Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Cowabunga Collection Review

ign.com:

When the Digital Eclipse team at Konami boasted that they’d put a lot of care into the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Cowabunga Collection I wrote it off as the standard marketing line we see around any repackaging of beloved games. However, this may be the first instance where we really have gotten a truly excellent collection of these 13 games, many of which hold up well and are exceptionally difficult and expensive to get hold of in their physical forms. Not only does Cowabunga collect some fan favorites, but tucked away in the Turtles’ lair are 2,000+ items for fans to explore, including (previously) rare pieces of concept art, soundtracks with newly revealed track names added, nostalgic magazine advertisements we ‘90s kids were bombarded with, and a ton more. There are a few sour, but important caveats, though: The online component is barely functioning at launch, and when it does work there are jittering and audio issues. And while Digital Eclipse has done an okay job with latency when playing solo, there is still a lot of room for improvement when compared to other TMNT beat-’em-ups.

Most things in this collection have been a treat for a fan like myself. I’ve longed to own one of those hard-to-find arcade cabinets that can go for around $700, expensive NES cartridges like TMNT 3: The Manhattan Project, which still goes for around $50 at the low end, or the NES version of TMNT: Tournament Fighters that goes for $200 if you’re lucky to find one that “cheap.”

Getting to boot up any of these beloved games from my childhood without hassle is a joy. The Cowabunga Collection has some gems like the aforementioned NES version of Tournament Fighters or the arcade version of TMNT: Turtles in Time that, until now, could only be