Turtles in Time is one of four games I actually still own the cartridge for on SNES. The other three are NBA Jam, Chrono Trigger, and Mystic Quest. As you can surmise, this places this game in a league among kings. Remakes have been running rampant in the industry lately and for the most part, I embrace this. When I first found out about a Turtles in Time remake, I was thrilled. However, upon hearing this remake was being done by Ubisoft Singapore, I soon changed my tune. Hey, at least it wasn't Ubisoft Montreal. Excitement turned to an elitist bitter "you better not drop the ball on this one" attitude. For a little perspective, the feeling was similar to as if it had been announced that Final Fantasy 1 was being remade in 3d, and it was being remade by EA. Bizarre. None-the-less, it's a allsy undertaking to remake, what is in my opinion, the BEST arcade brawler of all time (I'm talking from Prehistoric Turtlesaurus 650000000 BC to Neon Nightriders).
So here came Turtles in Time Reshelled, gracing the perfect medium of XBLA and PSN. Is this game the classic pizza power you would expect? Or does it suffer from Shell Shock.
There's no argument for the fact that 4-player Turtles in Time, upgraded to HD, and applied to next gen consoles with the allure of added achievements, trophies and the like, would be a supreme gaming experience even to the most mild fans of the genre. That's a fact.
Uh, Cowabunga.
Familiarity. Dude, it's classic turtles. Who are you gonna be? I call Raph. n_g calls Donny. Save the pizza for the guy with the lowest life. Throw footsoldiers at the screen. This game has all the mechanics you loved back then and they're just as fun now. The turtles still have their unique stats, a pretty balanced spread of speed/range/power, with Raph being the quickest moving, with short range, and Don being the slowest with longest range. This game is just great, it's based on a strict formula of one of the best games ever. You won't get sick of reliving the Turtles in Time adventure in HD.
Music. The music from the original is one of those games with the most memorable background jams. It was like Sonic the Hedgehog. The options menus had jukebox options, and for good reason. Reshelled does NOT recycle this music, which is an obvious bummer, but I'm going to recognize my own nostalgia may be getting in the way here, so from a completely subjective standpoint, Reshelled's remixed music is great.
Difficulty. The game comes complete with different levels of difficulty. I played the original exclusively on Hard, simply because it was necessary to access the Super Shredder battle. In Reshelled all difficulty levels are well represented, although there is no difference in the levels available to you.
Hi Def. See for yourself. This video literally compares the original to this HD remake side by side. Good stuff.
SHELL SHOCK
Turtles in Time had nothing wrong with it. This remake doesn't feel necessary really. Feels like a novelty. Turtles in Time is a rare case where the original was perfect. It really didn't need a 3d facelift. The 3d looks great, but the 2d sprite graphics of the first game where stylish, fluid and awesome. They could have even used 2d sprites in this game instead of 3d. They have added a 4-way directional facing (you can now attack up and down, rather than left and right), and while there's nothing wrong with this at all, you can't argue that the previous system was already flawless.
This game is like Linkin Park covering the Beatles Hey Jude with an electronic nu-metal style, and then slapping it in the latest Transformers movie. Does that sound cool to you?"
If you were looking forward to flinging the Foot at the screen to hit shredder right in the face, forget it.
This isn't a remake of the SNES version. It's a remake of the Arcade version. Let me list the things that ARE NOT INCLUDED for those of you unfamiliar. In Sewer Surfin, there's no rat king boss. You just fight a horde of frustrating pizza monsters. No exaggeration, a FRUSTRATING HORDE is the only way to describe this. This is widely considered to be one of, if not the hardest parts of this entire game. Once you trip and blunder your way through this frame-rate lagging shit fest, you are met with a hologram of shredder who immediately proceeds to transport you back to Prehistoric Turtlesaurus stage. This means no technodrome. No Tokka an Razar boss on the technodrome, so you fight them on the ship level instead of Bebop and Rocksteddy. Which means no Bebop and Rocksteddy at all, ever. This also means no dimension X battle where you have to throw footsoldiers at the screen to kill Shredder. Speaking of Shredder, there is NO Super Shredder boss either. Okay, I get it, this is a remake of the arcade, and not SNES version. Makes sense right? Yeah, I guess. But have you played the SNES version, Ubisoft?? Why the heck would you want to remake the lamer of the two versions? Why, why, why. Suddenly this remake is less than you would have wanted, for reasons you didn't even see coming.
Continues. The lives system is broken. In the original, you start with a set number of lives depending on your difficulty. When you lose them all, you rechoose your turtle, and continue. If you get a set number of points (from kills) you earn an extra life. It's very basic, it's simple, it makes sense. Ubisoft apparently didn't think this was such a simple system. In fact they dropped the ball here so hard, that at this point, I'm basically not going to tell you to buy this. First of all, you don't earn extra lives based on performance. There's no benefit to killing other than having a high score. Who knows why. Second of all, and this is the real busted part, there's no continues. Bear with me. Lose all your lives, you're done. UNLESS! Unless you die completely, game over for you, and another turtle you're playing with completes the level. Then the next level begins with you being granted ALL your lives back.
Absolutely BUSTED system. The only way to get a continue is to do this method which can only be considered an exploit. It rewards the fail player full lives back, while the other player carries on with what he has left. The only way to continue is to die off completely and begin another level. This is going to cause players, just before the final boss to all kill themselves and let one guy get the final hit, that way they will all come back in the last level with full lives. How hard is it to properly execute a continue system in a standard arcade style brawler?
Don't buy this broken piece unless you don't own the original Turtles in Time and want to have a superficial play through of a fun arcade remake of a legend. This is all style over substance. This isn't a rock solid entry into your collection, it's a cash machine jumping on board the remake revolution train. If you're going to remake a flawless classic, at least nail the fundamentals, please. I had my doubts about this and for the most part, I was right.
Dude, we're like, second only to Sonic the Hedgehog in that everything we are in post-1998 is, like, superficial and amateur-made.
As for me, I made the best of it. After all, I'm reviewing this from a core-gamer standpoint, and as I said, if you're interested in a superficial redux of the olden classic, then jump aboard. I beat this game on the hardest difficulty with 3 other 0friends, and the 4 turtle experience is like no other. It was still a blast.
But you know what would be an even bigger blast? The SNES version, 4 players. Beat it twice, and I will never play it again.
| Price : $70.99
