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.

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.

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.