Dan Geeks Out: Video Game Review #365: TMNT: Fall of the Foot Clan

TMNT: Fall of the Foot Clan

Game Boy

Nostalgia Factor:

Ah, 1990. I was eight years old at the time. George Bush was in the White House. Home Alone was dominating the box office. The Teenage Mutant Ninja turtles were still at the height of their popularity. I had played through most of the TMNT games available to me back then, such as the notoriously challenging NES game and the multiplayer arcade game. One title I was not able to play was TMNT: Fall of the Foot Clan for the Game Boy. This is a well-documented fact that loyal readers of this blog should already know, but I never had a Game Boy as a kid. As a result, I’m just now discovering and playing through some of these games for the first time, here in the 2020s.

Would this game be any good, or now that TMNT fever is over would I find that it leaves something to be desired? Only one way to find out.

Story:

Although they all had different gameplay elements, nearly every TMNT game released back in the late 80s or early 90s had the exact same story: April O’Neill has been captured by Shredder and the Foot Clan and you have to track them down and rescue her. That’s the story of this game. Nothing more, nothing less. Just classic, somewhat clichéd TMNT goodness.

Gameplay:

This game bears more similarities to the classic NES TMNT game than to the arcade game. It’s a single player side-scrolling platformer where your goal is to advance through a series of five stages, each one ending in a boss character. You start by selecting the Turtle you want to play as, and then off you go. The control scheme is very simple. Aside from being able to move with the D-pad, you only use two buttons: jump and attack. You start on the left side of the screen and you make your way to the right. When enemies appear, you hit them with your attack. They can come at you either from in front of you our behind you, so you have to remain alert at all times.

There are obstacles to jump over, environmental hazards you will occasionally need to duck under. That’s about it as far as gameplay goes. You walk to the right, you beat enemies, and you make your way through each stage. You have a health meter. Once your health meter runs out, you die and have to select a different Turtle to play as. This won’t happen to you very much, as this game is fairly easy. It is also very generous with its health items.

Bosses are easy too. Their attack patterns are very predictable. All of them basically do the same thing: run left and right across the screen while occasionally stopping to swing at you or fire a projectile in your direction. Using jump kicks and keeping away when it is their turn to attack is the key to victory. But like I said: these fights are easy. Most of the bosses can be defeated in 30 seconds, if that.

All in all, a very easy and simple game.

Graphics:

I had anticipated that this game would look like crud, being an early Game Boy release, but I think it has aged pretty well. Take the TMNT arcade game or the NES version of the game and drain its color, and that’s what this game looks like. The characters are all instantly identifiable. The bosses in particular I was impressed with. There are a wide variety of regular enemies to fight as well. The backgrounds, while basic, look really nice.

I have to say that this game did a very good job capturing the look and feel of the Ninja Turtles. 8 year old Dan would have loved this game if I had been able to play it growing up.

Sound:

This game’s sound matches its graphics. I’m not going to say the music is phenomenal or anything, but it does a great job capturing that classic feel of the TMNT cartoon. The theme song alone was enough to get me fired up to play this game.

Overall:

Once again, the Game Boy surprises me. Every single time I fire up a Game Boy title I have it in my mind that I’m going to be playing something inferior to what I’d see on the NES. It happened with Batman: The Animated Series. It happened with the Contra games, the Castlevania games, and most recently with Super Mario Land. But this game is good!

I’m not going to say it is a masterpiece or anything. It’s very short, easy, and simple. Anyone could probably pick this game up and beat it in one day, even people who generally don’t play video games. I think it is just so fun, though. I love how it captures the look and feel of the Ninja Turtles. The graphics, the music, the story, the locations, even the little generic cutscenes in between levels: perfection. It transported me back to the day when I was a carefree kid with nothing on my mind except what Turtles toy I was going to get next, or when I wanted to watch the movie again.

I didn’t know that it was possible to make me feel these things again, but this game pulled it off. If you remove the TMNT skin and replace the Turtles with generic heroes and change the music to something else, I can’t say that I’d like this game nearly as much as I do. And that’s fine. But it does show you that the game itself isn’t anything special. It’s the whole package that makes this game what it is.

THE GRADE:

B-

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1982 reviews:

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