Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Fall of the Foot Clan

The Good
Very very rarely, the game manages to really amaze. Some of the background graphics are pretty good, in fact (for example, the first level sewers look pretty amazing). Cut scene graphics are, with a few nitpicks, pretty decently made.

The game is actually fun if you have nothing better to do. It's a great game if your thinking abilities are temporarily withdrawn for a short period of time. I bet the next craze is to find out who can finish the game at 4 o'clock in the morning, or severely drunk at any other time of the day.

Oh, and the whole game appears to be green by default when played in Game Boy Advance. Just like on the original GameBoy. Pretty neat. Probably a coincidence or something.

The Bad
The game feels like it was produced with great rush, and reeks of derivativeness. It can't even be properly analyzed in "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Game" context, but only in larger "Platform Game" context, if you catch what I mean. In other words, it doesn't feel like a Turtles game, it's just a platform game with Turtles characters in it.

The game sprites are pretty bad. I can easily recognize the characters and most of the enemies, but, uh... the walk animations look silly, the weaponry of the Turtles aren't exactly epic, and the Foot Clan warriors are oddly animated. Most of the sprites flicker a lot, suggesting that coders didn't have time to do the graphics routines properly.

Some of the enemies are odd, shall we say "non-canonical" in TMNT sense, and didn't exactly seem fun at the time (In retrospect - did they take the bats from Castlevania or what???)

The enemies are pretty stupid. The enemy AI can't be talked about in the same sentence with the term "artificial intelligence" in fears of tarnishing the term (apologies for doing so just now). I remember I was thinking, "why are these Foot Clan guys always slowly jumping at me, with no weapons, even?" Foot Clan was turned into a freaking Army of Kamikaze Androids!

Gameplay boils down to memorizing attack patterns and thinking of ways to outwit the enemies. There's no randomness in the game, all enemies are hanging out at the same places every time.

Levels are pretty dull. While level background graphics are good, the levels themselves are not particularly remarkable for any reason whatsoever. They follow the platform game cliché of "several levels with different themes", and the plot tying these various levels together isn't exactly strong. (speaking of which, where is the plot?)

And the video game "Engrish" is just about everywhere. Need I say more?

The Bottom Line
First, a question: Why on Earth I always ended up owning the shoddiest versions of the TMNT games? (GameBoy and Commodore 64, specifically.)

Here we have what was supposed to be the TMNT fan's next big thing to buy: The First GameBoy Turtles Game. Follow the action-packed tale of the Turtles as they rescue April O'Neal from the clutches of Shredder and Krang, through five levels, with a lot of cool Turtle graphics strewn between the levels.

The game was surprisingly challenging when I was a teenager. But does it tell you something that when I yesterday, not having touched TMNT:FotFC for over 10 years or something, could finish the game without any need to think about it, not dying a single time? Either in the past years I have finally learned how to play platform games, or maybe the game just burned into my mind. Or maybe the game was just easy to begin with.

Overall, the game now has this kind of feel: Konami got the game license, took Generic Platform Game Engine Mark One source code from the vault, produced some graphics, did some music, and slapped them together. If you changed the graphics, this would be just yet another platform game.

Along with Commodore 64 version of TMNT, the game left a bad taste in mouth, truth to tell. Back then, the game just didn't feel cool, like the animated series or something. Nowadays, the games felt shoddy and quickly coded, in hopes of grabbing the money off the gullible teenagers, which I admittedly was at the time.

It's a ninja game with no trace of the real ultimate power.

TMNT2: Back from the Sewers was a far better game than TMNT: Fall of the Foot Clan, though, even when that wasn't without its small flaws, but at least it still seems somewhat fun. =)

The Good
Konami was one of the few companies that could make a decent game out of any major license. Naturally, back in the early 1990s, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were the great Behemoth of cartoon licenses (and I'll admit that yes, I was nuts about the series when I was a kid), with action figures, T-shirts, comic books, a TV series, and of course, video games. (I suppose I could go on about TMNT underwear and the like, but let's not.) So how does Konami's first Gameboy game featuring those four green dudes stack up? Let's find out.

The premise of this game is pretty much like any other TMNT game: April's been kidnapped, Shredder did it, go kick his butt, blah blah blah...I think Shredder's just looking for an excuse to get his butt kicked, that or he really doesn't have much better to do. So you choose your favorite turtle at the beginning of each stage, go and smack around a few Foot Soldiers, then fight a boss at the end of each stage. The bosses are the standard major enemies of the series: the mutant rhino soldier Rocksteady, warthog punk Bebop, the half-human half-fly Baxter Stockman, and of course Shredder and evil brain creature Krang and his android exoskeleton. The gameplay is standard beat-em-up fare, but everything dies in one hit. Once in a while, the action breaks for a little mini-game, where you can try to regain lost health. Speaking of health, each turtle can take 8 hits, but each one also counts as a "life", meaning when one turtle is defeated, you lose him for the rest of the game.

The graphics in this game look pretty good, with decently sized characters and detail. The game also doesn't move too quickly, which is a good thing, as the first generation Gameboys (this game came out soon after the Gameboy was introduced) had a nasty problem with screen blur sometimes, especially in side-scrolling action games. The sounds were pretty good, although some of them were rather high pitched and whiny sounding. Music is a mixed bag: my favorite tunes were Stage 2's music and Stage 3's music. There's the standard rendition of the TV show's theme song in the intro, of course, and reprises of it in some cutscenes. The rest are "take it or leave it" pieces of music.

The Bad
It's short...WAY too short. I can beat this game in a half hour. Also, animation of the enemies feels a bit limited, but then again this IS a first-generation Gameboy title we're talking about...

The Bottom Line
For a first-gen Gameboy game, it's a pretty good effort. Although really short, it's good to waste a half-hour with. Go for it if you're still into TMNT games, collecting them, or just want a quick Gameboy game for lunch breaks or whatever.