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Episode 18:

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

00:00 / 01:04

In the late 80's and early 90's, there might not have been a bigger franchise on the planet than the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. We all loved them. A lot of people from my generation (myself included), still love them. They had movies, cartoons, action figures, comic books. Video games were inevitable.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles for the NES. Some would call it the most "beloved bad game" of all time. I don't think I'd call it bad. It certainly can't hold a torch to it's sequel, which was a port of the amazing Ninja Turtles arcade game, but it's still a fine game in it's own right. It's inventive. Outside of the Tournament Fighter games, it's really the only TMNT video game that isn't just a side scrolling beat 'em up. (At least for the first 15 years of Turtles games).

Oh, and it's hard. Really hard. Like, if you're reading this, you probably never finished it hard.

Oh, you did finish it? What Game Genie code did you use? Exactly. Shut up.

This game was merciless. And it was marketed toward children. This was pretty common place with the NES, a ton of those games are borderline unbeatable with their insane levels of difficulty. But I don't remember wanting to play one of those games as bad as this one. This was the freaking Ninja Turtles. You could have designed the game to automatically kill you after 5 minutes and I would have wanted it.

My buddy and fellow comic David Rae is my guest this week, and we had a lot of fun looking back at this game. From fighting guys made out of fire, to falling into sewer water (and not being able to swim despite being Turtles ??), to the F*CKING seaweed level; it's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles for the NES. And it's awesome.

(If anything, this game deserves an episode of this podcast for one reason; it proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that Donatello is the best Ninja Turtle).

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