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PC|ONE|PS4|SW TMNT: Shredder's Revenge

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PC|ONE|PS4|SW TMNT: Shredder's Revenge

Unread postby icycalm » 17 Jun 2022 01:07

Full title wouldn't fit in the subject line: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1361 ... rs_Revenge

Just came out, I just bought it and lots of people have bought it [ > ], let's hope it's good. One thing I don't like off the bat is that the extra two characters you need to use to play 6-player aren't that cool-looking. In fact they look crap and I'd rather not play the game at all than use them. But we'll see how it works out if we ever manage to get 6 players in. Maybe you will eventually be able to mod them into something else?

It DOES look like it's been pumped out quickly to cash in on SoR4's success (otherwise it would at the very least by as high-res as SoR4), but it may also be a decent game, who knows.

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Definitely need scanlines for this.

Release Trailer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozKsDzumb0c

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icycalm
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CULT LIVE: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge

Unread postby schadenfreude » 17 Jun 2022 23:08

The YouTube title is too long, so poor Archonus's name was lobbed off the end:

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge (Arcade Gnarly) with ChevRage, schadenfreude and Archonus
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbq7HM5EeKc

The first thing you'll notice is how pixelated the graphics look, like the jagged corners around the button icons on the main menu. It looks like something you'd see in a GBA game, but at least that expects you to be playing on a small screen (and of course all those games are much improved on a bigger screen with proper scanlines). Shredder's Revenge badly needs scanlines, but the developer didn't provide any shader options in the game. After our session, I messed around with ReShade and got a much better image with just a few minutes of tweaking, which we should try next time. Admittedly the pixelation isn't distracting when there's a lot of motion or action on the screen, but during downtimes the upscaled, low-resolution assets are conspicuous, as seen on the walls and buildings in the stage backgrounds. The game's installation size is 715 MB, compared to 6 GB (!) for Streets of Rage 4. I know it's an oversimplification, but the latter's bigger art assets have a lot to do with the size difference. And regarding quality of art, there's no comparison between the two games, as you can infer even from screenshots. Somehow the artists even messed up the large images of the characters in cutscenes, with April's face in particular looking badly mangled, and somehow the cutscene character art in Turtles in Time from 31 years ago looks superior. At least in the game the four turtles look respectable and are well-animated, to far more detail than in previous titles, and there are plenty of small touches in the stage backgrounds to keep things interesting, but SoR4 set the graphical bar really high, and I had hoped that having the same publisher for this game would give us a similar level of quality.

Mechanically, the first problem and main issue I have with Shredder's Revenge and indeed all previous Turtles belt-scrollers is that you can't pick up any new weapons in the game. One of the coolest conventions laid down in Double Dragon and continued in Final Fight and so on is that you're thrown into the streets armed with nothing but your bare fists and by the end of the game you will have used everything from measly punches and kicks to lead pipes, knives, broken bottles, whips, even crazy shit like car tires and trash cans, etc., to defeat heaps of enemies and cover the streets with their corpses and blood. Meanwhile in Turtles games, if you're playing as Donatello, he has to enter the game with his bo, Raphael has to have his two sai, and so on, and there's no reason to expect the turtles not to have them, but using impromptu street weapons is a significant part of the fun of this genre, and it's totally lacking in these titles. There are at least destructible objects, like wooden boxes and exploding barrels, and occasionally there will be an object you can strike and send sailing into a line of approaching enemies, but most of the time you'll just be using your own weapon(s) to clear the screen and proceed through the stage.

My second problem with Turtles belt-scrollers is a lack of throwing moves for crowd control. Now there are some throwing moves, the most famous being the "throw the enemy at the screen" move introduced in Turtles in Time, but it's a toss off the screen into the foreground and not into a crowd of enemies, like you can do in the Final Fights, Bare Knuckles, and countless others. Like impromptu weapons, one of the coolest things about these games is being surrounded by enemies and throwing an enemy from one side of the screen into the crowd on the other side, dropping all the struck enemies to the ground and temporarily incapacitating them while you work on the enemies on the other side—and perhaps repeating the move when those downed enemies get back up and approach you again. There is a special move here that strikes all enemies around you, just like the desperation move in Final Fight, but instead of draining your health for every enemy you strike with the move, there's a separate gauge that charges when you hit enemies, or you can charge it yourself by doing a taunt. Regardless the special is not the same as throwing a body into a crowd of enemies, and I really miss it when I play TMNT games.

And speaking of enemies, in Turtles games you'll fight Foot Soldiers, lots of Foot Soldiers. Blue ones and red ones and green ones and orange ones. There is some variety to how they act or if they're armed, etc., but they're palette swaps, and you won't find as interesting of combinations of enemies like in Final Fight, where you'll be swarmed by grunts while a guy behind the crowd throws firecrackers at you, or an Andore will rush into the circle and chest-butt you to the ground, and so on. Turtles belt-scrollers prefer large crowds of samey enemies to the tactical placement and variety you'll see in the Final Fights and Bare Knuckles and their ilk, and it gives these games more of a fast-paced, button-mashey feeling, for lack of a better term, because there's less emphasis on a preferred order when clearing a section of enemies. Also proving my point is that friendly fire is always off in the Turtles games, and in Shredder's Revenge there's not even an option to enable it. It would be utter mayhem with it on and 4-6 players filling the screen, which might be why it was never enabled in previous games, but not having to worry about striking your teammates contributes to that button-mashey feel I mentioned.

But I will praise the move list in Shredder's Revenge as easily being the most extensive of all the Turtles belt-scrollers, and my friends and I had a blast figuring them out and sharing with each other when to use them. Every playable character has the same number of moves and inputs for each move, but their animation, range, damage, and duration vary. The turtles are also more distinguishable this time, with unique running animations and running speeds, for example. And in what I think is a first for this genre, straight out of Gears of War is the ability to revive a downed teammate after he hits 0 HP by comically fanning a pizza slice under his nose (like using smelling salts to awaken someone from a faint). If you hold the slice there long enough without getting hit and before your wounded buddy's timer hits zero, he'll be revived with a small amount of health. As a team of three we used this to great effect, with one of us distracting the enemies while the other worked on reviving. Initially I worried this mechanic would make the game too easy, but we were plenty challenged: I found the game in its hardest mode more difficult than Sor4 on highest default difficulty, where I was able to get further in the game with two people than three people here, in about the same amount of playtime.

Overall, Shredder's Revenge is good fun and nostalgic if you grew up with the IP like I did, and while I'd say it's the best of the TMNT belt-scrollers I've played, these games are in no way at the top of their genre, despite what you might hear from nostalgia-drunk old-timers online, and you're better served by playing the Capcom and Sega greats if you want to experience the peaks. I look forward to playing it more though, especially with at least four players so we can get all the turtles on the screen simultaneously.
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Re: PC|ONE|PS4|SW TMNT: Shredder's Revenge

Unread postby icycalm » 18 Jun 2022 00:11

Thanks for the impressions. I fixed the YT video title. It has a shorter limit than Twitch which sometimes leads to this sort of issue.
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