Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Arcade: Wrath Of The Mutants PS4 [REVIEW] | Arcades In Times

Since it’s un-officially “ninja month”, let’s talk ninja. Mutant teenage turtles ninjas.

And while their popularity and games based on the series still doesn’t waver, so much that we recently got a tie-in game to the 2023 animated film TMNT: Mutant Mayhem, TMNT: Splintered Fate, and one about the Last Ronin spin-off series by the TMNT original creators coming next year.

But we’re not talking about those, or the well received Shredder’s Revenge.

Nope, we’re going back to 2017, indirectly, thank to the recent release of the 2017 TMNT arcade game by Raw Thrills, in this expanded port (gaining the “Arcade” moniker and a new subtitle since there are literally dozens of TMNT game just called “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles”) handled by Cradle Games and distributed (even physically) by… shovelware maestro Gamemill Entertaiment.

Though this is not shovelware, i had the pleasure to play this machine/arcade cabinet more than once in my local arcades, and it’s quite fun 3D side scrolling beat em up, obviously trying to arken back to Turtles In Time, as these arcade TMNT titles often do, for nostalgia but also because it was indeed a quality title worth trying imitation and the flattery that – ideally – that would imply.

It’s a pleasant surprise regardless, since i doubt anyone was expecting this, expecially given how some digital only TMNT titles have gone delisted entirely, especially made for smarthphones offering and arcade releases. The TMNT Cowabunga Collection is great but some titles will always be bound to being emulated, at best, like the Tiger handheld games and such.

This not the case, as we get the game seen and played in the arcades as well as some new extra levels, which is a good things since Gamemill still asks more than it should for a physical copy, but we’ll discuss that later.

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Babylon’s Fall PS4 [REVIEW-FUNERAL] | Enuma Eloss

After previously touching upon the demo, and especially when the inevitable news of the sunset period before the servers would be shot down, i knew i had get Babylon’s fall, for cheap (which wasn’t an issue), actually play and finish before lights were out.

Other times i’ve put out these “funerary reviews” slightly before a game kicked the bucket, just in case, as both a courtesy and a way to let people that might be interested in the game itself, for whatever reason, so they could – potentially – try it or play it, i mean, Jump Force can still be played as second hand copies are still around.

But Babylon’s Fall didn’t even deserve that, so we’re talking about it the very same days its servers will close forever, 28^th of February 2023, not even 1 year after the game launched on the 3^rd of March 2022, couldn’t even held out for 3 days more, in such a hurry to kill to it Square Enix were.

Then again, that in itself it’s nothing special, the company does this to countless mobile free to play spinoffs of it’s own series, it’s like clockwork for many people to learn through these “end of service announcement” that many mobile games based on franchises owned by Squeenix…. even existed.

But it’s Babylon’s Fall we’re talking about, a game that indeed will live on infamy as a golden grease stain on Platinum Games’ record, when they had the bright idea to work alongside the company that once every 2 year lamented every non-japanese big franchise they owned and handled sold “below expectations”, the company of FF VII NFTs, that also later sold all its western-centric studios and properties for a pittance, all to drown more cash into the latest internet money scam.

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Where the on-rail shooter compilations at?

(A review of Mamoru Hosoda’s Belle is coming VERY soon, btw)

As the remake of the first House Of The Dead game is set to release soon on Switch (as a retail packaged release too), i’ve just realized how incredibly really no company before Sega with this remake has tried to bring on-rail shooters to the only current-gen (kinda) popular console that still retains Wii style pointers controls via the Joycons.

Given how the nostalgia market will only grow even larger in time, i’m surprised Namco didn’t dig from its huge backcatalog and pushed out a Point Blank or Time Crisis collection, or made compilations of some of the many others games of this kind that only existed as arcade cabinets.

I named Namco, but heck, even Konami and Sega were quite prolific back in the day, though Konami nowadays it’s better when they just licensed compilations-ports of their older titles to people who care (like Digital Eclipse, also handling the recently announced TMNT Cowabunga Collection), and Sega quite likely simply doesn’t care.

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[EXPRESSO] Biker Mice From Mars iOS | Nostalgia & Rat Milk

Yeah, time to reach for some low hanging fruit. If you were born in the 90s, you probably saw or remember this TMNT rip-off from you childhood.

Not that it’s worth remembering.

Then again, you probably didn’t know (or care to know) about this smartphone game, which i stumbled upon when browsing for other stuff in the bowels of the App Store.

Of course it’s a crappy endless runner. Functional, yes, but so bad it doesn’t feel like you’re moving through space in a bike, more like you’re a toy with magnets moved around a crap plastic city by a bored child. It looks like ass, unfinished, and is so cheap it reuses badly cropped images from the old cartoon, because who cares.

This one is so fuckin pathetic it won’t even try to coerce you into using premium currency to retry a level or continue, it knows it’s dung to the max. The game being so shit it pratically begs you to keep playing would be laughable enough for a cheap ass license videogame that exists to mine some some cash from desperate, naive souls.

But i just lost it when i arrived at the first boss, and got stuck in a loop, able to continue from a checkpoint, but since the ammo isn’t recharged when you continue, i kept inevitably smashing into enemies i couldn’t kill. I was gonna quit and end it there, but i kept trying and somehow the game decided to skip me to the boss, which managed to “kill” me with oil puddles… which just didn’t appear, if not for a fraction of a second when hit.

Then i somehow managed to fail the mission entirely, which required me to replay the stage from scratch.

Disinstalled into the void from which it came.

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