My gyxpyx is broken and Cowabunga Dude!

It is easy to look at modern games such as Halo 3 or Final Fantasy and see all the fantastic things they are doing but it is important to see where these games came from. This is why I decided to analyze the classic game, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Arcade Game (TMNT II). The Arcade smash hit that was released in 1989 and later released for the Nintendo Entertainment System rode the popularity of the cartoon series Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. The game mostly contained side scrolling beat em up action, which by today’s standard looks simple but revolutionized the industry during its time. The game was recently released for the Xbox Live Arcade and features the games important feature of Cooperative play online.

TMNT II was not the first game to include cooperative play between 4 players but it did change the medium of video games. TMNT II used the aspect of 4 players playing together to achieve a goal but still had them competing for points and challenges. Players had to decide who would use limited resources such as life (which was represented by pizza.) Players could work as a team or fight for the resources among each player. While the game stressed cooperative play the game kept score of each player and the popular high scores list to keep a competitive aspect in the game.

For all the advances TMNT II had, it did not try and change the notion of genre. It instead attempted to master and refine how it was played. The game followed side scrolling action and followed other major games of it’s time by giving a semi 3D perspective and moving up and down the screen gave a feeling of depth. TMNT II used industry normals such as giving a boss fight at the end of each level and using a standard life bar system but focused more on making these experiences enjoyable by giving varied and differing backdrops. TMNT II did change many aspects from other arcade games as the game was considered easy for its time but had an innovation where the game would become more difficult with more players in the game, as there would be more opponents and creatures for the players to fight.

TMNT II cannot be called the best game ever or even the best game in its genre. What can be said for it is that it did create a sense of “meaningful play.” The Hand Book of Computer Game Studies (page 60) says that “Meaningful play in a game emerges from the relation ship between player action and system outcome... The meaning of an action in a game resides in the relationship between action and outcome.” TMNT II achieves this extremely well when many players play the game together. The games sense of competitive cooperation creates an enjoyable atmosphere where the group of individuals must work together to beat the game but work against each other to achieve a higher score. The balancing between this is where TMNT II helped evolve its genre and created a sense of meaningful play.