Game:

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Smash-Up (2009)

Category:

Guide

Duration: 10:58

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130

Okay, so tell me if something about this seems a little...familiar. I mean, I just can't put my finger on why this game seems like another game we've seen and played for quite some time already. Oh yeah, the general idea behind this game is very much like Super Smash Bros.

They even bothered to put the word "Smash" in the title and the "How to Play" video that appears if you wait a bit on the title screen seems to be in the same general format as the ones for Melee and Brawl (the original game's How to Play video was somewhat different from those two, but it still covered the same material).

Now, a lot of people cry foul on this with such nasty terms as "copycat" and "ripoff" coming into play, but you want to know what? I'm glad it finally happened.

The short version of why I believe this to be a sign of a good thing is that it's a good step in the right direction towards getting this kind of game established as its own subgenre of "fighting" games, rather than people calling Super Smash Bros. a "fighting game" when there's a lot more at play than that, since it clearly defies so simple a classification. All it took was somebody shameless enough to make a game so obviously cut from the same type of cloth as Smash Bros. so as to set the precedent...and for a change of pace, I don't believe the term "shameless" should be taken to be a detrimental evaluation of the game itself...Smash-Up should be proud of its shamelessness.

Oh, and I'd point out that this is hardly the first "clone" of Smash Bros. to come into existence, what with the Jump Superstars series on the DS, which unfortunately never came to America, serving as at least two other examples of games like this.

But anyway, this game is no more a ripoff than any other game that happens to occupy the same genre as another that came before it...although, as I've stated, it is definitely in the realm of "shameless" in the number of similarities that you can see between the two. But then again, fighting games have been adhering to the same general formula with slight variations between themselves since their inception. Nobody calls Mortal Kombat a Street Fighter copycat, even though the basic gameplay premise is one shared between the two.

So yeah, this was one of the more surprising Christmas gifts I received this year, and I'm very pleasantly surprised with it, not only as a longtime fan of the Super Smash Bros., but also as a longtime fan of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and of both the 1987 and 2003 animated incarnations among their other media outings.

Anyway, the demonstrative video for how to play is pretty basic, so I figured a little sample of what the game looks like online would be a good addition to put things in perspective. At the very least, I'll state that if you're proficient at Super Smash Bros., you're more than qualified to understand the general flow of this game as well.

Just sit back and let the turtle power work its magic and I'll try to get into more explicit detail later on.

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