Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (arcade games)

While Konami had many very good comic book or cartoon arcade beat ’em up games, which includes X-Men and The Simpsons, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is the quintessential game to sum up the beat ’em up and spirit of the time. While TMNT was ubiquitous at the time, the arcade games were very fun to play with your friends while strolling in the mall and you saw a machine. And when you couldn’t afford to play it in the arcade, you could play the console ports. Recently another one, direct to console in these days of basically no arcade, called Shredder’s Revenge came out and reminded people of how much they missed the old days. While there’s better beat ’em up games in Final Fight and Streets of Rage, this game sat directly in the comfortable boundaries of kids’ cartoons, arcade, and beat ’em up.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles IV: Turtles in Time is in the book The 100 Greatest Console Video Games 1988-1998. Now that the Cowabunga Collection is out, people no longer have to bring out old hardware and buy games that are extremely expensive to enjoy the old games. Now the arcade games and the ports are available at a reasonable price.