YMMV / Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1989)

• Anticlimax Boss: After all the crap it takes to reach him, Shredder is a relative pushover due to the fact that he's the only boss in the game that can be knocked back. Players who get him in the right rhythm can just keep smacking him without giving him a chance to counter.
• Awesome Music: Even critics of the original NES game have to admit that the music is pretty catchy, especially the title theme, the sewer theme, the warehouse theme, and the main boss theme. The fact that none of it is based on music from the '87 series and still leaves an impression is even more impressive.
• Badass Decay: As mentioned above, Shredder is a pathetically easy final boss, while various other sources showed him dominating all 4 turtles singlehandedly.
• Breather Boss: The Big Mouser at the end of level 4. It's completely stationary, and its only attacks are occasionally firing an eye laser and dropping regular mousers. If you stand under it with Donatello and spam your upwards attack at its weak point, neither of these will ever hit you.
• Common Knowledge: The Dam stage is not the hardest part of the game; much like the infamous Turbo Tunnel from Battletoads, it's merely where the game starts getting much more difficult.
• Demonic Spiders: It's bad enough that there are respawning enemies but there are some enemies that really make this game unfair and annoying to play.
  • The worst enemy that you will encounter in the game are the Rocket Men armed with laser guns in the later sections of the Technodrome. They appear and move so quickly that you almost can't react to them without getting hit. What's even worse is that there are sections of narrow halls that make getting shot or running into them an inevitability. It also takes two shots from the Scroll, the best sub-weapon in the game, to kill them. Or if you have single shurikens, it can kill them just as quickly.
  • The Climb Busters, large spider-like robots in Area 5, are notorious for making climbing sections a total pain since they move fast towards you and you're completely defenseless while climbing the wall.
  • Needle Beasts are large porcupine in the underground sections of Area 5. They're cheap and unpredictable as they jump and attack in completely random patterns, making it hard to not get hit by them.
• Difficulty Spike: Area 3, and it only gets worse from there.
• Game-Breaker: The scroll weapon makes quick work on most bosses. However, it's extremely rare and can be replaced by other subweapons.
  • Also Donatello, considering that his bo staff had absolutely absurd offensive power and range, which made most boss fights pretty trivial.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • By pausing the game at the right time, you can make the Giant Mouser boss fight even easier. Normally, you have to wait for it to open its mouth to attack, but pausing the game makes it vulnerable at all times.
  • The North American MS-DOS version has a required jump that is literally impossible to accomplish. However, you can still beat the game without cheats, if you do a sequence of extremely strange actions (although you still skip the rest of that level). If you have rope, there's a place on the overworld that you can walk, which triggers the use of the rope. Suddenly, you're using the climbing animation on the overworld. If you now enter a specific building, you will fall through the floor into a glitched level. You might end up dead, or the game asking you to insert another disk, or just trapped in a broken level, but there is a chance that the game will instead teleport you to the beginning of the next level. [1]
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "Don't let the Foot Clan destroy the dam. You have my support."^ExplanationApril tells the Turtles this when they rescue her. Then the dam level begins.
  • "Okay, what the hell did she ever do for you? Stupid banana raincoat-wearing bitch." ^ExplanationThe Turtles rescued April moments ago, making AVGN wonder what support she'd give them. Area 2 isn't all that difficult, though it does feature an Unexpected Gameplay Change and very precise movements. The Internet believes it is utterly impossible.
  • Cowabunga...COWA-FUCKIN' PIECE OF DOG SHIT! ^ExplanationAVGN's concluding rant of the NES game begins with this phrase. He also used it for his full theme song and the review of the third live-action movie.
• Misblamed: Franchise co-creator Kevin Eastman recalls people getting mad at him for the Dam level, apparently thinking he and Peter Laird made the game themselves and designed it. In reality, while they were involved in aspects of the games, they weren't the level designers, and Kevin Eastman himself admits to never having beaten that level.
• Nintendo Hard: Area 2 is the infamous swimming stage. Area 3 is a maze to find Splinter (though once you have the missiles, you can go right to where he is if you know the way, obviously). Area 4 is a "choose your path" with different roads to take to get to the end and towards the end are instant kill traps like fire pits and sliding spike walls. Area 5 is full of tough enemies and has a randomly placed boss who is difficult to defeat, and Area 6 is FULL of tough enemies. The jet pack-equipped laser troopers will make you tear your hair out. This game is TOUGH. But it is certainly NOT impossible.
• Overshadowed by Controversy: You cannot bring up the PC port without someone bringing up the Unintentionally Unwinnable Game-Breaking Bug in the third stage. It's physically impossible. The port is already quite bad in general, but this bug is responsible for at least 90% of the discussion surrounding it.
• Porting Disaster: The North American PC version to say the least. The third stage cannot be completed without cheating or a very strange glitch because of a design flaw in one of the sections in the sewers. The jump is impossible to make because of the ceiling being shorter and the platform on the other side being too far away. The UK Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles corrected this by extending the platform, but retained the other design decisions that made many aspects unintentionally more difficult.
  • As shown by James Rolfe, the Commodore 64 version is definitely inferior to the NES version, with two of the biggest problems being the slower gameplay and that jump and attack share the same button.
• The Problem with Licensed Games: The original NES game is infamous for its extreme difficulty, including unbalanced characters, a sudden gameplay shift in the form of a timed swimming section, a steep difficulty curve halfway through, and nonstop hordes of strong enemies. (And to top if off, the MS-DOS port is even worse.)
• Surprise Difficulty: Sure, the game's reputation precedes it nowadays, but back in '89 when the game dropped, at the height of Turtlemania... let's just say there were a lot of pissed-off youngsters.
• Suspiciously Similar Song:
  • The first few seconds of the intro music sounds incredibly similar to "Stone Cold Crazy" by Queen.
  • The Area 5 overworld theme resembles the opening riff of The Beatles' "Come Together".
• That One Boss: The Technodrome boss in level 5. First of all, level 5 is That One Level in itself due to the fact that the boss is randomly placed at the end of one of three caves. As for the Technodrome itself, the prong in its front fires a powerful lightning beam that covers a third of the play area, making it nigh impossible to approach without using secondary weapons to destroy said prong^note or exploiting a glitch with the pause menu that makes the bottom half of the beam disappear. On top of that, it also has two turrets on the body firing a constant stream of bullets at you, as well as the open compartment at the top which spawns infinite Foot Soldiers to further hinder you. All of these have to be taken out if you want any chance of safely attacking the eye at the top, which is the boss's true weak point. Hope you packed a lunch!
• That One Level:
  • The notorious dam level, dubbed "That Damn Dam" by some, and some fan theories persist that this level was what turned famed movie critic Roger Ebert off of video games (he played to this level, which allowed him to spot an inaccuracy in The Wizard.) The dam level owes its infamy due to being an underwater level as well as being a Timed Mission. You are charged with defusing eight bombs under a time limit, with annoying sea life everywhere trying to inhibit your progress. Failing to defuse them all before time runs out will result in a Non-Standard Game Over. It doesn't matter how many turtles or continues you have left; if you run out of time, it's all over. Luckily it's the only game over of its kind in this game, since according to gamers who managed to pass this level, the game gets even harder.
  • The third level is a maze where you have to find the correct solution to it, starting off with entering a nearby building to get missiles for the Party Wagon in order to destroy barriers along the way.
  • The fourth level, the Foot Air Base, is not only another maze, but it's also full of dangerous hazards, including liquid flame pits in some of the underground tunnels that will kill any turtle instantly on contact. Thankfully, the boss of the level itself isn't too difficult.
  • The Abandoned Warehouse is the fifth level and it's quite difficult due to many factors: The enemies in the caves are Demonic Spiders, and one of the three caves contains the boss, the Technodrome Defense System. If it doesn't, it brings you to an empty room, and you're forced to backtrack to the beginning of the cave. The game randomly determines which cave the Technodrome is hiding in when you enter the level, and there's no clear indication on which cave is correct until you either find an empty room or the boss. To make things worse, the enemies respawn when you exit the empty room, so you'll inevitably have at least one turtle with low health.
  • The final level, inside the Technodrome, definitely takes the cake. No checkpoints, an array of Demonic Spiders unique to this level, and some rooms are full of spikes. Fortunately, Shredder is an Anti-Climax Boss, and even then, he may sneak in a One-Hit Kill if you don't know the trick to defeating him, forcing you to resume from the beginning of the level.
• Underused Game Mechanic: Using ropes to cross gaps. The ropes only appear in Stages 3 and 4, and all of the rope jumps in Stage 3 are optional. The first building in Stage 4 requires the rope to reach the second building, but there is an easy to grab rope pickup shortly before you reach the roof. The devs seem to have implemented the rope item and felt obligated to use it somehow.
• Unwinnable by Mistake: When the player defeats the Technodrome boss, the active turtle will automatically move into position to jump into the hatch that had been spawning foot soldiers. If the turtle is standing on the Technodrome's tank treads when delivering the final blow (easily done by, for example, using Donatello's upwards attack), there is a chance that the turtle will take collision damage from the front of the treads when moving into position. If this damage is enough to defeat the turtle, the game will soft lock; the player will be brought to the turtle select screen as usual, but will be unable to select any of the remaining turtles. The only option at this point is to restart the game from scratch.

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