From the Memory Bank: My History with Video Games

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles - Shredding Me Slowly
The evil Shredder's plan was foolproof, and I was just the fool to prove it.

If any psychologist ever came up to me and asked me to provide proof of a video-game variant of Stockholm Syndrome, I'd present to him or her my past experiences with the NES' Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and say, "There's all the evidence you'll ever need."

Really, I'm sure that none of us who used to play Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles with any regularity will ever be able to come up with an explanation as to why we devoted so much of our time and energy to a game that actively hated us and wanted us dead. We'll never be able to explain why we couldn't abandon a game whose only objective, it seemed, was to break us down and feed on our tears.

No matter how many times I try, I can never do it. I can never come up with a rational-sounding explanation as to why I continued to eagerly return to a game that brought me nothing but pain and anguish.

"What gives?" I've asked myself many times over the years. "What, exactly, was the allure of this game?"

Well, my only guess is that my actions were driven by some twisted sense of brand loyalty.

See--right around the time of the game's release, I'd become a pretty big fan of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and I was very much invested in the property's heavily marketed toy line and Saturday-morning cartoon show. So it was probably the case that my great enthusiasm for the brand was overwhelming my ability to soundly judge the Turtles' sadistic new video game. The Turtles were the hot thing, and consequently I was inclined to eagerly immerse myself in their world and continue doing so no matter how much damage it was doing to my emotional well-being.

That's the only sane-sounding explanation, I think.

It all started in the summer of 1989, when Turtles-mania was kicking into high gear.

At the time, I hadn't been a TMNT fan for all that long, so I was still largely out of the loop in regard to news and events surrounding my new favorite cartoon heroes. I still didn't know much about the their comic-book origins or their expanded cast of friends, and I wasn't even aware that they were going to be imminently starring in their very own NES adventure. I didn't learn of the game until maybe a month before its release, when my friend Mike, who had been following it closely, finally decided to inform me about it. Naturally I was excited by the news (and I wasn't even mad that he'd left me in the dark for so long).

On the day Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles arrived in stores, Mike grabbed himself a copy of the game, and then he rushed home to play it. Later that day, he stood outside and waited for me to arrive at my aunt's house (which was across the street from his house), and the moment I got there, he excitedly rushed me across the street and into his basement, where his NES was set up (I remember how his TV and consoles were placed near the left side of his family's wine bar, which stretched far into the basement's back portion and thus into the pure darkness that swallowed up that part of the room). Then he proceeded to formally introduce me to the Turtles in all of their 8-bit glory!

Honestly, I have no memory of how that first session played out or what type of impression the game made, but I do know where my mind was in the following hours. I was, predictably, very envious. I wanted Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles--in part because I loved the Turtles but mostly because one of my friends owned it. At that point in my life, I was in my copycat-gamer phase, and consequently I was bound by a special rule: If one of my friends owned a game, then I had to own it, too!

So I made sure to put Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on my birthday list for that year!

For the first few months, I never played Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles alone. I always had Mike, Dominick or one of my more-temporary local-neighborhood friends (most of whom turned out to be jerks) at my side, guiding me along. I appreciated their assistance because I was somewhat intimidated by the game's overworld, whose environments were confusingly labyrinthine. There were doors and manholes everywhere, and each one of them tossed me into a large multi-path maze. And most of the mazes didn't even seem to lead anywhere; they'd simply place me near adjacent doors or manholes!

The game's level design felt tortuous and tangled and sometimes completely aimless. The first building, for instance, put you through a rigorous trial whose prize was a pizza slice that only seemed to exist for the purpose of replenishing the health that you lost in the process of getting to the pizza slice. "What the hell is the point of this building?" I'd always wonder. "What am I missing here?"

More concerning to me was the game's large number of swift, aggressive enemies, all of which were haphazardly stuffed into every narrow passage. Sometimes they'd form near-impenetrable walls, and I'd have no choice but to tank my way through the field and sacrifice a ton of health in the process. Soon I learned to fear the game's randomly chosen enemy sets--particularly the one that included the chainsaw-armed guys, the wall-hopping creatures, and the "meditating, scroll-throwing shapeshifters," as I called them. That set would always do a number on me.

I didn't like the enemies or how they were used. As far as I was concerned, the game's enemy placement and enemy spawn-rates were just plain unfair.

As I progressed further into the game, I began to feel as though its combat scenarios and boss battles were designed with long-range-capable heroes in mind. Getting close to enemies was too risky, I learned; they'd always find ways to sneak in shots or inflict contact damage. You had to keep your distance. The only problem was that three-fourths of the Turtle crew lacked long-range weapons, so you couldn't avoid getting close to enemies when you wanted to engage with them (unless you were lucky enough to have a sub-weapon).

So for my friends and I, it became customary to find ways to avoid engagement--find ways to maneuver around or despawn the larger, tougher enemies, many of which were capable of dishing out large amounts of pain and absorbing multiple weapon-strikes. That was the only way we could survive.

Whenever we'd talk about the game's enemies, our conversations rarely focused on tactics for dealing with them. Rather, we'd talk more about how disappointed we were with the enemy cast, which, inexplicably, included only a handful of familiar series characters. The rest of the characters, as far as we knew, were completely made up! Not one of them ever appeared in the cartoon! "What was developer thinking?" we'd often wonder. "Where the hell are the Foot Soldiers and the Roadkill Rodneys?! Where's Baxter Stockman and the Rat King?!" (I didn't know at the time that the game's "purple anteater heads," as I called them, were actually Foot Soldiers.)

Instead we got chainsaw-armed guys, crazy-legged wall-hoppers, meditating monks, fire men ("Fire Freaks," as the game's manual called them), flame-spewing knights with detachable heads, bomb-dropping balloons and the usual giant insects and birds. "What do any of these enemies have to do with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles?" we'd utter confusedly while shaking our heads.

The omission of recognizable characters wasn't as big a deal to me as it was to longtime fans (like my friends), no, but still it sent me a displeasing message. It made me think that the game's creators either didn't have a good grasp on or care about the subject-matter.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was an incredibly tough game. Thankfully, though, I had friends by my side to provide me knowledge of useful tactics and strategies and generally point me in the right direction. Mike, for instance, taught me how to cheaply take out Rocksteady by standing atop the room's right-positioned box pile and thrusting Donatello's bo downward. Any time Rocksteady executed his charge move, he'd take damage from a bo strike. (This didn't make any sense to us. I mean, Rocksteady was lower to the ground when he charged and thus clearly out of striking range. "How is it that we're able to hit him when he's leaning downward but not when he's standing fully upright?" we'd always wonder. We saw this weird hitbox issue as a glaring design oversight, and we agreed that its existence was further proof that the game was rough around the edges.)

I didn't necessarily like taking advantage of such a cheap exploit, but I felt that I had no choice but to do it. "What else can I do in a brutally difficult game in which conserving energy is a top priority?" I'd ask myself. I had to do whatever it took to avoid direct engagement.

Within a week or so, we established a working formula. We decided that it made the most sense for us to use Leonardo as our default character and switch off to the others when they were needed. Donatello had superior range and hit the hardest, yeah, but we didn't want to put him in the lead role because his talents were too precious and we didn't want to risk injuring or losing him in standard combat scenarios. He was our specialist, and we'd call upon him in two specific instances: when we encountered a tougher minor enemy or a boss, or when a passage's upper level was crowded with enemies and we had an opportunity to cheaply take them out from below. Raphael, whose weapon range was severely limited, was pure cannon fodder, and we'd toss him out there only when we intended to absorb a lot of damage. Michelangelo was basically Raphael II, and we'd send him into action only when everyone else was too injured and times were desperate.

In the early days, I almost never used sub-weapons like shurikens and boomerangs because, I guess, I felt that true heroes should put all of their focus on mastering the weapons they brought with them to battle. It's either that or because I just didn't see them there.

I'm not sure.

Another game element we really disliked were the damned close-quarters jumps. There were two such jumps, and both of them were of course placed at the end portions of lengthy platforming sections. The first offender was a two-tile gap placed at the end of the dam area's opening side-scrolling section. Clearing it required a pixel-perfect jump that you needed to execute at the exact millisecond you were approaching the rightmost platform's extreme edge. And you had to execute this perfect jump while dealing with the suddenly-appearing wall-hoppers that were placed there to disrupt your rhythm. Each time we played Turtles, we'd miss this jump at least a dozen times in a row.

What sucked about this jump was the consequence for missing it: You had to re-traverse the entire room and thus circle your way back up and around to the jump point; and while you were doing that, you had to once again fight your way through a storm of obnoxious enemies (like the chainsaw-armed guys, the meditating monks, and the erratically moving "brown helicopter helmets," as I called them)--the type of which you'd seen more than enough during your first 5-10 treks through this room.

Though, while messing around in the room's opening portion, Mike and I discovered a glitch that allowed us to jump directly up to the room's exit point: If you arced your jump in a certain way and then brushed up against the left wall's top portion right before your jump reach its apex, we learned, you'd be allowed to access the room's top level! The glitch didn't work consistently, and sometimes it'd take us several minutes to successfully execute it, but it was worth making the effort to pull it off because doing so allowed us to avoid having to circle our way around the room multiple times (admittedly, there were plenty of instances in which we'd get so frustrated with the glitch's refusal to work that we'd say "Screw it" and begrudgingly take the long route).

This was a life-saving glitch. It allowed us to cheaply advance past one of the game's worst room's and consequently avoid taking a huge beating.

Whenever you mention Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to people, you get a common refrain: Immediately they start talking about the dam area's water section and how much they hate it. You learn that it's one of the most feared stage sections in video-game history.

And that's surprising to me because I don't recall ever having any real trouble with the water section. Sure--I found it to be a bit a stressful because of its strict time-limit, and there were certainly many instances in which its electrified coral segments (particularly the narrow U-shaped room whose open spaces were being choked by coral) drained a lot of my health, but overall, I didn't find it to be too difficult (mostly because my experiences with Balloon Fight had helped me master resistance-based swimming controls). Really, it was an absolute cakewalk compared to some of the stage sections that followed.

I took issue only with the segments in which currents wouldn't activate until the screen locked into position. By doing this, the game created the illusion that the road ahead was free from obstacle and made you feel as though it was safe to speed ahead. So you wouldn't know that a current was about to activate until it was too late, and invariably you'd be propelled forward into an electrified hazard.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was always doing nasty things like this, and I was never sure whether it was doing so intentionally or because its creators just didn't know how to restrain themselves. I suspected that it was the former.

Area 2 (which we called "the Party Wagon stage") had another one of those pixel-perfect close-quarters jumps that we could never make with any consistency. The gap in question was a mere one tile in length, but it was incredibly difficult to clear because it was so close in proximity to the ceiling; usually the game's collision physics would cause us to bonk against the ceiling and lose jump momentum and thus helplessly fall through the gap and back down to the base level. For the longest time, our approach was to simply circle around repeatedly and keep attempting the jump until the game finally allowed us to clear it.

We were just as stunned as anyone when, a couple of years later, we learned that you could simply walk over the gap. At the time, though, we weren't sure whether this was a glitch or an intended mechanic that was dreamed up by some jackass level designer who was having a laugh at our expense.

This same room had a second tricky jump on its right side. This one was a two-tile jump placed in a similarly narrow passage. And if we missed this one (which we did at least half the time), we'd be sent back to the room below, and then we'd have to work our way back up. And every time this would happen, we'd groan and then spend the next few minutes silently wondering to ourselves, "How is any of this fun? Which absolute moron decided that ridiculously precise jumps and constant re-traversal should be foundational to a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game, of all things?"

The forced re-traversal was of course extremely irritating, but it did teach us one thing: You could control the enemy selection. If you didn't care to deal with the current selection, you could reset the room and spawn a different enemy set. We were always sure to do this when we were traversing Area 2's most challenging rooms. If we entered a room and saw flame-spewing knights and bomb-dropping balloons, we'd say "nope" and then promptly reset the room. We were happy to instead take our chances with the less-deadly fire men, eyeball spiders, and birds.

After spending a lot of time in Area 2, we developed a solid strategy for obtaining the missiles we needed to destroy the overworld's obstructive barriers. The items contained within a building would respawn whenever you exited and then reentered said building, and once we learned this, we decided that the best thing to do was refrain from searching multiple buildings and instead load up in one them! We chose the two-gaps building, since it was the easiest to locate, and its level design was immediately comprehensible (if not irritating); the subsequent buildings were too complex in design, and many of them were either diversionary or built to house only small pizza slices and unnecessary sub-weapons (well, the sub-weapons were "unnecessary" to me because I'd concluded, based off of scant evidence, that they were weak and ineffective).

Because in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, you see, picking the option that allowed you to put in as little effort as possible was always the most solid strategy. You had to do whatever you could to avoid combat and find ways to tactically skip entire sets of rooms (and basically half of the game). That was the only way you could survive. No other game was like that.

We didn't know much about the people who worked for this "Ultra Games" company, but our sense was that their game design skills were unfortunately lacking. And they were also the cruel sort, it seemed.

My personal idiocy didn't help the matter. I'd always make Area 2 more difficult than it needed to be by forgetting the controller inputs. Whenever I was controlling the Party Wagon, I'd keep forgetting that A, and not B, was the Vulcan Cannon button (the "standard bullet" button) and wind up wasting our missiles, which were finite in number. Dominick, in particular, would get mad at me whenever I'd carelessly waste missiles because he knew that my doing so was only going to result in our having to return to the two-gap hell house and spend another 10-20 minutes re-traversing that place.

Area 2's final building led into the sewers, which contained one of the most nightmarish platforming sequences I'd ever known. It was comprised of a few close-quarters two-tile jumps and repeating segments in which you had to traverse your way across series of single-tile platforms. The latter segments were particularly scary because the Turtles' controls had a loose and out-of-control feel to them, and thus trying to precisely land jumps was a huge challenge (at the time, I didn't yet know that you could simply walk over single-tile gaps). And even when I'd land solidly, I'd have the propensity to nervously overcorrect and resultantly walk right off the targeted platform and fall into the water. It didn't help that I also had to deal with aerial threats (the suddenly-spawning missile-dropping balloons) as I was erratically twisting through the air.

Also, I always struggled to clear close-quarters two-tile jumps because doing so required light button taps and I was never any good with soft inputs. I was too shaky. All I could do was tap the button as quickly as possible and hope that I happened to apply less than medium-force pressure. Usually I didn't.

It was too much for me. There were too much going on in this section, and too much calculation was needed, and I just didn't have the patience or the skills necessary to deal with such challenges (and it'd be a long time before I was able to capably complete either type of jump). So usually I'd lose at least one Turtle in this section. And in the early days, it wasn't uncommon for my friends and I to lose all four Turtles here. By then, we'd be out of continues and have no choice but to restart the game.

Had this game had any other name, we would have given up on it in less than a week. Its having Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles as its title was the only thing that was saving it.

Then there was the fearsome Mecaturtle. What we learned after falling to him multiple times was that we stood little chance of beating him if we didn't make it to him with our team fully intact. If we tried fighting him with three Turtles or fewer, we'd get squashed.

Mecaturtle had two considerably difficult forms--neither of which had a discernible pattern--so we had no choice but to engage him in battles of attrition. Our strategy was to aggressively tank and destroy his first form with Raphael and Michelangelo and then bring in the big guns--Leonardo and Donatello--to deal with his tougher second form (if Raph and Mikey were still healthy enough, we'd let them get some shots in on the second form before pulling them).

It took us a long time to get good enough to consistently make it to Mecaturtle with our team fully intact. And even then, victory wasn't a given. Mecaturtle's was always a perilous fight.

Area 3 (the "Find the Blimp" stage) took unforgiving level design to new heights. It was comprised of a near-endless number of cramped passages, all of which were stuffed to the gill with enemies, spike traps, conveyor belts, and flame pits.

At this point, the game completely eschewed sensible level design and pretty much turned into a desperate battle of endurance. Also, it introduced horribly obnoxious enemies like laser-firing mechs, four-directional turrets, and hopping, boomerang-tossing samurai.

And worse yet, the area was labyrinthine as hell. In every overworld section, there were multiple manholes, and you never knew where any of them were going to lead. Many of the manhole passages, annoyingly, led absolutely nowhere; they were designed to take you on overly long off-course treks and thus wear you down. And as were traveling across and inevitably backtracking through these awful dead-end passages, we'd continue to wonder, "How is any of this fun?! Who decided that this was the best style of level design for a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game?!"

This simply wasn't the game we wanted it to be.

By then, it was obvious to us that the level designers were well aware of the game's programming flaws and happy to use them as weapons against against the player. That propensity was strongly on display in Area 3's series of compacting-spike-wall rooms: They knew that the Turtles were apt to walk over single-tile gaps and get stuck on platform edges, and that's the only reason why they decided to fill these rooms with single-tile gaps! They wanted for the player to struggle not with the gaps, themselves, but instead the with mechanical flaws that made accurately dropping down through gaps such a huge challenge. And it wasn't a coincidence that the spike walls' hitboxes were so unfairly large. The designers purposely coded them that way. They hated us and wanted us to suffer.

It's just that we didn't want to take the hint and move on with our lives.

(Oh, and about the pizza that's placed on the second compacting room's right side: I really have to question the intelligence of the 30- and 40-year-olds who still seriously wonder why it was placed in that particular position. "How do they expect me to get that?" mentally deficient Youtubers ask in their angry review videos. They don't, you complete dinks. They expect you die! The pizza is pure idiot bait. You know--like 90% of your videos.)

We were always relieved to reach the Area 3's final segment because that was the point in which things got easy. The area's boss, Big Mouser, was a pushover compared to all of the previous challenges. He was utterly cheeseable with Donatello. All you had to do to beat him, we learned, was stand in the room's center point and continue executing upward bo strikes. If you did this, you could strike Big Mouser's vulnerable point (his glowing mouth orb) and take out his spewed minions and do so without ever having to move!

The way we saw it, the game's throwing us an easy boss fight was its way of apologizing to us for all of the hell it put us through. (We didn't consider the possibility that Donatello's being able to hit Mouser's vulnerable point while grounded was a design oversight. It probably was. I mean, the designers couldn't have been that nice.)

When my friends and I played Turtles together, we'd rarely reach the final area. That's why it was always such a nerve-wracking experience when we actually did. We'd be so scared of failing and throwing away what had been a charmed run.

The area's foreboding overworld music never provided me any comfort, but still I was fond of it. It was ominous-sounding, yes, but it also had a mysterious, stealthy flavor to it, and it made me feel as though I actually was a burdened ninja sneaking around in dangerous enemy territory ("This tune would fit perfectly into a Metal Gear game," my future self would always think). It was the ideal augmentation for the overworld's dark, blue-tinted nighttime setting; it really told the story of how quietly dangerous this place was.

More than anything, I enjoyed exploring the area's overworld and soaking in its atmosphere. Doing that was more preferable to me than entering into side-scrolling sections and dealing with the area's next-level challenges.

Though Area 4's overworld was composed of only a mere nine screens, it seemed impossibly large to me, and I felt overwhelmed as I traversed it. Thinking back on that time, I think that my perceiving the area's overworld to be intimidatingly enormous was a a product of intensifying stress. I didn't want to come this far to screw up. I was under so much pressure that every inch felt like a mile.

The area's indoor tune was among my favorite game tracks (really, the game's soundtrack was great in general; our only complaint was that it didn't have any familiar tunes, and thus it failed to truly capture the cartoon's spirit), but it was also something of a trigger. Whenever I'd hear it, I'd be reminded of how punishingly difficult Area 4's side-scrolling sections were. I'd instantly remember why I feared these sections and their nasty enemies: the exploding jellyfish and the two types of super-agile armadillo-like creatures (one looked like an alien, and the other resembled a monster from the movie Critter).

It was suicide to engage Area 4's enemies directly, so we instead had to rely on every cheap, evasive tactic we'd learned to that point (striking them from a level above or below with Donatello's long-range bo, despawing them, or using invincibility frames to tank our way past them). That's the only way we could endure the madness.

Your goal in Area 4 was to find the Technodrome, which could appear in any of three random locations. This design choice created the conditions for two entirely pointless, health-crippling circular treks through the area's merciless side-scrolling sections. And usually we'd have to endure two such treks--at times when we were already sick of being jerked around by this game. Each of these experiences was mentally draining.

In theory, Area 4 had a shelter point: a building that housed both a desirable pizza and the highly coveted scroll sub-weapon. But naturally the building's passages were crowded with annoying, hyper-aggressive enemies (mostly large, highly persistent spiders and birds). So it was too risky to even go there.

That's how it was in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Even the "safe" places were deadly.

Our strategy for fighting the Technodrome was to stand beneath the turrets with Raphael and twirl his sai upward. If we were lucky, Raph would take out both turrets and survive with a sliver of health and thus spare us from having to injure Michelangelo, who we needed to be at full strength if we hoped to have any success in the final stage (because we needed extra cannon fodder). If we could avoid getting nervous and thus refrain from colliding with the Technodrome's electrically charged forked protrusions, we'd have no trouble taking out the eye with Donatello. And then we'd move on to the final area: Area 5, the Technodrome's interior.

One observation that we couldn't help but make was that the Technodrome was much bigger than it looked from the outside. I mean, it was huge; its interior was comprised of several multi-screen rooms whereas its exterior was only one screen wide! The only way this would work, we theorized, was if what we saw in the exterior was only a side shot and the Technodrome's unseen front side was actually a mile long. (If that were the case, then trying to turn the vehicle would be a considerable challenge.)

Normally we wouldn't get very far into the Technodrome. We'd die about two or three rooms in. Then we'd throw in the towel. Even when we'd manage to make it to Area 5 with our team fully healthy, we'd still have a rough time of it. We'd struggle to find our way through the Technodrome's confusingly labyrinthine exterior or deal with its endless supply of wall-mounted turrets, spinning duck-head enemies, tail-whipping dino bots, and horribly awful jetpack soldiers (to this day, I still quiver when I see images of these purple-colored nightmares).

And when we were lucky enough to reach the area's final room, our efforts would still be in vain because our resources would, invariably, be too depleted, and the jetpack soldiers, who absolutely crowded the room's narrow passages, would grind us down and inevitably take us out. After assessing the situation, we concluded that our best shot to clear this room was to meticulously advance through its first three-quarters and then tank our way past its final part--past all of the jetpack soldiers that occupied the final part's super-narrow passage.

Sadly, this strategy never worked. We were never able to endure long enough to reach Shredder's chamber.

Eventually my friends grew bored of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and moved on to newer releases. From that point forward, I played it alone. And I kept playing it because I, unlike Mike and the rest of the crew, wasn't ready to give up on it. I was still obsessed with the idea of beating it--even though I had serious doubts about my ability to reach the game's final area without their assistance.

After a few weeks of aggressive training, though, I became skilled enough to reach the Area 5 and do so quite efficiently. But still, the Technodrome's final room continued to be an insurmountable obstacle for me. I could get so close to its end, but alas--it just wouldn't work out; each time, I'd inevitably fall to the last set of jetpack soldiers.

And soon it became apparent to me that ultimate victory just wasn't in the cards. I simply wasn't skilled enough to beat this game.

But I kept returning to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles anyway. Every few weeks or so, I'd pop it into my NES and try to beat it. Unfortunately, I was never able to.

About two or three years later, I completed the game using a Game Genie. I didn't want to resort to such an unsavory tactic, but I was desperate to make it past the final passage and see the game's ending. I didn't care about achievement anymore.

This was the first time I'd ever seen Shredder, so I didn't know what to expect. Weirdly, his fight turned out to be laughably easily (you could, I quickly learned, back him into a corner and then stunlock him with Donatello's bo or any sub-weapon). "How unbecoming of this game," I thought.

But I didn't really care about the Shredder fight, no. All I was interested in was seeing the game's ending--in finding out about the nature of the reward that had been eluding me for so very long.

And, well, the ending was a big fat nothing. It was comprised of a trio of small, washed-out-looking still images and a couple of lines of text. Only two things happened: Splinter, as he'd been longing to do, reverted to human form (and what, exactly, was stopping him from doing this earlier?), and April O'Neil congratulated me. That was it.

The ending was entirely mundane and not even close to being a satisfactory reward--not for the type of monumental effort you had to put in to earn it. Instead it was like a final kick in the teeth.

In the years that followed, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and their NES game slowly disappeared from my life, and I moved on to new things. Still, I'd occasionally take the time to think back on the time I spent with the Turtles and fondly recall how much joy their cartoon, toys, video games, and movies had brought me. But I'd never spend too much time thinking about the NES game, no. I couldn't bear to. Whenever I'd think about it, all I'd do is remember how much pain it had inflicted upon me. It was an evil, hateful game, and I just didn't need it in my life.

And yet I still wasn't able to stay away from it. I couldn't live with the idea that it had gotten the best of me, and I really wanted to beat it just to prove to myself that I could. But I didn't act on that impulse until ten years later, sometime in the year 2000. That's when I finally returned to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and beat it legitimately.

I went in confident because I'd learned, from watching play-through videos, that you could easily clear most of the game's roughest sections, like the Technodrome's final room, by charging forward while spamming boomerangs. (Who could have guessed that sub-weapons were actually useful? I mean, besides anyone who was actually paying attention?)

In the end, though, I didn't get any fulfillment from the experience. I wasn't excited about my victory. Really, I felt kinda empty. And I guess it's because a relationship built on years of abuse can't possibly culminate in a happy ending. You don't "beat" a game like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles as much as you endure its horror and try to emerge with your sanity intact.

More than a decade later, I'm still not able to provide a reasonable-sounding explanation as to why I spent so much time with this game. All it did was bring me pain and make me suffer, yet I kept returning to it for some reason. It makes no sense. I mean, I never enjoyed myself or had fun, and I'd spend most of my play-throughs wondering about where the game came from--from which fiery depth it was plucked--and why Konami, its creator, thought it would be a good idea to market an enormously difficult, punishing action-platformer to kids who were only looking to have a good time with their favorite cartoon heroes.

I have to say: If Konami's goal was to create one of the most feared video games in existence and thus damage the psyche of an entire generation, it succeeded masterfully in that mission. And if I can make such a comment and almost sound serious in doing so, then what does that tell you about the game in question?

Now, I'm not saying that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is a bad game, no. It really isn't. It's twisted and evil, sure, but it had a lot of redeeming qualities. It looks nice, it has a great soundtrack, it contains interesting settings and some cool mechanics, and it has a highly nostalgic air to it. Those were the qualities that we enjoy; we returned to Turtles specifically to experience those parts of it, and we merely endured the rough stretches in between. We knew that when Turtles was good, it was really good. And that, I think, was our impetus for returning to it; we knew that the game had some great aspects, and we were determined to see more of them even if meant enduring a huge amount of pain.

It's just that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles' worst parts are too punishing and too abusive, and they make playing the game a nightmare. They prevent it from being even marginally enjoyable.

Quite simply, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is hateful, sadistic game, and I just don't need it in my life. And I'm here to tell you, reader, that there's no way in hell that I'm ever going to return to it again!

Personally, I give it about six months.