Turtle Power! Let's Play TMNT for the Game Boy

We can either loop around the far right, or dig past these spikes.


On the far left of the lower level is a pizza. On the right is the way down.


…Actually, on second thought, let’s try down, back at that dig site.


Ooo, hoppers and cyborgs! This is much better.


Especially since there’s a Heart Container! Score!


Exit to the right to a one-way door. There’s the lesson: Go down.


So I’ll do that again.


These are new: They shoot out energy bubbles that drift towards you. You can hit the bubbles to destroy them, though.


I don’t think I can cross these spikes. Let’s try going down even more.


More bubblers, and now a different spike pit. This one I can make it across.


And then I can continue down. There’s a one-way door in the next room.


Hunh…I was expected to go down again, but I have to go right, and it’s one-way.


So we’ll head in here, and find an opportunity to go down.

Two paths! Left seems the better bet, just from the map shape.


Great. Spikes freakin’ everywhere.


I had to use my pizza to get across these stupid spikes, and this leads to…key door that I can’t open in a dead end. Dang. Let’s reload.


The right side has a pizza, which I need at this point. Then we head back up.


This leads to fire spout land, and I’m going to guess that going left will take us to the one-way door that leads back where we started.


A pizza. Good sign that we’re nearing something important?


First, bubbler land.


Yes! A boss battle!


This is apparently Scale Tale. (Or Scale Tail—it’s both in various places.) I don’t know who that is, but she has an array of attacks we haven’t seen before. They definitely chose a random crew to be the bosses of this game, as only the final one (c’mon, you all know who it is) appears in any other game, to my knowledge.


She’ll spit balls that turn into flame spouts.


She’ll blow you away from her.

She’ll jump and spring. And she’ll whack you with her tail.


And she drops a key when defeated.


I think I’ll wait until next time to try hiking down to that locked door again. Here’s my password.


And map v4, with everything we did today. I think I know where we’re going for the last segment. Next time!

The Scale Tail toy looks like it got kicked out of the Snake Men from MOTU. Especially with the shirt/bandolier that evokes the chestplates that came with a lot of MOTU figures:



Do you feel a loss of momentum after finding the last turtle? Sometimes in games like this I kinda lose my enthusiasm when I realize I've found the last "thing" and all that's left is to find and battle the final boss.

It really feels like Raphael should have been the wall-climber. They dropped the ball here.

Yeah, it feels like Mikey should be the one who hides in his shell (didn't he do that in one of the movies?), Donatello should be the helicopter, and Raph should be the wall climber. I guess Leonardo can keep his job as the drill bit.

I enjoyed the "a little too Raph" line on its own merits, but it didn't occur to me it was a movie callback until Kishi mentioned it. (It is, right? I'm pretty sure it is....)

Yeah "a little too Raph" is from the first movie. I loved that callout BTW.

At different points of my life, different quotes from that movie have been regular parts of conversations.

Back in high school, it was usually "Uhhh...Chevy Nova?" and "Ninja kick the damn rabbit!"

Lately it tends to be "I LOST A SAI" or just "DAAAAAAMN!"

There is a lot going on with Scale Tail.

I recall the difficulty rising significantly once you get Donny and head into the top-right of the map, but the worst is still to come.

Oops! I guess I forgot that TMNT 2 had notable lines.

That WAS my favorite one when I was kid, though.

Wasn't this released in 93? (Well before Super Metroid came out in '94.)

Yeah, November of '93. I realize that the Metroidvania genre was still in its infancy at the time, but that doesn't mean I'm not going to complain about it. Simon's Quest had been out for six years and Metroid 2 for two--they could have done better.

Not really; I have a completionist drive that makes me want to reach the end of games, even if they aren't games I'm particularly enjoying. The final boss represents a particular accomplishment to me.

I have one more game post, but since I don't have a manual for this game, I figured I should sneak in one more ridiculous analysis post before I wrap up the LP. Remember my "economic analysis" in other LPs? Well, here's one for the Turtles universe.

You know, we smashed up a LOT of foot soldiers in the past three games, and we can generally assume they were all robots because a) people don’t typically explode when hit with swords and b) this is a media property based on an 80s cartoon, so we’re only allowed to use weapons on non-human foes.
Where the hell is Shredder getting all of these robots?

The thing is, for the first two games, Krang and Dimension X are our easy out. A lot of cartoon shows have this, where the villains have access to such vast resources “elsewhere” (their home world or dimension, or simply elsewhere in the show’s world because they control it all) that scarcity isn’t really an issue. Or they have the always-nebulously-defined magic--we have no reason to believe that the Ancient Spirits of Evil are going to run out of whatever mojo they use on Mumm-Ra any time soon, after all.

If I remember correctly from the TMNT cartoon show, Krang had a virtually unlimited army of stone warriors and other creatures in Dimension X, and the only reason he didn’t just use them to conquer Earth was there were limits to what could pass between dimensions at any one time. I remember Baxter Stockman having to take a trip to Dimension X to balance out Bebop and Rocksteady returning to Earth, for instance. Presumably there are some sort of limits to non-living matter as well (I recall the Technodrome constantly getting stuck in one place or another), but information flow is unlimited. So all Krang needs to do is set his army on the task of building a compact robot-maker machine and getting that through a portal, and Shredder can dump raw materials into it and get all the foot soldiers he needs.

Hey! At the end of the second game, Krang was trapped back in Dimension X, but Shredder was on Earth and was able to collect a bunch of his old toys. If he got ahold of his robot-maker, he’d just need enough raw materials to use it. What’s a cheap source of raw materials when you can build tireless labor? A mine! And this game’s setting is suddenly explained! Over the past year, he’s been converting mined metals into robots, using those robots to build more tech and mine more materials (we even see foot soldiers mining in the game), and cycling up. This explains why some of the mine is just a regular mine, some is high-tech, and some is cave structures that they presumably just tunneled into while mining.

This also allows Shredder to side-step a lot of the problems of human labor. Sure, the robots are dumb and easily destroyed, but the fact that they’re cheap, have perfect morale and require no upkeep costs counterbalances that. He can make half a dozen new mutants from either animals or people he can control, and have those be his generals, but keep the number low so he can make sure they stay in line. Also, with five mouths to feed in the entire place—and four of those are animalistic enough to hunt for their own food—he doesn’t need to interact with civilization for supplies.

…this ended up shockingly coherent!

Y'know, I've read enough interviews with Japanese game designers that I wouldn't be hugely surprised if someone on this game's team actually was thinking about that. Like take for example this quote from an interview for Steel Empire, a SHMUP on Genesis:

Who would have expected a designer to put that type of thought into a game area where you're only going to be thinking about surviving the next wave of enemies?

On the other hand, it wouldn't surprise me at all if the whole mining operation angle was just put in there because it's a common level design trope.

(I liked your writeup.)

The triumphant conclusion!


Okay, so, after getting a key from Scale Taile, I need to hike back down to that locked door I saw before.


So down, down, down and left…


Then make this goddamn jump again. It only took me five tries this time, and I only rammed the spikes once!


Then climb up, and back to the key door.


Master Splinter!


…”Prepare for buttle”? Seriously?


The door lets us out on the other side, and we can climb up with Donny.


Then there’s a vertical shaft with a bunch of common enemies.


And another annoying spike-jump for Mikey. The designers are really dicks, have I mentioned that? You pretty much have to get hit by both of the falling stalactites here, because otherwise you land in spikes. And you have to do this both on the way in and on the way out!


Immediately after, you have to do a blind jump down into more spikes in order to find the last keycard. Then we backtrack.


This amusing message plays when we go back through the door where Splinter was.

We actually need to take a longer route around, because of the damn one-way doors.


Did I point out that some cyborgs fire rockets? They do!


This spike jump, just as a change of pace, has fire spouts instead of spikes on the ceiling.


So we climb way back up, and end up here.


At the end of the roomful of cyborgs we can use that passkey.


Then we need to climb this shaft. It has bubblers! And lasers! And a two-way path that means nothing!


We emerge outdoors, for a brief time.


We can’t just walk away to the right, as much as that seems like a lovely idea.

There’s a pizza up in this tree.


And foot soldiers on the ground and in the air.


Back inside: Fire spouts by the dozen!


You need to hop these platforms while being pestered by jetpack foot soldiers. The floor is all spikes. Then, there’s more fire spouts to see you out.

This is imposing.


The blind jump leads to a nastier version of the previous room: Smaller platforms that move in and out of the walls, more soldiers, and a longer series of jumps overall.


And shmuck-bait pizza in the bottom-right corner, just to rub salt in the wound.


Oh, and a fire spout right before the exit that’ll surely knock you down into the spikes. Hah hah! You need to use Mikey to make it past the multiple blind jumps, but switch to Donny at the last second to get to the end.


Next room: Refreshingly, Fire and Lasers!


At least there’s a pizza sitting right out in the open.


Then we reach what is, presumably, the final boss room.


And it’s…the squirrel guy. Crap. This is going to be a boss rush, isn’t it?


He’s exactly the same as before.


And thankfully, you get your health refilled when you beat him.


Which is not particularly helpful when Moleman costs me my stocked pizza anyway.

And then Scale Tale kills me and it’s back to the beginning of the boss rush. (Did her tail lash do three boxes of damage last time? Gah!) Let’s try again.


Have I mentioned that I hate all of these bosses? Granted, I’m frustrated and feeling lazy, but their patterns are all such a pain with so few safe points to hit from. You don’t realize that until the boss rush.


Making it back to Scale Tale with my pizza meant I got past her.

Which finally gets us to Cyber-Shredder. He’s got a bunch of new tricks.


He likes to hop and kick. He’ll float around the top of the screen with a bunch of doubles, then jumpkick you. And he’ll throw bubbles that turn into flame spikes at you.


When you deplete his health bar once, he’ll refill it and get faster. Also, his flame spikes get nastier.


Defeating him earns you the final key.


Wait…fire spouts? I JUST BEAT THE FINAL BOSS! I COULD CONCIEVABLY DIE HERE?

I think the makers of this went on to make I Wanna Be the Guy.


Anyways, we rescue April.


Because the only threat to world peace—ever—has been one asshole ninja and one alien brain.


And the credits roll!




Irritatingly, these credits flicker between the pictures of the turtles and the actual credit roll, which makes them extraordinarily hard to screencap.

So here’s some of them.


And rather than end on that sour, lousy-credits note, here’s my final map.

This is a shockingly linear game, given the premise. There’s only one order you can do anything in—you can’t get anywhere without doing the one, true next step at any point. Also, you need to backtrack at only a couple of points (mostly to get out of dead-ends that hold items) and there’s no benefit to going back to old areas after acquiring new abilities.

In retrospect, I’m not sure that Young Beowulf missed much, here. After Fall of the Foot Clan, the next TMNT game I owned was Turtles in Time for the SNES, which is a very respectable beat-em-up that I still occasionally play with friends to this day.

And I suspect, as my son gets older and more into TMNT (and can be trusted to watch their cartoons without trying to use his ninja skills on the furniture or his classmates) I’ll play a bunch of the more recent games.

And that’s what I have for you! This has been another installment of Let’s Play Beowulf’s Game Boy Youth. I’d like to thank Nintendo, Komani, Eastman and Laird, and as always, the good folks of Talking Time.


Thanks for reading, and see you next time!

Well done! I really enjoyed this.

Here's the map I made. Since the in-game map is so vague, I paid special attention to the shapes of rooms and the positions of doors. I also used color to delineate discrete areas based on where you use key cards.





I forgot Michael Blaustein worked as a tester on this game. A year later, he'd work on the localization of Snatcher with his brother Jeremy.

Yeah, this was a great read. My TMNT game exposure has mostly been limited to the NES and SNES games, so it was cool to see how those experiences translated onto the Game Boy.

Thanks for the Let's Play's, they were a lot of fun to read. I played the first two games to death as a kid, and as simple as the first game was, it was really fun to just pop it in and play through for 20 minutes. And both games had such great soundtracks!

The third game was always the one that got away, and I'd always wanted to play it, especially since it looked so different from the standard, go right and attack that a lot of the TMNT games were. I finally got a copy of it last year and man, it is hard! Still trying to make my way through it. Maybe this let's play and your mapping skills are just what I need to get my through it!

CHIMING IN TO SAY I ALSO ENJOYED THIS LP A GREAT DEAL. GOOD WORK BEOWULF. U DA MAN.

Good stuff. I enjoyed it.

Turtle Beowulf Power!