Next Year I Dine on Turtle Soup

Let's talk about self-betterment for a moment, shall we? It's the end of the year (or close enough to it), I haven't sat down to do my Game of the Year list (not because lists aren't up yet, but because I am lazy and also need to sit down with a list of the year's releases before I do anything else), but I can at least do a little New Year's Resolution, right?

So here's my New Year's Resolution:

I mean look at these cool turtle teens

I am going to beat Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles for the Nintendo Entertainment System. In fact I am going to take this opportunity to say I will do it more than once. I will, I think, strive to do this clean (that is to say, without save states or rewind) on something as close to real hardware as I can get my hands on at first - which is to say either my Analogue Pocket or, when it finally ships and shows up, the SuperStation - while also messing around in Retroarch or the Cowabunga Collection as the mood takes me. I know my limits, and I reckon the first time I get through this it will probably be with the help of save states, if only because getting some of the jumps dialed in can take a while, but I do want to get to the point where I can just sit down and do it in one shot. Kind of like sitting down and ripping through the first episode of DOOM, which is something I can more or less do without even dying, much less really thinking about saving my game. I can't explain why this is something I feel compelled to do, apart from the fact that having hit 40 years old I figure there are some things a fellow just has to do, and putting old ghosts of childhood to bed is one of them.

The other reason is... I think I might like this game a lot?

No wait come back

Look, I ranked this game pretty low, and when I did so I was not kind about it. I called it a giant disappointment for someone who knew that TMNT II: The Arcade existed along with being "fiddly, difficult (in a bad way).... and there's an underwater level that fuckin' sucks" which is all stuff I still stand by. I also stand by saying that it was neat the different turtles had different properties and the soundtrack goes crazy style. If there is a soundtrack that fucks, it is the TMNT soundtrack.

This is the level that sucks. Except I am regularly breezing through it with no trouble now, which says more about me than the game, I'm sure.

The only thing I can't stand by, at least not for me personally, is saying the game is unpleasant to play. Quite the opposite! I'm having a wonderful time with it! There's something about it that I just can't put my finger on that is tickling my brain - maybe it's the Konami of it all, I don't know. Like, and I know I am going to be murdered for saying this but whatever, the movement in Castlevania isn't that different from the movement in this. This all goes out the window with the swimming level, which really is some Hot Bullshit, but not the sort of Hot Bullshit you can't kind of push past with a little practice. Which is maybe the thing that appeals to me?

I swear I am not making a comparison to Dark Souls here

Repetition is I think what is really starting to get its hooks into me. Getting the first few levels to feel like muscle memory (except it can never be total muscle memory, because the game changes the enemy arrangements kind of on a whim and stuff respawns (sometimes in greater numbers than before) if you scroll away and back) and just burning through to the third area has become deeply satisfying to me. I'm intrigued by the possibility of getting to that level of familiarity with the third area. I am almost there in terms of having the map more or less memorized for - I know where to go to get the particular things I need to go get Splinter, it is just down to execution. Fortunately I'm getting used to that too - the extremely fiddly jump is starting to feel... well, I don't know that I would ever say it feels good, but I do think it has graduated to feeling satisfying. Which is to say that my brain has finally broken enough to wrap itself around the fiddliness of the jumping physics to the point where it doesn't feel bad anymore.

We always used to pretend Donatello was offering people a baguette

It's the sort of thing I did all the time as a kid without realizing it. You get your one NES cart that you lucked into at a garage sale of the game you really wanted (okay not really wanted, you really wanted TMNT II, but hey this has the turtles in it too and also seems real weird?) and you jump into it whole-heartedly. Then you play the hell out of it, starting from the beginning every time because come on, you don't have save games or passwords or any of that nonsense here. It's just doing a run of a game that, if you're just mainlining things, shouldn't take more than 2-3 hours to finish. That's pretty reasonable if you ask me - hell, usually if I sit down to play a game I am doing it because I have 2-3 hours to spend (that's like, three runs in Absolum, depending on how your runs go, or a looooot of Sektori. Which... I should talk about Sektori at some point). I am, I know, kind of a sicko for making the conscious decision to just... play a lot of a mediocre game for my own satisfaction. Like objectively it is not a very good NES game - the science has it at number 396 as of the time of this writing, and I trust the science. But the heart wants what it wants, and what it currently wants is to finally beat a game I had as a kid that I never managed to get my head around.

Thanks, April

I'm already making real progress - the day I sat down to write this article was also the day I ended up rescuing Splinter for the First Time Ever in my Goddamn Life!

Then I got my shit pushed in by Area 4, because I've never been there and there's spiked floors and weird magnets that make the already fiddly jumping even fiddlier, and it's a whole thing. Strangely, I'm looking forward to the challenge!