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Playing through Konami's 1989 "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" arcade game as Michaelangelo on the default difficulty! I extracted this arcade ROM from the Steam version of "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Cowabunga Collection," and am running it from the command line of the current version of the emulator MAME, version 0.267.
I seem to be liking this game more as time goes on, which I did not really expect. The bosses, especially later, are the usual Konami will-just-hit-you variety, which isn't all that fun really, but the rest of the game is so well done that that's mostly bearable.
I think I got stabbed about twice by every spear. = oooPP Really sucked against the helicopter carpet bombing. 8_8 Dunno if I noticed that white number above your health meter before, showing how many enemy KOs you have--ended w/ 349 (did time out vs Baxter Stockman though ;_;;).
April frees herself from the ropes after you beat Bebop and Rocksteady. ; )
Forgot at first Shredder's devolvo-ray is an insta-kill. ; D
How is Leonardo a year older (16) than the other turtles? : PP (Eh later in the TV show they were just four unrelated turtles--even diff species--grabbed from a lab: https://turtlepedia.fandom.com/wiki/Rise_of_the_Teenage_Mutant_Ninja_Turtles_(TV_series . A bit diff than the original 1984 comic, where, on a city street, a canister of radioactive ooze smashed a fishbowl containing 4 "infant" turtles, held by a small boy. HM but it does take turtles 5-8 years to grow to adulthood, so POSSIBLY they weren't quite the same age as "infants," even though they were drawn as the same tiny size--still feels like a stretch to put Leonardo a year older. : P)
(Oh say, Turtles co-creator Peter Laird is 8 years older than co-creator Kevin Eastman.)
OH MAN I forgot (I looked this up back when the Cowabunga Collection first came out on PS4 : P) this came out not just in the same year as Final Fight, but BEFORE: Oct 11 1989, vs FF's Nov 25 1989, says Wikipedia. Easy (for addled me) to forget as TMNT feels more advanced--not better, necessarily, just further along a general game development continuum--in terms of presentation and gameplay.
I extracted the ROMs from the Steam TMNT Cowabunga collection with a program from https://github.com/Masquerade64/Cowabunga , and converted them to MAME format with this script: https://github.com/farmerbb/RED-Project/blob/master/ROM%20Extraction/tmnt-cc-arcade-extract.sh (put in extracted roms/Konami dir and run in WSL w/ "./[script name]").
A bit of a pain to get the turtle you may want to use in MAME as you have to set your controls to a specific MAME player controls 1-4: P1 = Leonardo, P2 = Michelangelo, P3 = Donatello, P4 = Raphael. And while the game says to press "START" after pressing the coin button bound to whichever player's controls, the MAME button you actually press is that player's "Button 1," the TMNT jump button--so I bound their MAME Start button to that button as well. : P
Michelangelo's name was spelled "Michaelangelo" when the the game came out, as that's how it was spelled in the original comics; it started to change in various Turtles products in the late '90s and early 2000s, says Wikipedia.
The term "cowabunga" was invented by writer Eddie Kean for the children's TV show "Howdy Doody" in 1954, as an exclamation for a stereotyped Native American character. It was subsequently used by surfers, appeared in surfer movies, and was even used by Snoopy while he surfed in a 1965 Peanuts cartoon panel. It became a catchphrase of Cookie Monster on the Sesame Street TV show in the '70s and '80s. TMNT Michelangelo used it as a catchphrase in the 1987 TV show, where he was given a "surfer" personality. Bart Simpson first used it as a skateboarding catchphrase in a 1990 episode of The Simpsons TV show--a year after the TMNT game. (Sources: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FD5xsTRWBZE , https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Etymology/cowabunga , https://www.oed.com/dictionary/cowabunga_int?tl=true .)
Started to think maybe I'd play through the NES version but eh the movement speed there is a lot slower. = P |
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| | | daphaknee mentions https://selectbutton.net/t/games-you-played-today-chronicles-x-ten-things-i-played-about-you/14969/495 that in the NES version, the two-button attack stuns bosses; she also recommends jump-kicking bosses in that version.
I did try both those things in the arcade version on the later bosses, starting w/ bird-head flamethrower boss w/ Splinter)--but my playback doesn't seem to show the two-button attack stunning him at all, and at least some of the bosses (might've been Shredder?) swatted my jump-kick attempts out of the air easily, so I'd given up on that.
She mentions that, again for the NES version, the two-button attack is done not by hitting the buttons at exactly the same time, but one right after the other. If that's also the case in the arcade version, it might explain why I was having trouble with the button timing. I'll hafta experiment with that; I've got my buttons set up pretty much NES-style on the DualSense pad as it is, so the ol' NES thumb-roll approach she uses should work there, if the mechanics are similar between versions. |
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| | | Tipped off by Loki https://selectbutton.net/t/games-you-played-today-chronicles-x-ten-things-i-played-about-you/14969/500 , I found that the JP version of TMNT is a later revision: TCRF says it fixed a scoring exploit in the other versions, where you could destroy infinitely recurring projectiles for points https://tcrf.net/Teenage_Mutant_Ninja_Turtles_(Arcade)#Regional_Differences .
A "tmntj.zip" extracts from The Cowabunga Collection. It's only a fraction of the size of tmnt.zip (172 KB vs 1.36 MB)--so I guess it probably just modifies that one?
isfet mentioned https://selectbutton.net/t/games-you-played-today-chronicles-x-ten-things-i-played-about-you/14969/491 a two-player JP version where you can pick your turtle freely, which would make for easier MAME set-up--but the CC JP version is a 4-player version, with Japanese characters where "TURTLES" would be on the title screen--and a date there of 1990 instead of 1989. (MAME refers to it as "Japan 4 players, version 2.") |
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| | | | Since the JP version--see entry 1911--is a later revision, and still has the story text in English, I'm switching over to that one. : ) |
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