Review: TMNT The Cowabunga Collection sums up the era in a half-shell
When Kermit the Frog first sang “it’s not easy being green”, it’s unlikely that he was referring to the NES version of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
In Kermit’s defence, his song was released 19 years before the game. Still, even if it wasn’t explicitly aimed at Konami’s 1989 platformer (and it definitely wasn’t), the sentiment rings true regardless – TMNT on the NES was extremely hard.
The Cowabunga Collection, the latest old-school compilation from the retro specialists at Digital Eclipse, has an interesting mode that proves that while the game may be extremely difficult, it isn’t unbeatable.
As seen in a handful of other Digital Eclipse titles, the Watch mode plays the game for you so you can study the techniques required to complete each stage.
And when we say it “plays the game for you” we literally mean it – this isn’t just a YouTube video being played back to you, it’s a pre-recorded set of button commands being carried out in real time, the video game equivalent of a self-playing piano.
Because it’s playing the actual game, it also allows for a brilliant twist in that at any point you can press a button and take over the action. It’s like having a virtual older sibling who gets past the tricky bit before handing you the controller.
Thankfully, most of the other games in the Cowabunga Collection aren’t quite as hard as that first NES affair, which is well-known for its difficulty (or at least these days it is – back then it was just one of many challenging NES games).
Most of the other console games included are manageable, and while the two arcade games which are included are typical early ‘90s coin-op cheap-fests designed to make the player die regularly, but the ability to add coins at will allows players to brute
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