Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles In Time Re-Shelled (X-Box 360)
Riv , 2011/01/06 17:38

Publisher:	UBISoft
Genre:	Action-Beat-Em-Up
Players:	1-4 Players
Rating	Everyone
The Good:	Remade 3D Graphics.
The Bad:	Unfortunately it's based on the ARCADE version of the game and as such anything you might remember from the console version is missing entirely.
The Ugly:	Cement Man. He looks like a human animated pile of shit. Literally.

What the hell happened, did the Rat King have a falling out with the Ninja Turtles universe?

Growing up I was always a huge fan of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Our four mutant superheroes seemed to fill a dramatic void left after Transformers got taken off the air in my life. And one thing that was always amazing about Ninja Turtles is the amount of media the four heroes in a half-shell covered: Comic books, full-feature movies, cartoons, action figures, and of course video games - and in the videogames department boy did they deliver. Almost every Ninja Turtles videogame was immensely fun, whether it was the ultra-challenging NES cartridge, the arcade game, or the one-on-one Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Tournament fighter. But the height of amusing action games had to come in the arcade hit that you could take home on the Super NES: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles IV: Turtles in Time.

Needless to say I was pretty stoked about the fact this game was making a comeback on X-Box Live Arcade and the Playstation Network, but did it manage to live up to the awesomeness of the original title that I spent countless hours trying to master? Let's just say its left open to a few complaints.

TIT: Reshelled (love the abbreviation by the way), is a complete graphical remake of the original title, and as such it's now 3D. The premise is that Shredder and Krang are up to their old tricks again and the Foot Clan has stolen the entire Statue of Liberty and it's up to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to get it back, but it's part of a greater plan of the Shredder's to launch the turtles into a time warp from which they will never return.

Immediately upon cranking up this game I notice the music is completely different and I find myself disappointed that somehow UBIsoft didn't snatch that up when taking the reins from Konami. Am I the only one that noticed this? While most of the stage music in the original title were catchy remixes of the iconic Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles theme, TIT: Reshelled seems to play some random crap that takes away from the atmosphere of the game.

The gameplay is pretty much the same; you run through hordes of Foot Soldiers and Rock Soldiers, random traps and bosses and can play with up to four players simultaneously locally or online, but wait a second, something isn't right here.

I immediately noticed some of the following changes which irritated me. For starters the introductory Technodrome stage is absent from the game. This was probably the longest level in the original and one of the most fun, but it's completely removed from this version of the game. Also missing are the following:

The Rat King.

Bebop & Rocksteady.

Slash.

What the hell happened, did the Rat King have a falling out with the Ninja Turtles universe? Is he going to record a shoot video where he reveals that they didn't pay him enough, and that Eastman and Laird rejected ideas that he had for the development of his character or that Raphael was an asshole behind the scenes and difficult to work with? What gives? Well I found out later that this game is not based on the Super NES version of the game, but of the obscure Arcade version of the game which was missing all these things. This unfortunately makes the game feel lackluster. I don't think many people played it to the end in the Arcade to realize that all of these things were extras for the home version so it makes this one feel like a total jip.

I cry foul! Hell, Shredder doesn't even become Super Shredder. He just sort of wails on you with a katana. And it's a shame he's not voiced by Uncle Phil from the Fresh Prince in the remake- I really almost feel I'd be better off playing this on my laptop.

Naturally TIT: Reshelled comes with all the extras you've come to expect from most X-Box Live arcade hits - leaderboards, a survival mode, achievements, and all that crap but what it doesn't come with is the 16-bit version of the game, and what it's lacking in is a lot of the things that made the Super NES classic what it was. Was the Arcade version really this... empty compared to the console renditions?

So what's the verdict on this remake of Ninja Turtles? I have to say unless you're a total graphics whore that MUST have a remake of anything 16-bit by today's "standards," then avoid this one. You can easily download a ROM of it and play it on an Emulator or the Nintendo Wii and have a much more enjoyable and faithful trip down memory lane. Is it a complete waste of money? No, it is somewhat amusing. But it's definitely not complete and in that regard I feel ripped off. I don't find myself cheering COWABUNGA at all at the end of this one, and that's just a shame.

-- Riv - jasonrivera@jasonrivera.com