From the Memory Bank: My History with Video Games

Quick Impressions: "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Hyperstone Heist" (Genesis)

As someone who grew up with beat-'em-ups and considered them to be one of the action-game genres best sub-genres, I'm sad to say that I fell out of love with them over the years.

It happened mostly because the genre stopped advancing and started to become saturated with games that all had the same tired formula: Each stage is comprised of multiple sections in which you fight 8-12 enemies then move on to the next screen to fight another 8-12 enemies and then repeat this process a number of times, and at the end, you encounter a boss that you have to necessarily tank because it has a ridiculous amount of health and insane priority.

Beat-'em-ups got predictable and boring, so I moved away from them and turned my attention to side-scrolling action-platformers, which were, conversely, constantly evolving and becoming more ambitious by the year.

Resultantly I missed out on beat-'em-ups like Knights of the Round, Streets of Rage 2, The Punisher, Super Double Dragon, X-Men, and other games that were said to be some of the genre's best. I was so disconnected from the scene, in fact, that I didn't even know that some of these games even existed! (And I didn't play most of them until fairly recently.)

The list of beat-'em-ups that I somehow failed to notice included all of the post-Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Arcade Game NES and Game Boy Turtles games and the subject of today's piece: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Hyperstone Heist, which I didn't discover until the mid-2010s. (Strangely I'm credited as the Hyperstone Heist image contributor on the Video Game Museum, which has to be a mistake because I know that I'd never touched the game before February of this year.)

Back then, I was drawn to Hyperstone Heist because of how surprised I was by its existence. I was fascinated to learn that Konami sneaked it onto the Genesis late in 1992, when no one was looking, and that it was, on the surface, very similar to the SNES version of Turtles in Time. "What a highly intriguing game," I thought to myself whenever I saw it in action and observed its familiar-looking-yet-curiously-disparate structuring and level design.

In the years that followed, I desired to play Hyperstone Heist because I wanted to get a better sense of what it was and more so because it was described to be a really good game. Also, I needed to play it at some point because a piece that I was planning to write (and am still planning to write) required me to become more intimately familiar with it. The only problem was that I could never get in the mood to do so. Any time I'd think about playing the game, my residual genre fatigue would surface and greatly diminish my desire to play it.

Things have changed since then, and in recent years, I've been getting back into the genre and looking to rediscover and play classic beat-'em-ups. And about two weeks ago, when my "Games to Play" list was starting to look severely dried up, I decided that it was time for me to stop delaying the inevitable and finally do what was right: play Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Hyperstone Heist and become more familiar with a game that was likely worth my time.

And now that I've played the game multiple times and spent a few days with it, I'd like to tell you what I think about it.

 First I have to talk about what I consider to be Hyperstone Heist's most mysterious element: its unknown timeline placement. I have no idea how it fits into the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles video-game canon, and as far as I'm aware, no one else does either!

Some say that the game is chronologically positioned between the arcade versions of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Turtles in Time, while others claim that it's simply a "remix" or "reimagining" of Turtles in Time.

For me, the evidence points toward the latter. Just look at the game's story, cut-scenes, level design, and stage progression: They're so incredibly similar to Turtle in Time's that it would be ridiculous for them to be considered elements of a standalone game!

I mean, the implication of Hyperstone Heist being a standalone game would be that Shredder is a complete buffoon who decided to (a) hatch a nearly identical plot that could be thwarted in the same manner, (b) station his minions in the exact same locations and thus remove any element of surprise, and then (c) attack the Turtles in ways that would, by now, be entirely predictable to them.

I seriously doubt that a development team would take another game's premise and reproduce it, beat for beat, in a product that's intentioned to be standalone. And I don't believe that a team could be so creatively bankrupt that it would recycle 90% of another game's content and try to pass off the resulting product as a sequel. That would be silly.

Clearly its intention was to refrain from simply porting Turtles in Time to the Genesis and instead bring a remixed version of the game to the Genesis and consequently allow the Sega fanbase to get a unique taste of the original game's action.

I'll stick to that explanation until Konami says otherwise.

 Hyperstone Heist is, as you would expect, very much like all of the other 90s-era Turtles beat-'em-ups, but it's closest in character to the SNES version of Turtles in Time. That's the case because it's built on the latter's engine and is thus almost mechanically and technically identical to that version of the game (there are ways in which it differentiates itself, yes, but I'll talk about its diverging qualities later on).

As a consequence of being built on the SNES Turtles in Time's engine, Hyperstone Heist isn't designed to take advantage of one of the Genesis' greatest strengths: its 320-pixel horizontal resolution, which gives you an expanded view of stage environments and provides you more room to maneuver. Instead its field of view is limited to the SNES' standard 256x224 pixels. And that's disappointing to me because I find the 320-pixel view to be highly desirable. I like to see more of the playing field and its visuals and have extra space that gives me more time to react to incoming enemies.

So it would have been great had Konami found a way to tweak the engine and allow for it to support a 320-pixel horizontal display.

It's too bad that it didn't.

But there are some notable differences between the two games.

To start, Hyperstone Heist lacks the throw-enemies-toward-the-screen move that was a popular feature of Turtles in Time. I miss its presence because it feels like an "advanced 16-bit move" and is generally fun to execute (and it serves as a quick and cheap way to take enemies out!).

Really, I don't understand why it was removed. Including it wouldn't have required that much extra work. The designers would only have needed to draw three additional frames of animation and four additional character sprites!

It couldn't have been a storage-space issue because the game's cart size is identical to Turtles in Time's (1MB)! And it's a smaller game in general, so it's not as though there wasn't plenty of extra storage space!

The only thing that I can think is that the move's omission was dictated by the game's nature, which is to say is that it was a casualty of the scaling-down process that partly directed the game's development.

I would have determined that the Turtles' repertoire had been resultantly downgraded had I not been very pleased by the big improvement that had been made to the game's dash mechanic: The dash is now mapped to a single button! (In Turtles in Time, dashes trigger automatically after you walk forward for about a second, and you can otherwise choose a manual option that allows you to trigger a dash by double-tapping the forward directional and then continuing to hold forward. Neither input method is as quick or as reliable as simply pressing and holding a single button.)

Consequently it's now much easier to dash and execute your running attacks: the flying kick, the sliding kick, the shoulder block, and the spinning tackle!

I love using the running attacks to get the jump on enemies as they appear onscreen and immediately set them up for body slams! It's so much fun!

Honestly, though, I can't deny that the running attacks are kinda overpowered. Most of the time, you can coast your way through multiple segments by repeatedly dashing back and forth and striking enemies with shoulder blocks and slides attacks. You can use the former to pretty much stun and nullify weapon-carrying and projectile-tossing Foot Soldiers--including the white nunchaku-wielding Foot Soldiers, who can block your standard weapon-strikes but are simply helpless against running attacks--and thus render their special abilities useless. And additionally it sets them up for easy body slams.

The shoulder block also has a limited invincibility effect during its ending frames, so you can use it to take out packs of Mousers and Robot Walkers and not have to worry about unaffected enemies striking you from behind as you complete the attack!

Sometimes I almost feel bad about using the shoulder block. You can disable enemies so easily with it that it's honestly unfair for them.

Still, I love how the dash functions and feels in this game, and I greatly missed having the same type of control over the move when I returned to Turtles in Time in following for the purpose of comparing it to Hyperstone Heist.

On the whole, Hyperstone Heist is much like other 1992-era beat-'em-ups: Its action is formulaic and repetitive. Its segments tend to drag on for far too long, and it makes you fight the same sets of enemies over and over again. This of course gets tiring after a while, and eventually it puts you in a state in which your mind starts to drift and consequently you lose focus and fall victim to attacks that you would never have landed otherwise.

I expected this to be the case, so I'm not disappointed by it. That's just how it was back then.

If the game had fewer enemy waves and shorter stages, it would fare a lot better than its contemporaries. It would have great pacing and the ideal length for a game of this type.

I mean, it's not a long game (it can be completed in about 40 minutes), no, but still it could have made its point in a shorter period of time and been a better game a result.

I have to say, though, that I really like the game's boss battles. They're manageable and have strategy to them, and I never feel as though bosses have too much priority or too many invincibility frames. The battles are fair and resultantly engaging and fun.

 This is, like I said, a short game, and I can best describe it as a condensed, scaled-down version of Turtles in Time with a little NES Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2: The Arcade Game thrown in.

Mostly it builds its stages by taking two or three of the aforementioned games' stages and combining them into one (Scene 1, for example, is a three-section stage that combines Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2's SoHo Sewer System stage with Turtles in Time's Alleycat Blues and Sewer Surfin' stages). And the majority of its Turtles in Time-inspired locations are visually and structurally similar to the latter's, so you'll probably get a strong sense of deja vu as you traverse your way through them.

As a result, the game is never fully able to fully establish its own identity, and it continuously gives you the impression that you're traveling through a world that's comprised of a haphazardly pasted-together collection of set pieces that were ripped directly from other series games.

And it doesn't help that its fourth scene, The Gauntlet, is a complete throwaway stage. It's comprised merely of (a) three segments in which multiple Pizza Monsters dive out from the water, one after the other, and force you to endure their assault (which you can easily do by hanging around the top-most plane, where they rarely appear); (b) a boss rush that consists of the bosses that you fought in the previous three scenes (Leatherhead, Rocksteady and Tatsu); and (c) the final boss battle with Baxter Stockman.

Also, it reuses the "cavern" visual theme from Scene 3's final section and tries to pass it off as new by simply recoloring it!

Scene 4 is pure filler, and it could have been safely removed. Its absence wouldn't have mattered; it wouldn't have affected the game's quality one way or the other.

And for all of these reasons, Hyperstone Heist comes off feeling less ambitious than its contemporaries. It winds up exhibiting the character of a B-tier project, which is curious because it was released in 1992, at a time when Konami was on top of its game and pumping out one high- to top-tier action game after the next.

I'm not too surprised by this, though, because it's well known that the company's earliest Genesis games were nowhere near as ambitious as its later offerings. I don't know the exact reason why this is the case, but I've seen speculation that it has something to do with the company's lack of familiarity with the hardware and its lack of available resources (it was, apparently, putting most of its money into arcade and SNES development at the time).

The result is that Hyperstone Heist is less than it should have been, and that's a real shame.

Konami should have found a way to put more effort into its creation. Because the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game franchise and Genesis-owners deserved better.

As an aside: I love the addition of Tatsu from the first Turtles movie! I always find it cool when games include characters from films (Turtles in Time did this with Tokka and Rahzar, to my great delight), comics, and other creative mediums. I like how it canonizes them and thus creates a greater cohesion within the properties' universes.

His is a cool fight, but honestly, it's largely unchallenging once you know how to approach it. You can beat him easily by moving to the the extreme opposite plane and then dashing to the other side screen, positioning yourself behind him, delivering a series of back strikes, and then repeating the process.

Still, it's a genuinely unique fight, and I like what it adds to the game.

 Unsurprisingly, Hyperstone Heist is artistically and stylistically identical to the arcade Turtles games and SNES Turtles in Time. In fact, most of its environments and character sprites are, as I've said, ripped directly from the aforementioned.

The game's most notable presentational difference is its color tone: Its visuals are darker-colored, as Genesis games' tend to be. Darker coloring usually works for Genesis games because it emphasizes shading and detailing and resultantly makes characters and textures look really sharp. And it does so here in some instances.

But the problem is that darker color-schemes simply aren't the best choice for Turtles beat-'em-ups, which are popular partly because of how starkly bright and radiant they are. Because Hyperstone Heist uses them, it lacks its contemporaries' luminance and vibrancy, and its world feels comparatively muted and subdued.

In some places, like Scene 3's opening section, the background textures are so dark and muddy that they're lifeless in character, and they're so horribly saturated that they're honestly hard to look at. It doesn't help that the game has a severe lack of parallax scrolling and contains mostly static backgrounds, which only serves to make such textures appear flat and thus even more drab.

Realistically, though, there isn't much that Konami could have done about the problem. It had no choice but to work with the palette that it was given. The Genesis' simply didn't have the types of colors necessary to replicate the other Turtles games' bright and radiant visual presentations.

But even then, Hyperstone Heist still looks very good, and certainly it has the type of fantastic sprite-work and animation that we expect from out Turtles beat-'em-ups.

Honestly, I didn't remember much about the game's music after I completed my first play-through. At the time, I was so focused on the action that I never took the opportunity to stop and get a strong sense of what the tunes were doing instrumentally and tonally. So I'm not inferring that the tunes were forgettable, no. It's just that the game's other aspects were more compelling to me.

I know now, after my subsequent play-through, that the game's music is largely recycled from Turtles in Time. There are some unique tunes, yeah, but what you'll hear, mostly, are tunes from Turtles in Time paired with stages that similar to those that you traversed in that game.

I won't say that Hyperstone Heist's music is better or worse than Turtles in Time's. It's just a little different. The Genesis' sound hardware produces music that's close in form to arcade music, so that's the character that Hyperstone Heist's music takes: It's more synth-heavy, its notes are sharper- and cleaner-sounding, and its harder-edge in general.

Turtles in Time's music, contrastingly is higher in energy, it's more reverberant, and it has more pronounced vibrato. Consequently it hits harder and is a bit more invigorating.

I have a preference for Turtles in Time's music for the stated reasons, but still I think that Hyperstone Heist's music is really great and legitimately some of the best music on the Genesis.

Oh, and Hyperstone Heist actually plays the Pizza Power tune during its credits! (Turtles in Time completely lacks this tune, which is strange considering that the arcade game on which it's based includes it.)

So I give the game points for that!

The game's sound effects have a little less punch and explosiveness than Turtles in Time's, and its voice samples are comparatively scratchy (which is common for Genesis voice samples because the console's sound hardware wasn't designed for digital audio), but still they're nicely produced and able to meet the standard that we place on our Turtles games. (And I will say that the game's laser sounds are better than Turtles in Time's by virtue of not being annoyingly squeaky-sounding.)

Overall the game's sound design is really great.

 What surprised me was that Hyperstone Heist wasn't nearly as difficult as I expected it to be. At times, in fact, I couldn't help but feel as though it was intentionally going easy on me. During my play-through, I kept having thoughts like "They could have been meaner and put more obstacles here" and "They could have given this boss more health and more priority."

But they usually didn't. Rather, they were apt to show restraint.

For that reason, I managed to beat the game on my first attempt and on a single credit (in the final stage, though, I continued to hang on by a thread, and I had no lives and only three or four slivers of health remaining when I defeated Super Shredder). It took me about 50 minutes, overall, to do so.

I'm not complaining about the lack of high difficulty, though, no. I just find it odd that there's a 1990s-era Konami game that shows mercy and doesn't require you to play through a stupidly difficult "Hard" mode to get the true ending.

How nice of the company.

 My final verdict is that Hyperstone Heist isn't as good as the arcade Turtles games and SNES Turtles in Time. It isn't, as each of them is, a next-level beat-'em-up. But still it's a solid action game and better than most of the beat-'em-ups that were released during the early-to-mid-90s era.

It's not too long or too stressful, and it's perfect for novice players who are interested in having a more-casual beat-'em-up experience and looking for a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game whose difficulty is manageable.

For those reasons, it's great as a warmup to a play-through of either of the arcade Turtles games or SNES Turtles in Time.

It's just, as I said, not quite on their level.

But still it's a fun game that's worth a play if you're a fan of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles games or beat-'em-ups in general.