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Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (Switch): COMPLETED!

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Yes! The arcade version! It’s another game on the Cowabunga Collection, and probably the best one on there from what I remember.

Sure, it’s mindless and lacking in combos and special moves like newer examples of the genre, but it’s a classic and you can never hear “SAY YOIRE PRAYERS, TOITLES” too many times. Also, being an arcade game designed to extract as many coins from your purse as possible, it’s really rather hard and the bosses especially are just unfair money-sponges, but it doesn’t matter when you can just feed it unlimited virtual credits.

We also played through in three player, which is a very unusual thing these days.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Fall of the Foot Clan (Switch): COMPLETED!

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Originally a Game Boy game, this TMNT game is now one of the games on the “Cowabunga” collection, and it… isn’t great. Pretty sure it wasn’t great at the time, either, what with the flickery graphics and barely-there animation and repetitive gameplay and the tiny viewport and, well, it goes on. It’s not that far from Kung Fu Master for most of the game, having to attack enemies as they approach from left and right, but there’s also some basic platforming and jumping over tumbling rocks and stuff.

In the Game Boy’s heyday, there were probably a trillion (conservative estimate) games near identical to this with various different licences, but being Turtles, Fall of the Foot Clan was probably more visible. Plus, you get to choose which turtle you want to be for each level even though they make no difference whatsoever, bar the two animation frames of swapped out weapons.

Still, it isn’t terrible. The Game Boy was incredibly underpowered and by rights shouldn’t have even been able to manage half the games it did, but FotFC is not the best fit for the device.

Lost in Play (Switch): COMPLETED!

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A point and click adventure game set in the imaginations of two kids playing with a weird collection of creatures and characters, some Alice In Wonderland-esque trippiness, and some fantastic art and cartoon level animation? Sure, why not.

Not unlike The Many Pieces of Mr Coo, Lost in Play is wordless, with intent and conversations in the game taking place via icons, gestures and various non-vocal grunts and outbursts. It does mean that a bit of nuance is lost, but it also means the devs don’t need to localise. Besides, it’s all nonsensical, what with gnomes and frogs and strange flying devices and a toilet inside a whale, so actually trying to understand is probably unnecessary.

It wasn’t especially hard, mainly as it did manage to have puzzles that made some sort of logical sense (if no real-world sense, of course), and I found it thoroughly enjoyable and humorous. And very pretty and well animated.

Super Mario Land (Switch): COMPLETED!

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Ah, who doesn’t remember the chart-topping MC Mario “Folks round here think I’m crazy, but I gotta rescue Daisy” song that was based on the music from this, slightly odd in hindsight, Game Boy Mario game? Kids, that’s who. Tch.

And it is a bit odd. Super Mario Land starts out as a seemingly normal, low resolution and black and white approximation of the NES classic, but adds different enemies and the fire flower is a bouncy ball and there are scrolling shooter levels. It isn’t a bad game, but put it next to Super Mario Land 2 and it’s like they’re not even the same console generation, let alone in the same game series.

I completed it, of course, and it was ridiculously easy. But not actually bad.

Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown (Switch): COMPLETED!

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I have mentioned many times here how I do like a good (or even, a fair-to-middling) Metroidvania game. So when I discovered that the already great looking Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown was such a game in that genre, I leapt on the demo and was so struck by it I did a very rare thing – I bought an actual physical copy.

It’s really good. It does all the great things Metroidvanias do, by giving you additional powers to defeat new foes and reach new, and previously unreachable, areas, eventually turning you into a walking tank. It also has excellent combat, with a huge number of sword based attacks but also a bow and arrow, a boomerang-like chakra thing, magical special attacks, and all sorts of dashes, juggles and dodges making each fight enjoyable and varied. Metroid Dread was a great game, but the combat was mostly shoot or missile or bomb, whereas here it’s much more deep and fluid.

Although not linked to any of the previous Prince of Persia games in any way, there are thematic similarities. There’s the obvious one – it’s set in Persia – but also there’s a “sands of time” thing going on. The story involves Sargon (you) and his friends chasing after a kidnapped prince into a cursed city, In this city time had gone weird, with time loops and stopped time and future, past and alternative timeline events all occurring. Sargon also manages to learn some time related skills, like slowing it or pausing it.

Despite being based in a city, there are a number of varied areas, most housing a boss of some kind. There are a few distinct areas to the city itself (including one that is at night), but also dark caves, an icy mountain, and a whole section where storm-tossed ships are frozen in time. Bosses are difficult, but all can be bested by carefully noting their attack patterns and weaknesses so they always seem fair.

I did run into a game breaking bug, however. Near the end of the game you have to reach and ring three gongs. En-route to one of these you have to fight a series of enemies and every time I killed the second one, the game crashed. It turned out to be a bug introduced in a previous update, which also affected other platforms the game was on, and to be fair Ubisoft did fix it (although it took over a week before I could continue playing). Annoying, but it didn’t make me think anything less of the game, which I loved. So much so I even went and 100%ed it after completing the story!