I am a big fan of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I’ve watched every iteration of the team on the big and small screens, read the original Eastman and Laird Run, bought more plastic nunchucks than I’ll admit, and even made my own Ninja Turtles OC. has made. Wait, forget you read that last part. Really, no shame, his name is George, he will wield a spade, and everyone will love him.
Break my absolutely soft, tough-as-nails shell, and you’ll find that turtles have a huge place in my heart. Despite this acclaim, my love and nostalgia for the franchise actually lingers through most of the games presented in the Cowbanga collection. I know they exist, but since I was born in 1999, not only were none of these games released when I started watching TMNT, but only a few of them have been re-released.
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This means that out of the 13 games, I only played two of them before the Cowbanga Collection, making it more like experiencing a piece of Ninja Turtles history than playing one game. It’s an exciting prospect for anyone who considers knowing what the Venus de Milo is all about.
There are a total of 13 different games in the Cowabunga Collection, although the number is closer to eight when you take into account the different console releases of the same title. Right off the bat, this is incredible value, especially considering how rare some of these games are. They are also provided with special cheat codes to see how they can be completed, Japanese and English language options, and some even have online functionality. Everything you could possibly want from a collection like this has been done.
Surprisingly, most games hold well on their own. The original arcade title might be a lot cheaper than I remember, but it’s still good, arcade fun, while Turtle in Time is one of the best TMNT games ever. While Tournament Fighters on the SNES is great but too challenging, I found the Game Boy’s two entries to be simple fun. It took some time to understand Radical Rescue, but once upon a time I realized it was one of the better games in the collection.
There are also some games that I categorized as ‘fun for scientific research’. The NES TMNT game, made famous by The Angry Video Game Nerds, is a strange journey, where the TMNT game barely resembles TMNT, while the Game Boy’s Fall of the Foot Clan is painfully simple and boring. Some games are worth playing just out of curiosity, as they are usually watered-down versions of the same game on another console, such as Hyperstone Heist and the NES version of Tournament Fighters.
Still, even though some games haven’t stood the test of time, I had a blast playing through them all, hearing what felt like a million different variations of the TMNT theme, and seeing all those similarities. Which are oddly carried over to more recent games as well. What’s with TMNT Games and you have a smack of parking meters?
Turtle in Time may be the best TMNT game ever, but it still won’t be the best part of the Cowbanga Collection. That honor goes to the surprising amount of bonus material found within Turtles Layer, a museum that pieces together instruction manuals, box art, music and sound effects, magazine ads, behind-the-scenes documents, and more for each game. . collection.
All of that is already impressive enough and worth the price of admission, but the Cowbanga Collection manages to go a step further and include every comic book cover in Turtles’ history, and screenshots from every season and iteration of the Turtles on TV. Is. , The collection of 13 obscure Turtle games was enough of an homage to the franchise, but this museum is the best part of the game and an essential experience for anyone who loves the series.
There are a few minor issues with the Cowbanga Collection that marginally affect the experience. For one, I couldn’t find a way to play music tracks while watching stuff in Turtles Lair, which means listening to a single track on loop, which gets annoying depending on how much time you should spend there.
I also wish there was a unified control scheme between games, as it can be a bit of a pain from the fall of the Foot Klan to Radical Rescue and having completely separate buttons for jump and attack. This is a minor issue in the grand scheme of things, but it was noticeable and made Radical Rescue more difficult than needed.
Whether you’re a fan of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or not, the Cowbanga Collection is undoubtedly the most impressive gaming collection ever. Collecting 13 hard-to-find games with every possible extra content is an incredible endeavor, and the fact that most of them are still a blast today is just the icing on the cake. The Cowbanga Collection is truly an amalgamation of everything from TMNT.
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