Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles IV: Turtles in Time (SNES) Playthrough
1,365A playthrough of Konami's 1992 license-based beat 'em up for the Super Nintendo, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles IV: Turtles in Time.
Played as Leonardo on the hard difficulty setting.
Turtles in Time was a huge hit when it first appeared in arcades in the spring of 1991 (https://youtu.be/vYhGfIULZJg ), and it made no less a splash when it showed up on the Super Nintendo in the summer of the following year. The SNES version was met with universal praise by critics and fans alike, and despite having released just a few months behind juggernauts like Street Fighter II: The World Warrior and The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, it quickly rose to the top of the sales charts.
Though the move to the SNES brought with it some changes, the game was impressively faithful to the arcade version. The bombastic, cartoon-like presentation made the transition intact, as did all of the stages and the main gameplay elements.
There were a few cuts made to make it fit on a cramped SNES cartridge - the intro was changed, the bosses' intro quotes are no longer spoken, and some frames of animation have been cut - but these changes had little impact on the game's playability, and they were subtle enough that many people never even picked up on them at the time.
There were other changes, but they weren't concessions made for the sake of running on weaker hardware - they were improvements on the original game. The Technodrome stage was extended and capped off with a new Shredder battle, Neon Night Riders became an exciting showpiece for the SNES's Mode 7 scaling capabilities, and there were a ton of new bosses. Sewer Surfin' now ends with a fight against the Rat King, Prehistoric Turtlesaurus's Cement Man has been swapped out for Slash, Bebop and Rocksteady now wait (in pirate costumes!) at the end of Skull and Crossbones, and this time, the final battle is with Super Shredder, fresh off of his introduction in the second TMNT movie.
The controls have been improved and expanded on, too. You now have direct control over throws and the dash maneuver, and you can assign your special move to a different button to avoid accidentally triggering it at an inopportune time. These changes do make the game substantially easier than the arcade version, but the improved responsiveness makes it feel quite a bit better to play.
And finally, 2P versus-fighting mode and a time trial game was tossed in to round out the package.
What makes the game all the more amazing is that Turtles in Time came out just weeks before the Super Nintendo's first birthday in North America. It's a phenomenal piece of work that deserves every bit of praise that was heaped on it, it was one of the best games released on the SNES, and it's arguably the best game to ever bear the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles license.
In fact, I'd go so far as to argue that the inclusion of this game alone justifies the cowabunga in the upcoming Cowabunga Collection.
LET'S KICK SHELL!
I also played the Japanese version of the game and translated all of its text. If you'd like to check that out to see how it differs from the North American release: https://youtu.be/NVX54AmdRM4
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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