Flash back to 1989. I'm nine years old, Street Fighter II won't be out for another two years, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is the hottest thing in video arcades, by which I of course mean the lobby of the movie theater. There's no waiting: with four turtles in the cartoon crew, four players can jump onto the machine and team up to trash wave after wave of ninja robots, an assault that doesn't stop until everybody runs out of quarters.____
18 years later, the Turtles are staging a comeback with a new Hollywood film, and the original beat-em-up is reborn on Xbox Live Arcade. TMNT's two-decade-old graphics hold up nicely -- who doesn't vastly prefer the cartoony, goofy Turtles of yore to today's soulless CG monstrosities? And although the gameplay is simple -- all you can do is jump and/or swing your ninja weapon of choice -- that's more than enough to carry you through the whole game. Mostly because it's really short. It doesn't seem that way when each life costs 25 cents, but when you have unlimited free virtual quarters, it is.
The real fun is online. Unlike some other games, TMNT feels just perfect online. There was some slowdown when some low-ping interlopers joined the game, but once we found a good set of four players it was like we were all in an arcade together, planning strategies and joking around.
Unfortunately, it was getting to that point that was the problem. If you're not setting up a game by inviting your friends, you're tossed into a match with three random people, and if one of them isn't any good, all you can do is quit the entire game. Likewise, if someone drops out, you can't add a player to replace him. Add to that the fact that the characters are way unbalanced -- Donatello's staff and Leonardo's katana are infinitely better than the other Turtles' weapons -- and online play can be a frustrating experience.
__—__Chris Kohler
__WIRED __A true classic reborn, online mode feels just like you're in an arcade in 1989
__TIRED __Quite short and unbalanced, matchmaking options are severely limited
$5, Ubisoft
Rating: 
