Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge is tight. Both “tight” in the way Michelangelo would describe a new skateboard and “tight” in the way Leonardo leaves little room for anything other than his focus.

It’s Tight 🤙

It’s awesome! Righteous! Bossa nova… er… Chevy Nova? Excellent! In the words of the ’90s youth, it’s tight!

Many reviews have already pointed out how awesome Shredder’s Revenge is. It absolutely rules. It’s a must-play arcade throwback. It’s way more than retro-cool. It’s the best nostalgia trip you’ll ever have. It’s heckin’ dope.

The game overwhelming succeeds at recreating the ’80s/’90s TMNT arcade beat-em-up experiences. If you spent any time with the original TMNT arcade game (arcade/NES), Turtles in Time (arcade/SNES) or Hyperstone Heist (Sega Genesis), you’ll find the familiar variety of foot soldiers, patterns of obstacles to dodge while riding cheapskates and hoverboards, mutant (and robot) baddies from across the franchise, pizza boxes, and quotes likes, “Turtle Power!” and, “Ugh… shellshocked”.

In addition to the familiar, the level designs feature lovingly handcrafted pixel art by Juanito Medina that feels like it was ripped right out of the cartoon — colors pop, tiny details strewn about — with those aforementioned foot soldiers taking part in the scenes as office workers or checkout clerks. You’ll uncover cameos from the first two seasons of the original 1987 cartoon. The turtles themselves — voiced by the actors from the original cartoon series — feature their own unique stats and animations. And not only can you play as the four titular heroes, but you can also play as Splinter, April O’Neil, and Casey Jones. There are even clever nods to the legacy of TMNT video games: The overworld map resembles the overworld map from the original NES game, and — follow me here — a video game-based villain from the original cartoon summons other villains from an old TMNT video game who originally appeared in one of the films. (Spoiler: Tokka and Rahzar from the TMNT 2: The Secret of the Ooze film are villains in the arcarde/SNES game Turtles in Time. In Shredder’s Revenge, Tempestra — a villain who escapes a video game in the original cartoon — can summon the arcade versions of Tokka and Rahzar, seemingly from an in-game version of Turtles in Time. Radical!) It even plays homage to other classic fighting games:

https://twitter.com/ryugainai/status/1538086616258035713?s=21&t=3WJIA2YSi2IyfkB2Vk-7_A

https://twitter.com/ryugainai/status/1538311850630098944?s=21&t=3WJIA2YSi2IyfkB2Vk-7_A

Of course, just like a classic beat-em-up, Shredder’s Revenge is designed for co-op play. Unlike the TMNT beat-em-ups of yore, Shredder’s Revenge allows up to 6-player co-op. As of this review, I’ve only gone as far as to play 4-player co-op which was utter chaos (in the best possible sense). I cannot imagine what mayhem 6-player co-op brings.

https://twitter.com/genepark/status/1538281074865807360?s=21&t=3WJIA2YSi2IyfkB2Vk-7_A

Perhaps the best part of the Shredder’s Revenge experience is the ability to jump in to a random party’s game. During stage select, you can pull up a menu of other parties currently playing that level, which characters they’re playing as, and how far along they are in the level. At the press of a button, you can jump right into their game and fight alongside their party. The experience mimics the feeling of seeing an empty seat at an original 4-player TMNT arcade cabinet, dropping in a quarter, and joining the other three strangers players in their quest to best the Technodrome.

Some of the voice acting feels like a miss, and the final bosses aren’t particularly challengeing. But overall, the game rips!

It’s Tight 🪢

TMNT: Shredder’s Revenge is billed as a throwback/sequel to the original TMNT beat-em-up games. And that’s exactly what it is. Full stop. Even with all that’s new, the game is extremely focused. While it’s jam-packed full of character(s), there isn’t an ounce of fat on the game. It sets out to recreate the experience shared by many a ’90s mall rat and sticks the landing. 10/10. A perfect video game ass video game. Playing it at age 36 sent me back to playing Hyperstone Heist on my family’s 13-channel TV on loop. Scrolling through Twitter, I’ve come across well over a dozen tweets about parents playing through with their children, sharing an arcade experience from a bygone era.

A Little Too Tight?

Immediately after my first playthrough (as Donatello, of course), I was left wanting, and I felt extremely conflicted by this. I’d gotten what I wanted of the game, but I didn’t feel wholly satisfied. I didn’t want my time as Donatello to be over. It felt like the game was missing something. Side quests. Time trials. More Easter eggs to uncover. But that’s not the point of this game.

It’s probably not a shock to anyone reading this that video games are packed with optional tasks and mini-games. I’d be quick to point to the recently released Kirby and the Forgotten Land as an example of a game that tactfully blends the critical path with side-missions/time-trials, town restoration, power ups, and collectables, but this isn’t a new concept. Super Mario Bros. 3 was full of little mini-games, alternative paths, and secrets. Perhaps it’s the overworld map in Shredder’s Revenge that led my imagination to wonder if there was more to this game than its 16 levels. The routes off of the critical path tease, only leading to fetch-quest status screens from the extra characters discovered during the game’s story. There’s a list of achievements to complete, but I had tackled 70% of those after my first story run and one online level. Essentially, once you’ve completed the story, all that’s left to do is to play the game again.

It’s completely unfair to ask of more from this masterpiece, but nonetheless, here I am wanting. This feeling must be akin to seeing Star Wars (A New Hope) in theaters in 1977. Audiences had just experienced something special, but what next? Surely there’s more magic in that galaxy, but the the only way to feel it was to watch the film again.

Turtle Power

Amongst friends and family, I’m considered “The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Guy”. Whenever someone is watching one of the movies, stumbles upon an old toy, or catches the annual float during the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, I’m notified… and I love it! I own the original set of action figures in their boxes, have the entire 1987 cartoon series, rewatch the original movie annually, own movie and video game soundtracks on vinyl, and used to run a TMNT blog.

But truthfully, my fandom only runs as deep as the ink of my (bad) TMNT tattoo. I hadn’t rewatched any of the original cartoons since elementary school, rarely if ever dabbled in any new video game releases, and ceased following the franchise once I started investing more time in Zero Counts (and, you know, my career). Yet, I still appreciate every text message and memento sent my way. And I actually do see the turtles as a part of my identity; personas I often reflect upon. But I’d begun to feel detached from the franchise. A lapsed “fan for life”.

When Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge was announced, I felt an excitement for the franchise I hadn’t felt in a decade. The game looked like everything I’d remembered of those classic games with additional fidelity that brought the art direction to closer parody with the original cartoon. When I learned that the original voice cast of the turtles would be reprising their roles and Splinter, April O’Neil, and Casey Jones would be playable characters, my excitement went through the roof. The mention that there would be plenty of nods to the franchise and Easter eggs from the original cartoon prompted me to begin rewatching the show while feeding my newborn daughter during the middle-of-the-night. (We’re through the first two seasons and it holds up!) All this is to say that this game has rekindled my affection for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Not only is it true to the arcade games my nostalgia so deperately yearns to relive, but I can feel the care, craft, and love that went into the game. All at once, I felt like I was back in the arcade, watching Saturday morning cartoons, and having an overnight pizza party with my best friends. It’s one of the most wonderful nostalgia trips I’ve experienced and it only makes me want more.

Tight 🤙

Reggie Fils-Aimé discussing the Wii U’s struggle to perform in his new memior “Disrupting the Game:

New versions of key software in the Mario Kart and Legend of Zelda franchises were not coming until 2014 or later. Coupled with the announcements that new Xbox and PlayStation consoles were launching during holiday 2013, Wii U sales struggled to gain momentum.

Once again, we were faced with a difficult situation that had to be addressed immediately. Wii U had launched with two versions: white with limited storage at $299 and black with four times the storage capacity at $349 including the game Nintendo Land, which we had featured during the 2012 E3 conference. We had hoped this game would be a system seller like Wii Sports, but it did not live up to our expectations. There was not enough volume to support the two different versions at retail, and the black bundle was outselling the white one dramatically, even with the higher price.

In the Americas, I took action to eliminate the white Wii U configuration and consolidate the volume on the black bundle. By summer 2013, we had taken the price of the black bundle down to $299. We also worked with NCL to create unique offerings for our market that would appeal to our players. These included black hardware with Zelda graphic elements and the game Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker HD and a different special hardware bundle that included New Super Mario Bros. U and bonus content called New Super Luigi U.

Promotions offering unique hardware and different software bundles are typical in the video game industry. But having to resort to these tactics within one year of launch was unheard of. It was clear that there were not enough product and pricing tactics to keep Wii U alive for a traditional five-plus-year life cycle.

THE SO WHAT
Businesses in trouble need immediate and decisive action. You don’t have the luxury of time as the situation worsens around you. Stay true to your principles and the key foundations of the business. Stabilize the situation, then prepare for the next wave of innovation to grow the business back.

That “next wave of innovation” was the Nintendo Switch — one of the best (and possibly the fastest) selling consoles of all time.

On a selfish note, it’s too bad Reggie didn’t mention a certain Wii U hail mary.

The Dev Game Club podcast sat down with Halo: Combat Evolved designer Jamie Grisemer to discuss the origins of Halo’s development, constraints that turned into boons, and design considerations that have become staples in first-person shooters today.

I was particularly fascinated by their discussion around controllers, limited input, and removing friction from action at timestamp 57:43:

Jamie Griesemer: I think a really fundamental aspect of… I think it is Bungie’s design, but also my own, is something I call “Random Access Controls”. You can activate any ability with one button press. There’s no state or preamble.

When we were working on Halo, the way that you would add a grenade to your game is that you would switch to the grenade weapon and use the fire button to throw it. Everybody did it that way. We were like, “I just want to throw the grenade now!” Melee attack is the same way. You don’t switch to a melee weapon. It’s like, “now!” It’s all available right now with no delay. I think that makes your experience much more engaging because instead of having to plan to throw a grenade with your conscious mind, it moves it down into the hypothalamus; like, “no, I’m just going to react with a grenade.” At that point, the controls are just going to disappear and you’re not thinking about the controller or the keyboard or whatever anymore. You’re just thinking and having actions happen. I think that’s a really important aspect of games, that I enjoy at least. So I definitely try to recreate that.

Brett Douville: If you have to plan, you’re never going to touch the right stick. You’re never going to switch the weapon.

Tim Longo: You snuck in there “the triangle” (melee, grenades, guns). You melded it into the thirty-second conversation. You wouldn’t have that otherwise. It would be so inaccessible if you had to switch between all of those modes. As it is, you can react on the fly and tap, tap, tap.

JG: We called it the “Golden Tripod”. It keeps them all top-of-mind.

One thing I’ve been thinking about a lot over the current project is… we’re developing it for the PC and it’s really tempting when you have a whole keyboard in front of you to just invent a bunch of new abilities and just assign them all to different letters and numbers and what not. But I really think the controller is the complexity that it is and no more complicated because that’s kinda the maximum number of things you can have at the top of mind. Like, you wouldn’t improve the Dualshock by adding eight more buttons to it. It would just become more difficult to use, I think at that point.

I wonder if controllers got more complicated because players got more capable of holding all those actions in their mind at once.

TL: I think there’s actually some papers out there about this — the evolution of Nintendo’s controllers specifically — and how each one of their generations brought something new, like the D-pad and then the analog stick… not to give them all the credit, but there’s an evolution you can see; gamers evolving with it.

BD: It’s interesting that you don’t really see that with arcade controls. Those just locked into a stick and two or four buttons. They were always kind of limited in that way. They never matured because you never knew who was going to be plugging quarters into that thing. It had to be lowest common denominator. Anybody could walk up to it an do the thing.

This bit pairs nicely with Chris Plante and Jered Petty’s conversation about Wii Sports and the Wii Remote as well as my thinking about there being too many buttons for casual gaming, of which I’m beginning to turn around on.

(Hat tip to Rahim Sonawalla on the podcast recommendation.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-78FD9xvc0

Konami:

Leonardo, Donatello, Raphael, and Michelangelo are back from the sewers with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Cowabunga Collection! Thirteen radical games from KONAMI’s entire archive of retro 8-bit, 16-bit, and arcade Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (TMNT) titles and their Japanese versions* will be coming to PlayStation®5, PlayStation®4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch and PC Steam. Physical retail and digital versions will be available in 2022 at SRP $39.99.

This incredible collection of thirteen original classics gives chasing down Shredder, fighting the Foot, and tangling-up with Bebop and Rocksteady a fresh look at why KONAMI’s adaptations of the heroes in a half shell set the standard in beat ‘em up, action games. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Cowabunga Collection includes:

• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (Arcade)
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time (Arcade)
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (NES)
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Arcade Game (NES)
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III: The Manhattan Project (NES)
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tournament Fighters (NES)
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles IV: Turtles in Time (Super Nintendo)
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tournament Fighters (Super Nintendo)
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Hyperstone Heist (Sega Genesis)
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tournament Fighters (Sega Genesis)
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Fall of The Foot Clan (Game Boy)
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: Back From The Sewers (Game Boy)
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III: Radical Rescue (Game Boy)

This collection surpasses my wildest expectations. From the inclusion of the Game Boy games to all three versions of Tournament Fighters, Konami, Nickelodeon, and Digital Eclipse have outdone themselves.

Growing up a Gameboy + Genesis kid, I have fond memories of Fall of The Foot Clan and Hyperstone Heist, though, I played my fair share of the original TMNT and Arcade games for NES with my step brother and cousins. I was only able to consume crowd favorite Turtles in Time through schoolyard conversations and a handful of quarters at the arcade. And try as I might, Blockbuster always seemed to be out of Tournament Fighters. Thanks to the quality-of-life improvements advertised — save anytime, rewind — I can see myself completing all of these titles. I’ll be able to conjour up my childhood memories and create some new ones.

Cowabunga, indeed!

German Lopez, The New York Times:

Hades is the first video game in history to win a Hugo Award, the prize for science fiction and fantasy that has historically honored books, graphic novels and other written works.

The game, from the developer Supergiant Games, follows the story of Zagreus — son of the game’s eponymous god — as he tries to escape the Underworld. Along the way, he fights all sorts of hellish creatures and meets a wide array of characters, including the gods up on Olympus. He also uncovers family secrets and gains perspective on why his dad has made seemingly unsavory decisions.

The Hugo Awards’ inclusion of video games, which organizers are considering making permanent, speaks to how far the medium has come. In the early days of Pong in the 1970s or the original Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda in the 1980s, technology limited how much text a game could include. Today, a game’s storytelling can be its primary selling point, whether it’s a high-budget science-fiction epic like the Mass Effect trilogy or an indie game made by a small team like Celeste.

This news broke last December, but I was tickled to see it included in today’s NYT morning newsletter. Not only is winning a Hugo award a tremendous achievement for Supergiant Games and the medium as a whole, mentions of specific titles large and small — from Mass Effect to Celeste — by a publication as massive as the New York Times is particularly noteworthy.

One of the reasons I started Zero Counts in 2013 was to gather and (hopefully) elevate video game industry coverage from major publications. I felt the medium had every right to be taken as seriously as art, big business, and cultural touchstones and should be covered as such by the largest publications in the world. At the time, it was only happening in fits and starts, typically prompted by the latest console craze or ”Nintendo’s white Playstation 4“.

Coverage has changed a great deal since then, putting a spotlight on scandal, working conditions, earnings, and acquisitions. What’s more is that most major outlets have now hired staff focused on the video game industry — NYT’s Kellen Browning, Washington Post’s Gene Park and Teddy Amenabar, Axios’ Stephen Totilo and Megan Farokhmanesh, and The Guardian’s Keza MacDonald to name a few. Coverage of specific games still feels spotty, but short of a consumer warning, reviews may be becoming less critical. So when specific games are highlighted — namely indies — it magnifies the growing recognition of the industry and the importance and impact of the medium.

On that note, I think I need to give the Underworld one more run.