Many of you already know I’m a fan of the Ninja Turtles. When I was young, I
loved the original cartoon, the original film is in my opinion one of the best
comic book movies ever made. In speaking of the comic books, the original
Mirage comics were excellent too. When you have a franchise that big that’s
been around that long, it’s no surprise that there’s going to be a few video games.
In the case of the Ninja Turtles, there’s been over 20 games, not counting stand-
alone hand-held games, mobile games, ports of older games and remakes. I’ve
talked about a few of the others in the past. But this time around I’d like to talk
about TMNT 3: The Manhattan Project.
Manhattan project is of course the third Ninja Turtle game released on the NES,
coming out in February of 1992 in the US. It is a sequel of sorts to the original
arcade game, or at least the NES port of it. It opens up with the Turtles on
vacation in Florida, perhaps visiting their buddies the punk frogs, they tune in
to watch April O’Neil’s latest news report only to see it interrupted by their
nemesis Shredder who has taken their reporter friend hostage, and turned the
city of Manhattan into a floating island. Shredder challenges the turtles to
come and stop them. Never the types to back down, the four jump into action
and raise some shell, battling their way back to Manhattan.
The game plays much like its predecessor, typical of a late 80’s/early 90’s arcade
style beat ‘em up with a simple layout with jump and attack buttons. Pressing
the two at the same time will do what is called here as a turbo attack, a very
powerful attack, unique to each turtle which drains a little health when used.
This game was the first to make the special attacks unique to each turtle. You
start off your game by choosing which turtle to play as, and you get 3 lives and 3
continues. When you lose a life, you get the option of selecting another turtle
and carrying on. Continuing starts you at the beginning of a stage, which is
kind of lame, but console games do that sometimes.
Visually, the graphics are good, slightly better than the NES version of the
arcade game, with some new enemies and animations, but with a bit more
sprite flickering, which can get somewhat distracting at times. The bosses in
this game include the usual suspects of Bebop, Rocksteady and Leatherhead,
Slash, Toka and Rahzar which appear in other games, and also Groundchuck
and Dirtbag, which I don’t think appear in any of the other games. Heck, I don’t
even remember seeing Groundchuck in the cartoon. While on the subject of the
enemies, it’s kind of funny that they show a Triceraton on the box art, but there
isn’t any of those in the game. They were featured prominently in the Fugitoid
story from the comics. Anyway, as the levels progress, you start out on the beach
and are basically fighting your way back to Manhattan, including a level where you
are on a Foot submarine. Don’t remember those from the cartoon either. All the
levels have unique art design and are all pretty fun to look at. The sound is
decent, not too different from its predecessor, but aside from the theme song in
the intro, the music is all pretty generic.
Like with a few other Konami TMNT games, there is a modified version of the
classic Konami code you can enter which leads to an option screen. I believe
this feature was actually not hidden in the Japanese version of the game. In
these options you can increase the number of lives you start with and adjust the
difficulty. This easy mode reduces the amount of hits it takes to beat enemies,
making the levels stupid easy to get through.
Overall, while I do think this is a very good game, I think I enjoy Turtles II: The
Arcade Game quite a bit more. This one isn’t quite as common as Turtles II, so
it’ll cost you around $30 for a loose cartridge. If you’ve never played it, it’s at
least worth a look, especially to a Ninja Turtles fan.
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