Downloadable Content This Week - Zuma Clone, TMNT

1up has details on the week's new content from Nintendo's Virtual Console and Microsoft's Xbox Live Arcade. The 360's offering this week is Luxor 2 . A Zuma-like puzzle game, it was published previously on the PSP and PC. The 360 version will offer new levels and more complexity, and will set you back 800 points. On the Virtual Console side, we've got Star Fox 64 (1000 points), the old NES TMNT game (600 points), and the TurboGrafx title Dragon's Curse (600 points). The blurb for TMNT is retro-tastic: "Cowabunga! Players take control of the turtles in a half shell and rescue reporter April O'Neil from the clutches of the evil Shredder. Battle against the Foot Ninja Clan as Leonardo, Michaelangelo, Donatello and Raphael with their trademark weapons and ninja abilities. Search through five stages and dozens of areas throughout the New York City sewers, rooftops and ultimately Shredder's Technodrome to save April. Players must scarf down some pizza to keep up their energy, as they'll need it to defeat Shredder. Turtle Power!"

Fun Fact

[Seumas]

The guy who played Cousin Oliver (Robbie Rist [wikipedia.org]) on the Brady Bunch is also the guy who played Michaelangelo in the original TMNT movies.

TMNT port on the Wiii - Warning! Dodgy Port!

[@madeus]

I've bought a few SNES and N64 games on the Wii (N64 titles as I've run out of native titles and I skipped over the N64, SNES and NES titles because it's great to play some classics again).

While every other game I've downloaded runs just fine, and it's joy to play the likes of Super Mario again, (it's as if it hasn't aged at all, though sadly the same cannot be said of the N64 port to which time has not been kind), the TMNT port does NOT work correctly.

My memory might be a bit wonky, but while I do remember a couple of native games on the NES suffering from flickery sprites and iffy controls (some movie knock-off titles spring to mind), but TMNT was not one of them.

I can't believe anyone play tested this title before it was released - at least not anyone who knows what to look for. It's immediately noticeably sluggish, poor to respond and flickery, like it's running on an emulator that can't handle whatever routines the game is using properly. Ironically, I've downloaded the ROM and played it on a 3rd party emulator which runs the game far better.

I would understand one or two titles being a bit iffy if they'd released a huge back catalog, but games on the virtual console are only coming through at a trickle right now. This one is poor effort on Nintendo's part, and while it's playable, I would caution people against getting this one (maybe get an old Zelda title instead).