Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The HyperStone Heist (Sega Genesis) 

I started playing this game a couple of days ago.  Even though I could have beaten sooner, it wasn't beat until today, simply because there are much more engaging things to do than play this game. 

This game makes me wish I had an NES so I could play Battletoads.  Oh man, did I love that game.  The people on this website should make that happen for me.   

I first started playing TMNT:HH in two-player mode with a friend.  We started playing on a whim because it was a two player game that seemed mindless enough to not care about.  We couldn't have been more correct. 

Anyway, it's okay to kill anything in this game.  Nothing dies.  It's all robots.  No body, no blood and guts on the ground.  It's nice and safe for everyone.  Even the organic looking enemies (like Foot soldiers, bosses like Rocksteady, etc) are, in fact, robots.  Their enemies are smart enough to make robots that look like flesh and bone, and the best they can come up with is stealing the Statue of Liberty.  It's excellent. 

And don't worry about death on the part of our heroes either.  Their enemies (OMG ALL THESE ROBOTS) are only able to render them dizzy.  Totally rad! 

The game starts out with April O'Neill reporting about the Statue of Liberty mysteriously vanishing and then cutting to Shredder saying some stuff about his ultra powerful hyperstone or what have you.  The only thing I really cared about was skipping through the inane storyline to try to save the world with the Turtles. 

On the first run through, I died several times and used up a continue.  We were able to reach Stage 3, but we ran out of lives.  Well, I used up too many continues and left my friend with none, so I lived on to Stage 4 while his health bar read “Game Over”.  Normally, I'd be the type of gamer who'd want to become proficient at playing games.  Not in this case,  however.  After a couple more failed run-throughs, I decided that the replay value of this game was so crappy that I didn't even feel like playing through the first levels again.  Luckily, in the Options menu, you can give yourself five lives and five continues so you only have to go through this game once. 

After setting all that up, a buddy of mine showed up to hang out.  So, I handed him the controller so he could play and I consumed some pasta.  It was delicious.  My two friends ended up being the ones playing the game and when one of them ran out of their initial five lives at the final stage, I took over so I could experience beating the game. 

Now you might be thinking that that wasn't very sporting of me.  You can keep thinking that if you wish, but the fact is that all you really need to do to defeat this game is jump and kick.  Over and over again.  You can even control where your turtle will land their ultra-amazing kick move.  Add a little dash of spatial reasoning and you should be fine.  Besides, it was only five levels.   

The whole thing is unimaginative, repetitive, and pretty much just bit off of the success that the franchise was enjoying at the time it came out.  It's hard to believe that someone purchased this game.  It's even harder to believe that it survived to present day so they could sell it to a video game store.