 Kids can be very fickle creatures, and I was definitely a very fickle kid growing up. I loved the Ninja Turtles, I loved the arcade game, I loved the NES games, anytime I had a chance to play them. I loved the theme song, I had all the trading cards, and of course I loved Turtles in Time on Super Nintendo, but by the time Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Tournament Fighters came out in December of 1993, I was just done. I had decided by that point that I'd had my fill, and it was time to move on to other stuff. But because of that, I completely utterly ignored this game at the time, and that kind of sucks because this is a pretty good title, which interestingly enough is sometimes referred to as Turtles 5, a follow up on Turtles 4, Turtles in Time. It's a well made one on one fighting game from Konami, well it's well made on Super Nintendo anyway, but I'll get to that later. The characters are all somewhat distinct, with different movesets and special moves, the sound design is well done, which lends itself well to the overall feel of the combat, and the settings and backgrounds are inspired. But here's the thing, not only were the Ninja Turtles everywhere back then, but so were one on one fighting games. They were like the first person shooters of their time, the gimmick that everyone wanted to latch their bandwagon onto, it got so bad that even Frickin' Shack got his own fighting game. My point is, many people got so burnt out on this stuff that even when a quality title came along, there was a good chance it got ignored, throwing the licensed game aspect and yeah, there's the reason I barely touched Turtles Tournament Fighters until now. The thing is though, the characters here aren't just the usual familiar folks you'd expect, like the four Turtles in Shredder, but there's also War, this huge purple monster thing, Wingnut, an alien bat, Chromedome, an android, Armagan, a mutant shark, and Asuka, a regular old ninja gal. Many of these characters come from the comic book series, so that's pretty cool. Asuka however, is someone unique to Tournament Fighters. The controls are your standard four button layout, kick and punch, weak and strong. The special moves are most similar to a game like Street Fighter, so it's pretty easy to get the hang of things. Tournament Fighters also has the feature of a secondary bar that fills up the more damage you dish out, and when it's full, you mash the strong kick and strong punch buttons, and you'll unleash a special attack, so that's pretty cool. My only real issue with the combat here is that most of the characters have the same speed and range of motion. The differences lie in the special moves. There's a couple exceptions like Chromedome, who's pretty much the dole sim of this game with his extendable limbs, but for the most part each character kind of feels the same to play as. The key to getting good at this game is putting together combinations. It's not as intricate as something like Killer Instinct, but it's still implemented well enough to stand out as something unique, and gives the gameplay a bit of depth. It's pretty fun to latch onto a character, learn all their special moves, and see the longest combo you can pull off. Strangely enough, Tournament Fighters also received an NES port, super late in the NES lifespan, and yeah, it looks really limited to say the least, but it's actually a pretty decent game, and it's a hell of a lot better than the Genesis port, which has terrible controls and an insane difficulty curve. Avoid the Genesis port, it sucks. The way to go here is with the Super Nintendo version of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Tournament Fighters. If nothing else, this game doesn't have the crazy difficulty most fighting games have in single player mode like Weapon Lord or the Mortal Kombat series, but yeah, Turtles Tournament Fighters isn't just a cash grab and isn't just a run-in-the-mill generic one-on-one fighting game. This game is actually pretty good, so check it out any way you can.