YMMV / Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Arcade Game

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• Awesome Music: You better bet this has awesome music. No matter how many times you listen to it. IT'S AWESOME, DUDE! The music is that legendary. Case in point: Fire! (NES version).
• Broken Base:
  • Which version is the better version: The NES or Arcade version? Heck, just comparing the music between the two versions (higher fidelity versus smoother instrumentation) can cause a fight. There are many who prefer the arcade version who nonetheless feel that Konami did the best they could with the NES hardware, but even then, not everyone feels that way.
  • The cover version of the 80s theme song found in the initial Arcade1up cabinets and the Cowabunga Collection that was done due to the original recordings being Screwed by the Lawyers for the rerelease; a butchering of the original song, or a cover that did the best it could to emulate the original?
• Nintendo Hard:
  • The arcade version, and unapologetically so, with an interesting twist: Aside from the difficulty dip-switch, this game features a sort of Dynamic Difficulty involving the enemy count that kicks in depending on several factors, including how many people are playing in the game, and — chiefly in one-player mode — whether or not the player has died/continued. Beating any level without losing a life will make the subsequent level much tougher (in that you have many more enemies to contend with in each wave), and dying at all will reset the soldier count to an easier level. Also, some bosses (namely the Dual Boss with Bebop & Rocksteady, and the final battle with Shredder) will have more health if you reach them without dying.
  • Now bear in mind that, by default, your life bar can take on average about 3~8 hits before you die, depending on what it is that damaged you, and the original arcade game settings allow for one life per credit. The Xbox Live Arcade version gives you 20 lives. Nintendo Hard indeed.
  • The NES version itself is quite difficult, as it uses the standard three Lives and three Continues format and extra lives are far and few in between — only given every 200 kills; which is roughly every two or three stages in a single player game; kills are not shared in a two-player game, and there are two extra stages in the NES version compared to the Arcade version. And it only allows for two players. To compensate, the Turtles in the NES version can take much more punishment before dying, and the Dynamic Difficulty feature mentioned above has been removed.
• No Problem with Licensed Games: The Arcade and NES versions are both fondly remembered by fans.
• Signature Scene: The cutscene at the end of the first level, which has Shredder jump out of April's blazing apartment with her in tow as the Turtles follow after them. It helps set the tone for Shredder's more badass portrayal here and is occasionally homaged in fan works.
• Surprisingly Improved Sequel: The original NES game, despite being the first number entry, was a TMNT game In Name Only. This game on the other hand had characters from the show, ranging from: Bebop and Rocksteady, Baxter Stockman, Lieutenant Granitor, to General Traag, had a very fluid battle system and set the tone for the next two TMNT console games. Note however that this is not the case in the original Japanese release, which had a different title from the first, establishing it as its own game.
• That One Boss:
  • Krang takes way more damage than anything before him and will hit you with a kick attack that does a lot of damage and has a lot of reach whenever you get near him, meaning about the only reliable way to hurt him is with jump attacks.
  • Shredder, despite already being the Final Boss. He creates a duplicate of himself for each Turtle fighting him, making it almost impossible to tell which is the real Shredder, and his One-Hit Kill attack (which is guaranteed to kill you, so having more players in the boss fight can actually make it more difficult), the final battle can be downright infuriating. His duplicates have less health than he does, but if you kill them, he just creates a replacement. This is on top of him being fought immediately after the above-mentioned Krang.
  • Lieutenant Granitor, in the Arcade version (though he's no slouch in the NES). Similar to above, he takes a considerable amount of hits and his attacks can be quite challenging to dodge. And when they connect, especially when he fires his Hibachi Blaster Cannon, it does a major blow to the player's health. There's a reason this particular boss fight has a rep of being the bane of No Death-Runs.

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