Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge (2022, Tribute Games)
There are two instances I can think of in which Konami would release improved versions of unbalanced or slightly unfinished arcade games to the Super Famicom. One such case is Gradius III, one of the most punishing STGs ever made, which was transformed into a delightful and in many ways brand new Super Famicom game whose higher difficulty levels provide the reasonable but still arcade-worthy challenge that its predecessor lacked. The second is Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time, its arcade incarnation a generally fine but rough around the edges brawler that's also probably a little too difficult, in which when you reach the end of the stage 3 sewer level and inexplicably Shredder's giant floating head hologram hovers above you to send you back in time with little lead up, you get the impression that the developers hadn't left this one in the oven for as long as they had wanted. Like Gradius III its Super Famicom version shuffles around levels and adds new ones while cleaning up stray mechanical deficiencies, resulting in a balanced and substantial yet briskly paced game with lots of variety in its stages and appealingly bright cartoony visuals. In brief: It's a classic. Most attempts to follow up on this game came years later in the form of uninspired cash-grabs that combine the worst qualities of the licensed games of old and nostalgia-bait. Few games in general rival the pure fun of just blasting through it, and, well, blast through it you can. For though Turtles in Time may be loads of fun, it is definitely not complex and doesn't demand much in the way of strategy in either its arcade or console incarnation. In the arcade game the dominant strategy is to spam your super move through its dense crowds of enemies, whereas in the Super Famicom game you'll be most utilizing the all-powerful (and over-powerful) slam throw, in which you pick up a Foot soldier and slam his body back and forth causing usually instantly fatal collateral damage to whatever is in its path. I'm not saying these are the only things you do in these games, as there are enemies to whom these techniques aren't applicable and of course there's a boss in every stage that needs its own strategy, but these moves do probably make up about 80% of what you do.
In Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge, the slam throw has been nerfed. Collateral damage no longer instantly kills enemies, which is a welcome change, and is a small indication of the refinement this game brings to Turtles in Time's moveset. The rising jump attack has been beefed up and is now less confusingly implemented as a simultaneous press of jump+attack. Running is still a double-tap of a direction but is far more reliable and consistent and your character will now stop after you release your hold of that direction. Backflipping has been expanded into its own class of moves and assigned to its own button, and most significantly, gives i-frames, which changes the game completely from being about careful spacing and going in for the almighty slam throw into a raucous close-quarters brawl punctuated with precision dodges. Your super move is now also an entire class of moves, dictated by a meter that's built over time by attacking enemies without taking damage, or instantly filled by using the new Taunt move, which can be risky to do in the midst of battle because the animation is quite long and you can't cancel it. Finally, Shredder's Revenge is all about combos, as enemies most of the time will stick to you as you're doing your basic P-P-P-P combo, which can be preceded by something like a slide attack and/or succeeded by a rising jump attack then dive kick. It's all really fluid and most of the time feels great.
There are a few oddities to be found, however, in that sometimes comboing a dodge into an attack will teleport your character vertically to the closest enemy, though not consistently; more irritating is that sometimes, especially on autoscrolling stages, my dodge move would go in the opposite direction of what I was holding. Maybe that's just a Skill Issue on my part but it seemed to happen a lot there. Throwing enemies has been made much simpler than its inspiration by including a grab move, after which you can press one of four directions plus attack to execute a given throw, which is a great improvement, though what caused me a not insignificant amount of annoyance is that holding a diagonal and pressing attack while in a grab does nothing at all. You have to be holding straight up, down, etc. In my mind, a diagonal should do something not necessarily new, but something, and ideally consistently. I praised the slam throw becoming more of a normal move in this game but it was probably nerfed a little too hard, in that the enemy being thrown doesn't always die instantly, which removes a lot of its usefulness. The game lets you combo already defeated enemies in order to build super and add to your hit count, which can be good fun, but defeated enemies can sometimes get in the way during more crowded fights. Speaking of which, the hit count chain mechanic seems superfluous in that it's just a stat that sits alongside your score without affecting it, increasing for every hit you score on an enemy without taking damage or letting its timer expire, which feels like a wasted opportunity. These few quibbles aside, the system is all there. The flow of using a charged super, getting it back by comboing enemies without getting hit yourself and then using it again is exquisite. The combat mechanics overall are a substantial improvement over either iteration of Turtles in Time.
It's clear that a lot of time was spent making the game feel good, and the amount of effort put into its aesthetics doesn't differ. In contrast to the dreck that Turtles games became after Konami's first handful of titles, Shredder's Revenge is very obviously downright worshipful of its source material. Not an ounce of cynicism is found in its kickass fully animated intro cutscene, its well drawn and fluidly animated sprites, its detailed backgrounds, or its music, the last of which is courtesy of Tee Lopes doing his Tee Lopes thing by way of a pretty convincing early 90's Konami impression, sprinkled in with a few vocal tracks that sound splendidly of the time the game generally evokes. Most of the principal voice cast from the original run of the cartoon returns as well to deliver occasional quips throughout. Every stage, and there are a lot of them, is thematically unique and most of them introduce new enemies along with a unique boss that will generally be fun and interesting to fight. Enemy layouts are usually well crafted and conducive to the compulsive grouping, comboing and supering that makes this game so addictive, though there are a few environmental obstacles I would rather have not been there, but maybe that's just a me thing. The game is dripping with charm and humor, and aside from some somewhat derpy looking close-up portraits, the art and animation is all very lovingly crafted and bright and fun, however it's all done in a jagged "pixel art" style, which is one I've come to kind of loathe over the years.
Here's the thing: Pixel art, in the context of games before modern retro titles, is just art. The pixels were displayed on a CRT screen that had no concept of pixels, that used a beam of light rapidly firing at a shadow mask against the wide end of a tube of glass, and the art's composition in pixels beforehand is a byproduct of how the source hardware worked. The pixels being sent to the television were displayed via electron beam-created scanlines that blurred and enlarged them according to the brightness level of each element of the source signal, e.g. single pixel stars against a black background are going to appear on such a screen larger (and brighter) than the size of one internal pixel. Furthermore, the gaps between scanlines (commonly erroneously themselves called scanlines) that would appear on these low resolution progressive signals provide a unique antialiasing effect, effectively smoothing out jagged edges. The video game artists of old would create their work on paper to be put into the game by the programmers, and the final product would be shown on a CRT screen; one initially wants to say "they made art expecting this kind of a display" but that's not even quite right. That's simply all there was. They didn't consider that there was any other possible kind of display (rear projection TVs that look terrible no matter what you're viewing on it notwithstanding), and now an entire art style has sprung up from playing these games on flat panel displays that, quite simply, display them incorrectly, either through hooking up the original systems directly to them, playing them on a rerelease by a clueless publisher (i.e. most publishers), or by emulating them without a proper filter. It irks me perhaps to an unreasonable degree. Obviously CRT monitors are dead and aren't coming back, which is a good thing because they're massive and impractical, but old games shouldn't be done a disservice by barfing out the raw output of the console or emulator playing them without modification; a good CRT simulating shader that uses bloom and scanline gaps at a 4:3 or 3:4 aspect ratio (depending on the game's screen orientation) is ideal, but even just clean scaling with a bilinear filter is at least better than nothing at all. As for the development of new games, well, just make good looking art for the target display! That's what the old artists were doing! Anyway that's my pixel art rant. Regardless of all this I generally enjoy the art in Shredder's Revenge and think it's very well done, but I think it would've been even better if it hadn't been directed by a mistaken conception of how old games looked back in their day.
So when I first picked the game up I went hard on arcade mode for days before trying the story mode. In retrospect, this was somewhat of a mistake, as the length of the game makes the most sense in the context of the latter and I feel like I would have gotten a better first impression with it. In terms of arcade mode, which follows the structure of the console Turtles in Time in that you get three lives to start and a 1up every 200 points, the game is very long. The pacing is a bit sluggish in that each stage is at least three and a half minutes long and can be as long as ten minutes, with the average falling at around 5 and a half minutes, while its immaculately paced inspiration about halves each of those values with fewer stages, so here we're left with a total experience of at least 90 minutes in length. The story mode is probably the best way to first experience the game as you don't have to do it all in one sitting and you get a cool looking world map which suffices as the closest thing to a stage select practice mode. Is there necessarily something wrong, though, with an arcade game being this length? What's my beef with this when I once voluntarily sat down to play a credit of Tatsujin for over three and a half hours to get 10,000,000 points, a game I can't even pause? Well for one, Tatsujin is an STG and I used autofire, whereas this game is a beat 'em up where you're constantly mashing, and no, autofire does not help here, I tried. By the time I make it to the last few stages I'm kind of exhausted. But more importantly, Tatsujin is effectively over after the 30 minute first loop, you can just stop playing after that if you want and you've really seen everything you're going to see; you've beaten it. In Shredder's Revenge you've gotten a full length's worth of arcade game in half the amount of stages but the game isn't over yet, and I'm not gonna quit halfway through. When I start a new game in arcade mode I'm locked in for 90 minutes minimum, which for a single round arcade campaign is a big ask. The game has a lot of stages but I'm not asking that any of them be cut, for as mentioned each one is thematically interesting and distinct and has unique enemies as well as a unique boss, so there's no sense in losing that. With this length the developers tried to hit a sweet spot between story game and arcade game, when the latter would have been better suited by abbreviated stages, perhaps with beefier individual encounters. The story mode provides lots of achievement-style counters to fill over several playthroughs with each character, if you're into that sort of thing, but for the hardcore obviously the arcade mode is the real mode. Copying the general pacing of the console Turtles in Time while keeping the same number of stages would leave us with roughly a nice round one hour, which by arcade standards is still pretty long but easily digestable, and stands better against the repeated play that mastery demands.
As far as difficulty goes, the default Okay difficulty in arcade mode can be 1CC'd in a few tries, which more or less matches up with the general difficulty level of the console beat 'em ups of old. An observation made by sidescrolling action fanatic BIL somewhere over at the shmups forum, that the arcade challenge of console arcade-likes consists more in the one life clear than the one credit clear, holds true for this game as well. For an average player a one life clear in the default difficulty is probably around a 5-10 hour endeavor; you have a lot of health and there are at least two full health-restoring pizzas in each stage, usually more. All in all it's more than fair and a fun time, excessive length aside. However the game gets real in Gnarly mode, where the damage to the player is doubled, the enemies are quicker to attack, and the damage done against bosses is roughly halved. The last part kept me from going for the 1CC at this difficulty in the week I was playing it as the bosses get kind of tedious when it takes twice as long to take them down, but the fact that the 1CC here is harder than the one-life clear in the default Okay difficulty is notable and worthy of praise. I just wasn't hardcore enough to take it on, heh. Maybe some other time.
I want to point out here that Shredder's Revenge is a very good game. The negative aspects of length, pacing and graphical style stick out only because everything else is so smooth and refined, and made by people who obviously loved and played the hell out of the old Konami Turtles games. It's a pretty unique product in that it's a game based on a fairly big property put together by genuine wholehearted fans of it. They knew, at least for the most part, what made those older games great and not only faithfully replicated most of those aspects here, but improved upon them in very smart ways. On a moment to moment basis, Shredder's Revenge is indeed more fun to play than even Turtles in Time; it's only in the zoomed out perspective of an entire playthrough that we can see that perhaps the point was very slightly missed. I can't even come down too hard on this game in particular for the length as the beat 'em up genre as a whole has been plagued with developers not knowing when enough is enough since its inception. That a game of this quality based on this property has arrived to us through official channels is honestly pretty cool, and is emblematic of a general upswing in the past few years of the respect paid to old games in new ones, with titles like Steel Assault, The Ninja Warriors Once Again and Kiki Kaikai: Kuro Manto no Nazo among others leaving us spoiled for choice these days. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge sits alongside these games as an example of what can still be done in the old styles of game design when genuine love is put into it.
Final rating: 4/5 (Good)