Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge Is a Way of Life

The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are back. And the news, whether good or bad, is: they are still teenage. Everyone knows that turtles boast embarrassingly long life spans, owing to their hare-whoopingly slow metabolisms; and the gang, after first emerging in the nineteen-eighties, appear to be seized in the same spirited adolescence that gripped them then. Imagine grinding through the rise of Reagan, the Iran-Contra affair, the Exxon Valdez oil spill, and the disasters of Chernobyl and Challenger and still preserving an untouched passion for skateboards. I, for one, admired PlatinumGames when it released Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutants in Manhattan, in 2016, for what I presumed was an attempt to show these reptiles in the rust of middle age. As it turned out, it was merely that the art style favoured a rough-sketched look, which gave our heroes a gristly exterior. They resembled the nuggets of grey that drift in bowls of turtle soup.

Anyway, they are back, and we find them, in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge, rendered in a reassuring shade of green. The new adventure, from developer Tribute Games, is a thing of the past. Its vision of New York is pixelated and cartoon bright, the stoops of its brownstones enlivened, rather than soiled, by graffiti. What is more, the voice actors from the 1987 TV series reprise their roles; as Leonardo, Donatello, Michaelangelo, and Raphael, we have Cam Clarke, Barry Gordon, Townsend Coleman and Rob Paulsen. Not that there is much time for talk. Shredder’s Revenge is an exercise in civic duty, meted out not by mayors and other elected officials but by nunchucks, swords, daggers, and a wooden staff, wielded with twirling fury.

These days, the side-scrolling beat-’em-up has become a turtle of a genre: superannuated, steady, and permanently threatening to become a shell of its former self. I dutifully marvelled at Street of Rage 4, whose attitude to the past was one of fierce reverence and careful renovation. That game was made by a triumvirate of studios: Dotemu, Guard Crush Games, and Lizardcube. The latter was responsible for its lavish hand-drawn art, rich in fructose colour, which both sharpened and sweetened the blur of time. Here, Tribute Games, true to its name, has gone for a 16-bit style; the art director, Adam J. Marin, is paying homage to Konami, which, in exchange for a slushy draught of silver coins, supplied us with a celebrated line of arcade games in the early nineties. (Many of which will be anthologised in The Cowabunga Collection, a scholarly volume due out later this year.) Most celebrated among them was Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time, in 1991, and its title serves as a mission statement here—to present these creatures in their natural chronological habitat.

Hence the overworld map, from where you select your desired stage, trundling to and fro in the turtles’ shell-topped van. It’s reminiscent of the map in Super Mario World, from 1990, over which Mario (who knew a thing or two about cracking the backs of bothersome lizards) gambolled atop a green vehicle of his own. And hence, as you hurl your enemies toward the screen, and they stretch to jumbo size with the illusion of depth, the moment of SNES-induced bliss as you unlock a Trophy entitled “Mode 7.” There was a day when overworld maps, with their impression of crafted cohesion; and the warping of flat textures, the better that they bulge into a queasy third dimension, were, in the truest sense, radical.

Rather more conservative, it must be said, is the combat. You will find, in Shredder’s Revenge, the usual genre appurtenances: the combo counter, the vaulting kicks, the charge-up super-attacks. There isn’t the challenge and complexity that await you in Streets of Rage 4; but, by way of compensation, we get a raft of charming flourishes. Your foes—a bunch of purple-clad blunderers, known as the Foot Clan—aren’t much of a match, so Tribute has them licking ice lollies and tapping away on Game Boys. Talk about idle animation. Elsewhere, the background details are eager to join the fray. The opening level—“JAW-BREAKING NEWS!”—unreels along the set of a morning show, and has you striking camera rigs so that they dolly into droves of oncoming thugs.

Such diversions will be enough, I suspect, for those weaned on the original comics, and the craze that they kicked up. Likewise, they will thrill to the ranks of villains that are trotted out. We have Bebop, a mutant cross between man and boar, who shows up for a screen-hogging boss fight, and begs to be taken to tusk. Rocksteady: the same deal, really, except he is part-rhino. My personal favourite is Wingnut, who, given that he is described as “PLANET FLAGENON’S FLAPPIEST FIGHTER!,” I take to be an extra-terrestrial bat, and whom we fight in the heavens above Manhattan, amid banks of paper-white cloud. And, of course, there is Shredder himself, villain among villains, whose spiked vambraces would make short work of a block of cheddar.

But what of that craze now? To anyone who may shrug at the globe-conquering will of Turtle Power, or who wasn’t the right age to get (or fall for) it, I would direct you to Grand Theft Auto III—another New York game, under darker skies—specifically to Chatterbox FM, a radio station on whose tolerant air many an important issue is thrashed out. One exchange, between the station’s host, Lazlow, and his guest Reed Tucker, goes as follows: “I think we all went through a ninja period, you know, I had the Chinese stars and the nunchucks—” “This is not a period, Lazlow! This is a way of life.” Such are the demographics that Dotemu, the publisher of Shredder’s Revenge, is dealing with. There are those who remember fondly the era, and the antics, of this sewer-dwelling quartet. And there are those for whom the era lives on. Both groups will be deeply gratified by the effort of Tribute Games, which proposes, above all, that just because the world groans on one needn’t lose one’s greenness. For those of us not quite convinced, we will have to wait for some other studio to drop these party-happy sluggers into the soup of a late-life crisis. Cowabunga.