Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III: Radical Rescue (GB via Cowabunga Collection) playthrough
1A metroidvania TMNT game? What a surprise from this GameBoy game! I love the Metroidvania genre. There's generally something about them, having to carefully craft the world, that prevents shovelware. It's pretty rare to find a really bad Metroidvania game. Except for the earliest entries. Which... unfortunately, this kinda is.
The concept is sound. Three of the turtles were kidnapped. You, as Mikey, have to go rescue them. Each one has its own ability to help get through areas of the map you couldn't before. There's boss fights for keys, and key cards to open doors. The game even includes a map that marks important areas (and, with this set, can be altered to mark more specifically what the items are).
The problem comes with how little health you have, how much damage enemies do, and the fact that there are limited continues. A password system, sure, but even that tracks your continues. The game's meant to waste your resources, and force you to replay it over and over and over and over to finally win. And the bosses are especially bad. Each one does 2-4x your damage per hit, has 2x+ as much health as you, and have attacks that are difficult to avoid. Even when they are telegraphed, which they aren't always. But the worst part comes at the end, where you have to do a boss rush, including fighting the last boss twice. You can carry in one pizza to help you, which acts as an extra life, but you only get one. For five straight boss fights, just ONE extra life. Thankfully you do restore health in between fights. But good luck making it through just one, yet alone all four early fights, to keep the pizza for the last two fights that don't have healing in between. And they don't compensate by making the bosses easy to avoid. No, they are just as difficult as ever.
This game didn't feel fun to play with all of that. It was beyond punishing. Artificial difficulty, especially the limited continues, in order to make it seem like less of a waste for how short the game ultimately is. Making you replay it over and over and over and over and over before you can win. A design philosophy that I'm glad has been largely abandoned. -- Watch live at https://www.twitch.tv/the_nametag
Humble Bundle Partner reference links:
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Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Cowabunga Collection:
https://www.humblebundle.com/store/teenage-mutant-ninja-turtles-the-cowabunga-collection?partner=nametag&charity=8443