Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Fall of the Foot Clan (1990)

Preliminary: Right off the bat with the first couple areas, I'm pleasantly surprised how tight the controls are. The scrolling is a bit jagged and clunky and it has the usual Gameboy limitations, but hey, it's got surprisingly good tunes so far (likely will get repetitive eventually but that's understandable for an early portable game), a nice skyline in the background and now a moody sewer setting, and tight controls. Here goes nothing.

Welp it was already starting to feel repetitive (gameplay-wise) by the end of Stage 1. The boss was neat enough, tho quite redundant since you can just out smack it. And the scrolling really is quite bad and jarring on the eyes. And your movement seems just sooo slow. Again, tho, I gotta recognize that this was for the early Gameboy and how neat it would be to have this in your little Gameboy bag for a trip to family as a kid etc.

Another pretty boring boss to end Stage 2, but hey, the Look is quite neat for a GB game, again the controls are surprisingly tight, and the tunes keep surprising me

Plus there are often moody skylines

Day 1

Already on Stage 4. Neat touch with the different characters and their main weapons, esp for a GB game, tho it really doesn't change much. Not as much as in the NES game, for instance. But a nice touch nonetheless. The music continues to change with each stage and consistently be good. The scrolling continues to be nauseating tho lol.

Day 2

It kindddaaaa sortaaaa started giving me that Castlevania feel where I liked just knowing how far to be from an enemy to attack and using evasive maneuvers otherwise. Classic feeling.

That was a lame final boss, well all the bosses were lame but especially the final boss. Still, a fun straightforward game that does well for an early GB platformer. And some good tunes at the end there

Look: 8/10 For being an early GB game, this definitely shines in the Look department.

Sound 8.5/10 Similarly, this shines for an early GB game's sound.

Play: 7.5/10 Clunky and with faults, but a gameplay I enjoy and pushed through.

Feel: 8/10 Tied to a franchise and surprisingly good for an early GB platformer.

Attachment: 7.5/10 In the end, I would rather just play console or PC platformers, since the portability of this isn't so relevant to me now. But for its time, this deserves positive recognition! How neat this would be portable when other portable games lacked!

Overall: 7.9/10

Completion: Main Story

Playtime: 45 mins

TMNT: Fall of The Foot Clan (FotFC) is a rather short portable hand held game for the game boy that is very much reminiscent of the original and well known side scrolling beat em up. However, unlike that (somewhat infamous and rather disliked) game this is a fairly easy game, while not being too easy. Like a lot of game boy games it runs a slight tad slower so that can make things a bit easier, and since the game is designed to be played on a small screen with less tactile control, it feels easier on a modern system because you generally have one or two enemies on the screen at a time to deal with and you really only have to be facing them when you try to hit them to hit them.

In some ways the game feels a lot like a lot of Game Boy games from this era such as Mega Man: Dr. Wily's Revenge, Castlevania: The Adventure, or even Operation C. It's about the same difficulty as Mega Man, lets you engage enemies one at a time slowly as you progress to the right (like Castlevania) and the music is rather good like a proper Konami title.

The game consists of 5 stages of varying lengths, all that look a little different and play considerably so, with a pushover boss at the end of each

The game also has a few secrets and some bonus games which are just absurd. Winning these games award you with purposeless points, or restore your health. Some of the bonus games are placed at the beginning of levels so there is no real assistance from filling up your HP Bar! (Bad design)

Guess my Number bonus game? Interesting idea but it doesn't fit in this game.

All in all its nothing special but is a fun game to try and master because you definitely can get pretty good at it in an hour or two, if not become an outright ninja master that would make Splinter proud!