling, again unlike the Amstrad’s slow, juddery screen update, and just as much variety as the arcade orginal and the range of moves that were included and could be pulled off by a joystick with single fire button was simply amazing. The only killer was the loading – unfortunately about 80% of the time from when I started loading until the game complete screen was showing was spent waiting for the tape to load. When I got hold of a disk version later on the loaidng was a lot quicker, cut out most of the waiting.
The C64 game reviewed pretty well too, with 74% in Zzap!64 and 89% in Commodore Format.
Sure, I wouldn’t play it now, what with being able to emulate the arcade original so easily, but looking back it is still a great conversion and I loved playing it back in the day.
Sparky Kestrel
November 4, 2018 at 1:01 am