Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles 1 logo

Publisher: Image Works Price: £24.99

Surely there cannot be anyone who has not heard of the Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles? Love them or loathe them, the Turtles are here to stay, at least until the next commercial craze hits the streets.
The Turtles began life as ordinary pets. One fateful day they were accidentally dropped down a sewer and instead of landing in the murky depths the pets found themselves swimming in a strange kind of radioactive ooze. Contact with this substance caused them to mutate. They grew in size and even learned to talk!
A Ninjitsu master also came into contact with the gunk and changed into a human rat. He became known as Splinter and under his watchful eye the Turtles were transformed into deadly Ninja fighting machines.
Splinter, a purveyor of Italian art, named his students after classical painters. Thus were Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo and Donatello created.

April O'Neill, a news reporter with a network television company has been kidnapped by the vile and ruthless Shredder. As leader of the nasty underworld Foot Clan, Shredder's dastardly scheme is to brainwash the reporter into joining his gruesome gang.

Controlling the Turtles, you must wage war on Shredder and his foot soldiers in a frantic battle to rescue the lovely April.
Your adventure starts in the downtown streets of New York. When you search the city streets and sewers you will come across all manner of creatures.
The end of each level is reached when you find April. However, she is always guarded by Rocksteady and Beebop, two of Shredder's most trusted henchmen. As you battle it out with one of them, the other will take April off to another location.
The game continues in a similar fashion until you eventually track the gang down to their safehouse at the Technodrome. There you confront Shredder and capture his death-dealing Life Transformer Gun.

Throughout the game there are various icons to collect, each of which will assist you in your valiant cause. Pieces of pizza replenish your life force, while invincibility and more powerful weapons can help you overcome the seemingly endless enemy onslaught.

The Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles is a competent beat-'em-up cum platform game. Needless to say, because of the Turtles' fame every kid in the land will want to play it.


Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles 1 logo

Mirrorsoft £24.99 Joystick

It's here, at last! Was it worth the wait? Well, to be brutally frank... no. The most hyped and probably most expensive licence of the year can't live up to its billing. The sprites ar small and, though green, are not instantly recognisable as Turtles. They could be mutant frogs or invading aliens - basically anything that shows an emerald hue.

Both the plot and gameplay are fragmented, shifting from one game style to another. This is not always a bad idea, adding variety, but each of the sections should be able to carry a game in its own right. This is decidedly not the case with the Turtles. There's an overhead Gauntlet-style street section, a side-on battle in the sewers and a very daft swimming bomb-disposal sequence. Not that it's too easy - it's just dull and extremely fiddly to control.

The game works, but is not exactly the state of the art. The scrolling lags behind the characters on occasions, exits refuse to let you past and pathways which apparently look as though they are clear sometimes become invisibly blocked for some reason.

These factors are made even more irritating because to get this far you will struggled with an almost unreadable copy protection sheet and listened to the infuriatingly unrecognisable tune. What was wrong with Partners in Crime or the cartoon theme?

It is an improvement on the American Ultra game on which this version was based, but not nearly by enough.


Kröte bleibt Kröte

Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles 1 logo

Weltweit grassiert das Turtles-Fieber, nur in Deutschland will sich keiner so recht davon anstecken lassen. Naja, trotzdem wollen wir Euch die zweite Version der kämpferischen Schildkröten nicht vorenthalten.

Hier handelt es sich wohlgemerkt nur im die "europäische Version" des ursprünglichen Konami-Spiels (Test in AJ 4/90), nicht etwa um eine Umsetzung der legendären Arcademaschine. Bis auf den Titel ("Hero Turtles" statt "Ninja Turtles") sind die Unterschiede denn auch denkbar gering. So hat das Game jetzt nur noch eine Disk statt deren zwei - nun wird halt genauso lange "entpackt", wie früher geladen wurde...

Nach wie vor müssen die vier Turtles ihre Freundin April aus den Klauen des bösen Shredder befreien und sich deshalb durch New Yorks Straßen und Kanale prügeln, gelegentlich geht es sogar unter Wasser. Jede Schildkröte hat ihre eigene Waffe und ist daher anders einsetzbar, man kann aber immer nur eine von ihnen steuern.

Hin und wieder findet man eine energiespendende Pizza oder Extrawaffen, wie Shurikens und Raketen.

Bei der Grafik muß man schon mit der Lupe hinschauen, um einen Unterschied feststellen zu können, auch das Scrolling ruckelt wie eh und je. Soundmäßig ist ebenfalls nicht gerade ein Symphinieorchester am Werk, dafür kann man immer noch Spielstände abspeichern, was für ein Actiongame ja nicht selbstverständlich ist. Also alles wie gehabt: ein 08/15-Plattformspielchen, dessen Steuerung zu wünschen übrig läßt. (mm)


Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles 1 logo

As predicted, TMNT was just released before Christmas, taking the number one spot with, reputedly, over half a million copies sold on all formats. The UK version of the game is a slightly altered copy of the American game, which in turn is copied from the Nintendo's release which was pretty good. The US Turtles was pretty abysmal, dogged with loading problems and gameplay faults while Nintendo's Turtles was fast and playable. Unfortunately, the Mirrorsoft's Turtles appears to have struck an unhappy balance between the two.

Based on the cartoon series, Shredder and the Foot Clan have captured April O'Neill, and it is down to the heroes in a soup bowl to rescue her. Level one has the turtles searching sewers for April. The colour scheme here makes the turtles almost invisible.

Level Two finds April held prisoner by Rock Steady, Shredder's right hand man. The next level changes slightly with the turtles swimming around searching for bombs.

The scrolling and animation leaves a lot to be desired, as does the playability. Still, the controls work well, and it is easy to get into.

No doubt turtle fans will think it is mega. However, more selective pizza freaks will see this for what it is, a pretty well average arcade game.


Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles 1 logo

Konami/Imageworks, C64 £12.99 cassette, £16.99 disk; Amiga £24.99

Okay, let me get this straight. Four terrapins fell into some radioactive sludge, but were rescued by a rat called Splinter which had learnt martial arts from watching a master ninja. The radioactivity naturally grew all five creatures to man-size and enable them to speak English. The Turtles learnt Californian surfer lingo from TV and, in time, became international heroes.

Obviously this is completely ludicrous and unbelievable, so when the Turtles became a worldwide phenomenon the plot was changed to something much more realistic. Now instead of Splinter being an incredibly smart rat, he's a human who was transformed into a rat. This incredibly mean act was perpetrated by Schredder after he killed the previous leader, a good friend of Splinter. Once transfromed into a rat, Splinter just happened to come across four Turtles as they fell into that critical radioactive sludge. All makes perfect sense now, doesn't it?

In the computer game the Turtles are battling, as ever, with the Foot Clan in their quest to get the Transformer device from Schredder. Also, their reporter friend April O'Neill has been kidnapped and must be rescued. The game takes place in New York, viewed from overhead. You control a single Turtle as he scuttles about, battling ninjas. Certain buildings can be entered and the view changes to a side-on one. The Turtle can run around, make massive leaps and fight. The weapon used varies according to the character, each of which has his own energy and can be switched between pressing space.

To restore energy you can collect pizzas, of course. Other pick-up items include additional weapons such as a Boomerang, Shuriken, Triple Shuriken, Anti-Clan missiles, a rope for climbing between buildings and limited invulnerability. On the overhead section there's a party-van which can be driven around.


Phil King The dudes are here at last, but the game's a bit of an anticlimax on the C64. It's a very mediocre arcade adventure which wouldn't stand a chance without the interest generated by the strong licence. Dedicated Turtles fans will no doubt lap up the unsophisticated beat-'em-up action - though the inflated price tag is harder to stomach than a 12-inch pizza. But there's nothing at all outstanding to see or do and the repetitive sewer sections all look very much alike.
Talking of sewers, the Amiga looks like it crawled out of one. Incredibly jerky scrolling, pathetic (sometimes two-frame!) animation, and a general lack of detail are complemented by an irritating tune. Gameplay is identical to the C64, i.e. very derivative and unambitious even for 8-bit, never mind 16-bit. Schredder must be laughing his head off at this dire effort. Totally bogus, dudes!
Stuart Wynne Well you've already bought this one by the crate load, so I guess this review is of more historical interest than anything else. Wisely Mirrorsoft declined to send out pre-prod versions for reviews, thus missing pre-Xmas reviews, but with the Amiga simply a glance would reveal a chronic scroll and banal graphics suffering mediocre animation. St-portitus strikes again! Gameplay is an unremarkable mix of overhead-view maze with side-on combat. Sluggish response makes the latter unsatisfying, and repetition soon sets in. It's a dull game which would've sunk without trace if it didn't have the Turtles name.
C64 Turtles isn't quite so technically poor, the backgrounds are reasonable and the Turtles sprites are acceptable. However, splodgy enemy sprites and the basic limitations of the gameplay make this amazingly inept for the high price point. A swift multiload and numerous levels can't compensate for this. I only hope all those new C64 owners aren't going to go off computer games this.