Video Game / Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Rescue Palooza

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Rescue Palooza is a freeware fan game by Merso X built on the OpenBOR engine that pays tribute to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise, primarily the 1987 animated series, the Licensed Games Konami developed for the aforementioned animated series, and the action figure line by Playmates Toys.

After a tutorial level guided by Master Splinter, the Turtles receive a message from the Shredder where their archenemy dares them to come after him and gloats that he's captured all their friends and allies in honor of the 30th anniversary of their rivalry. It's now up to Leonardo, Donatello, Raphael and Michelangelo to take down all their foes and rescue their allies in order to thwart old Shred Head.

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Tropes:

• Absurdly Short Level: Outside of a few enemies in-between, the Turtle Van level only has battles with Barney Stockman, the Bubble Copter and Chrome Dome.
• Adaptational Badass: Besides April, even the other members of the Channel 6 crew get to join in on the fun, after you rescue them.
• Adaptational Wimp:
  • Chromedome, who in the cartoon was The Juggernaut, appears as just another boss.
  • Krang is based on the boss fight from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Arcade Game, but he's much easier since among other things, the hand fired by his Rocket Punch can be destroyed.
  • Karai appears as a boss based on her appearance in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tournament Fighters, but in contrast to that game where she was a brutal SNK Boss, here she isn't especially challenging.
• Ascended Extra: Pizzaface, a toyline-only villain, gets to show up in several levels dropping pizza when attacked, long before you get to fight him for real in the final levels.
• Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: Collecting the mutagen canister item makes the player character temporarily turn into an invincible giant.
• Badass in Distress: Taken to silly levels here combined with Damsel in Distress & Distressed Dude, as the majority of the turtles' friends and allies are captive.
• Bat Family Crossover: Nearly everyone that's appeared in the 1987 animated series and its associated games is included. A few of the action figure line characters (some of whom appeared in the Archie comics or even originated back in the original Mirage comics) are also tossed in, for good measure.
• Bonus Level: Cudley the Cowlick will appear in the hub after you complete a few levels. Walk up to him to play a bonus level and rack up extra lives.
• Boss-Only Level: The first of the last levels consists entirely of a three-stage battle with Krang, immediately followed by the Scout Technodrome.
• Cast Herd: Many of the characters to rescue are arranged this way. For instance, the Neutrinos are logically found in Dimension X, while the martial artists (Usagi Yojimbo, Lotus Blossom and Aska) are in the Dojo.
• Climax Boss: The first fight with Krang, as explained above.
• Continuity Nod:
  • Right out of the intro, Raphael switches his choice of words to show that the game's majorly based on the 1987 animated series.
  "Yeah yeah, delivering beatings is enough for me. Wait – I meant wisecracks. Delivering wisecracks! I got my continuities mixed up for a sec."
  • Bosses often use the same tactics from their game appearances, when applicable- for example, Groundchuck rips a pipe off the wall to use as a weapon when he gets halfway through his health like he did in Manhattan Project.
• Crazy-Prepared: Among other contingencies, Shredder has kidnapped everyone that the turtles care about. This includes their master Splinter, as Shredder reveals after Leonardo tries to call him. Second one on the list after April, no less.
• Damsel out of Distress: April is tied up on her chair while you fight Rocksteady and Bebop. After she's freed, Shredder comes out to kidnap her again like in the second NES/first Arcade game... and April promptly whips him with her microphone cable and he flees.
• Dance Party Ending: The game ends with the Turtles holding a concert for everyone and singing "Pizza Power".
• Decomposite Character:
  • The human form of Baxter Stockman (featured in the original arcade game and The Hyperstone Heist) turns out to be his twin brother Barney Stockman, effectively avoiding the redundancy with the "mutated fly" form.
  • The Technodrome boss fight from the NES game is turned into a machine separate from the Technodrome called the "Technodrome Scout."
  • Cyber Shredder from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tournament Fighters appears a the Final Boss, but rather than being Shredder turning himself into a cyborg, it is instead a Humongous Mecha piloted by Shredder.
• Defeat Means Playable: Most of the bosses and minibosses are unlocked as playable characters after their respective levels have been beaten. Justified, as some are duplicates made by Donatello's latest invention.
• Degraded Boss:
  • One level has a boss fight against three Triceratons, who later get a rematch as regular enemies in one of the final levels. Oddly enough, none of them are identified as Captain Zorax, and the one you unlock after isn’t him either.
  • In a rare game-to-game example, the Mother Mousers go from being semi-formidable mid-bosses to regular enemies, since their Mook Maker aspects are used by Big Mouser instead.
• Demoted to Extra: Karai was the final boss for the SNES and Genesis versions of Tournament Fighters. Here, she's just an end boss in one of the first 13 levels.
• Do Not Adjust Your Set: At the start of the game, the turtles express their annoyance at Shredder using their TV signal to announce his latest plan, yet again.
• Dragon Their Feet: Zigzagged, as the game frequently changes up whether you fight Krang or his associate Shredder as the final villain of the game, especially once you reach the final battle (in which this happens three times in a row).
• Dual Boss: The game has several boss fights where you fight two or more foes at once: Bebop and Rocksteady, General Traag and Sergeant Granitor, Dirtbag and Groundchuck, Tokka and Rahzar, a trio of Triceratons and Shredder and Krang.
• Earn Your Fun: The story mode must be cleared before the arcade mode can be played. It grants you access to every playable character from the start, including the final bosses.
• Enemy Eats Your Lunch: When fighting Baxter Stockman at Channel 6, he can (and will) eat the pizza nearby when his health gets low enough, assuming the player left it around to use later. He even gets a unique line should he pull it off.
• Everybody Was Kung-Fu Fighting: Not only are the series' usual fighters and martial artists involved in the gameplay, April and even the Channel 6 crew provides their own share of fisticuffs.
• Excuse Plot: The game's simple premise can be summed up with the following: Shredder celebrates his rivalry by kidnapping everyone that's helped the turtles, let's go and kick shell!
• Executive Suite Fight: The boss battle with Baxter Stockman occurs in Burnes' office at the Channel 6 building.
• Fake Difficulty: Some characters aren't designed in a way that makes them suited to certain levels or bosses. As the player can't switch characters during a level, they are stuck using that character until they run out of lives or beat the level.
• Final Boss: The final boss fight is against Cyber Shredder, which is the Shredder piloting a mecha resembling his depiction in the SNES version of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tournament Fighters. The fight with him begins after he and the player(s) get transported into Dimension X, just because.
• Flunky Boss:
  • During the boss fight with Rat King, he uses his flute to summon his rat minions. You can do a few cheap hits on him while he does this.
  • Similarly in the Dojo, Tatsu will occasionally summon other Foot Soldiers to aid him.
• Forced Tutorial: You have to play the tutorial each time you start Story Mode.
• Foreshadowing: While going through the Channel 6 building, you come across the set for the Tournament Fighters broadcast. This hints that Baxter Stockman is not the last boss you fight in this level- that game's final boss, Karai, is.
• Glass Cannon: Hothead is the strongest playable character by far. However, he's slow, takes more damage, and his super move doesn't have much range.
• Jack of All Stats: While many other characters' stats vary wildly, the four main turtles have even stats.
• Joke Character: Vernon Fenwick is deliberately programmed to be the worst character to play as. His attacks are the weakest and he doesn't even have his own super move.
• Justified Tutorial: The tutorial is presented as Splinter running the turtles through their daily training session.
• Laughably Evil: Shredder. The game's intro has him appear on the turtles' TV, prompting "Aaaww, not this again!" from them. He replies "YES! This again!"
• Limit Break: Every playable character except Vernon Fenwick has a self-replenishing green bar of energy that enables them to use a super move when full.
• Megamix Game: The majority of the game's levels come from the Konami games, yet are usually arranged to some degree. Some are shortened, others are combinations of two formerly unrelated levels, and at least one has a new segment to extend it.
• Mood Whiplash: The Shogun appears as the stage boss for the Dojo to a rather unsettling theme (complete with garbled speech) before fighting. To add to this, his boss theme is something right out of a horror-based game.
• Mythology Gag: The entire game is a non-stop parade of these, both to various elements and scenes from the cartoon and its various tie-ins.
• Nostalgia Level: Many levels are taken from the Konami's era TMNT games. Special mention goes to the second Technodrome stage. The entire first half is ripped right out of Radical Rescue, right down to the grey color pallette!
• Not His Sled: The Damsel out of Distress incident that's mentioned above changes the ending to the first level from The Arcade Game, so it won't be required to save April a second time.
• Now What?: Played for laughs. After the villains have been exiled to Dimension X, the narration openly wonders about how the turtles are going to get pizza delivered to the Technodrome.
• Offscreen Moment of Awesome: Courtesy of Shredder himself. Most of the people he had kidnapped include seasoned combatants like Splinter, Casey Jones and Usagi.
• Play as a Boss: After you clear a level, you’ll unlock the ability to play as the bosses you encountered during it. However, this only applies to bosses that can be made into characters- things like the Big Mouser and the Technodrome Scout don’t count. Also, you’ll have to beat the game to unlock the bosses you fight in the Technodrome (Scale Tail, Pizzaface, Scratch, War, Shredder, Krang, Super Shredder, and Cyber Shredder).
• Recurring Boss: Shredder and Krang are repeatedly fought a few times throughout the game. Really fitting, since they are the main villains.
• Recycled Soundtrack: In an example from outside of the series (It'd take all day to list music from previous TMNT games), the stage and boss themes from The Adventures of Bayou Billy, another Konami game, can be heard at the Swamp stage and battle with Leatherhead, respectively.
• Reference Overdosed: This game has loads of references to TMNT published by the Archie Comics, the Konami's TMNT video games, the toyline and of course, the TMNT cartoon series. This goes from the game sprites, the move sets, sound effects, sound clips, music, sign posts, background characters, playable characters, stages and so much more, it will take all day to write them down.
• Remember the New Guy?: Fugitoid is the only playable hero who didn't appear in the '87 cartoon or its tie-in media, as he's a character from the Mirage comics who got a figure in the corresponding toyline.
• Rescue Arc: As befitting the game's subtitle, the entire first half of it has you rescue the Turtles' allies at the end of each stage.
• Retraux:
  • The mini boss fight against Tempestra drags you to a 8-bit graphics background and even more digitized music (considering the game itself used the NES music).
  • Much later in the game, in the second to last level, you get to experience a stage ripped right out of Radical Rescue on the Game Boy. At the end you fight the first boss from that game, Scratch.
• Roaring Rampage of Rescue: Roughly three quarters of the game involve saving the Turtles' allies and taking down the Foot Clan in the process. The last quarter only involves doing the latter.
• Run the Gauntlet: Definitely has elements of this; the turtles have to scour the entire city (and Dimension X) and take out the entire Foot Clan and all of their leaders, before they can rescue their allies. Only three quarters of the villain roster are defeated by the time you get to the Technodrome!
• Schrödinger's Player Character: Apart from April and Splinter, the only heroes to be featured in late-game cutscenes are the turtles. The turtle concert at the end makes up for this by showing their mugshots on a monitor.
• Sequel Escalation: In the older games, Shredder kidnapped April, and Splinter if he was lucky. Here, he's made sure to have practically everyone that the turtles have any connection to kidnapped before they could notice.
• Sequential Boss:
  • Tatsu and Shogun are fought in a row, with no breaks in-between.
  • Baxter Stockman and Karai are fought in two different areas, with only a cutscene separating them.
  • Mecaturtle goes through a normal doppelgänger appearance before turning into a robot for his second phase.
  • The final battle gives four phases to Shredder and Krang. First, Shredder and Krang fight you in a Dual Boss, then Shredder turns into Super Shredder, reverting back and fleeing following his defeat, then Krang returns piloting the walker he used in the episode "Turtles on Trial", before Shredder returns for the final phase piloting a mech known as "Cyber Shredder".
• Shout-Out:
  • Before fighting Armaggon, a derivative of the Jaws theme plays out from its NES game.
  • After clearing each of the final levels, you see a map path screen for the Technodrome, just like with the castle levels in the Mega Man series.
  • Leatherhead's stage, the Swamp, happens to come right out of The Adventures of Bayou Billy.
• Team Member in the Adaptation: Barney Stockman, who had no relation to the Foot Clan beyond being Baxter's brother in the cartoon, is included among its ranks here.
• Trick Boss: After defeating Baxter Stockman, it looks as though you've saved the Channel 6 crew, right until Karai breaks in the building and snatches them after throwing a flash bomb, forcing you to jump on a nearby train and go after her.
• Unique Enemy: Besides using those from the official games, this one introduces various new ones from the cartoon that don't show up in other levels, such as the clones of Krang's original body in Dimension X, and the giant mutated bananas and pizzas in one of the Technodrome levels.
• Variable Mix: Tempestra uses an 4-bit remix of the boss theme during her battle, which makes sense since she’s the villain of an in-universe video game.
• Video Game Cruelty Punishment: Try to attack the skater girl in the street level like in The Arcade Game, and she'll immediately retaliate with a ray gun. She's surprisingly durable, too.
• Villains Out Shopping:
  • While attacking the Technodrome, you can stumble upon Krang watching a sappy soap opera and bawling his eyes out before he fled.
  • A few sections later, you get into the Foot Soldiers' private quarters and witness them having meals shortly before attacking. There's even one preparing food in a kitchen nearby. This is also where you fight Pizzaface.
• Your Princess Is in Another Castle!: After completing the initial 13 levels, there is a cutscene where April O'Neil congratulates the Turtles for saving the day, only for Krang to appear and remark that he's very annoyed. What follows is Krang in his enlarged android body rampaging on the game's map. Approaching Krang will then activate the final four levels.