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Of the many one-on-one fighters in the 16-bit era, TMNT was one of the best of them, certainly on the Super Nintendo. Featuring large, well animated sprites, Tournament Fighters manages to offer both a genuine alternative to Street Fighter 2 and captures the spirit of the cartoon series better than any other game. Various modes of play include Story, Tournament, Versus and watch mode. Story sees you controlling one of the Turtles in a bid to rescue April and Splinter, but Tournament allows you to control a variety of the enemies in the game to chase a cash prize. There are 10 playable characters and two bosses. Each character has a typical range of special moves of the Dragon Punch/Fireball/Sonic boom variety. The balance is generally pretty good power and recovery times are well thought out for each character. Also available are danger attacks, usable after sustaining a number of hits that fills the gauge under the energy bars. Fights are brilliant fun, the characters feel perfect in control and hits are registered with suitable crunches and feedback animation. Graphically the game is excellent. The turtles look great and the other characters are really well drawn with good animation. Backgrounds are vibrant with plenty going on in each. The sound is superb too with great voice samples, crunching sound effects and a supremely upbeat soundtrack. Overall TMNT is a superb fighter and probably the second best fighter on the SNES at that time, maybe overall. The game is challenging and will last quite a long time. It has good depth of moves, combos and plenty of characters. Be warned though, the last boss is a little cheap!

Thanks to Michael Bay’s latest blockbuster, it might be difficult to conceive that the Turtles were at one time actually cool, but our “heroes in a half shell” embodied the very spirit of ‘90s youth subculture. The colorful costumes, nonstop action, karate theatrics, and pizza—lots and lots of pizza—translated really well to arcades, and the first Turtles arcade game was a massive success. Konami’s sequel, Turtles in Time, features a longer campaign, more locations, and more ways to punish your enemies. For instance, you can grab onto your opponents and swing them into other enemies or throw them toward the screen. The storyline has the Turtles getting trapped in a time warp and traveling to different historical eras like the Wild West or Stone Age. Their mission is to return to the Big Apple and bring Shredder down before any harm can come to the city in their absence, but there are always complications. The Turtles didn’t step into the time warp alone; legions of Foot Soldiers and Krang’s henchmen were sent in after them, meaning that every stage is crawling with hostile foes who want nothing less than to see turtle soup on the menu. The grueling road back to the present is best experienced with three friends in the arcades, and this is where the original game has the advantage over the Super Nintendo port, which accommodates only two players. The SNES version loses some frames of animation, too, and there are occasional drops in framerate, but overall, it’s a faithful port of the original and even features some exclusive bosses, stages, and Mode 7 effects. Turtles in Time takes us back to an era when the Turtles ruled TV. If you want to see them at the apex of their glory, unearth this classic.

Tchou’s the kind of game you would have seen in arcades, or on consoles, in the early to mid eighties. It’s the kind of game that’s all about testing your reflexes to see how far you can get. You play as an alien in a UFO, who we can probably assume is Tchou, and your mission is to survive the waves of enemies that appear before you. One button fires, while the other serves as your shield. Each time you use a shield you get a brief moment of invincibility in exchange for one of your shields. If you take damage your shield will activate and save you, but at the cost of all your shields. Taking damage without any shields on you is something you’d probably want to avoid. The good news is that your shields recharge over time, which means you don’t really have to be too stingy using it to defend yourself from enemies and bullets. Your progress is measured by the number of attack waves you manage to clear. The enemies don’t do a whole lot besides move in pre-set paths across the screen, but some of them can take more than one shot, and they can end up slamming into your ship rather quickly. Apparently there’s a boss fight at the end against “The Orange Evil Octopus”, although I’ve never gotten that far. The graphics were done by the programmer’s son and wife, so they have a very, err, hand-drawn look to them, but there’s a nice music track that plays throughout the game. It’s not the most complex of shooters, but it’s still one worth playing if you’re a fan of stuff like Galaxian.

Top Gear is a 1992 racer for the Super Nintendo. It is basically a restyled version of the ST & Amiga game Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge for the machine and it is rather good fun. Using the standard into the screen viewpoint the game presents you with a fast and smooth scrolling road that can undulate frantically to keep you on your toes. You race against a field of 19 other cars and one of these cars is a constant rival due to the split screen mode. The game is always split screen so if a second player is not around you will race against a CPU opponent. This actually helps to keep the action pretty intense as you always have someone to beat. There are 32 tracks across 8 areas and 4 different cars to choose from, each with very different statistics. Generally the white car is the best to use but the others are great to keep the difficulty up. Passwords are used to continue but they are short and easy to remember. There is also a choice of difficulty levels and auto or manual gears. The music is also excellent so all in all this is a great racer.

Out of all the platformers shown off in this article, Uwol has to be the one with the most polish of them all. The fact that the programmers included a copyright screen when the game starts off shows how much effort put into this production and it only goes up from there. Interestingly enough this game is actually a conversion of a homebrew Spectrum game of the same name and even with the game’s graphical enhancements it’s still pretty entrenched in its 8-bit roots. You play as Uwol, some kind of yellow dog bear thing, and you have to collect all the coins on the screen while avoiding the robots. You’ve also got a pretty strict timer at the top of the screen and when that runs out a ghost will show up and start chasing you down, making things even tougher for you. Once you collect the coins either one or two exits will open up and, depending on which ones you take, you’ll end up going to different levels entirely. It’s a neat feature that opens up a lot of replay value, if you can handle how rough the game can get. The graphics have a nice 8-bit style to them, more C64 than NES, and there are quite a few original songs to listen to as you play. Uwol’s probably one of the best homebrew games you’re likely to find on the SNES and, if you think you can handle the challenge, it’s very much worth tracking down.