Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tournament Fighters – Now you’re playing with turtle power!

I consider myself a pretty big TMNT fan. I’m old enough to remember the original cartoon, Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles, which hit the UK in 1990 with the force of a pop culture hurricane. I was first in line to see the actually very good live action movie. I saw the not so great second movie twice. Once with a bleeding head, having decided not to tell anyone that I’d hit my skull in the car park on the way in. But we don’t need to dwell on that. I loved the UK version of the Archie comics as a kid, and adored the Mirage comics as an adult. Naturally, I also played a load of the classic Konami videogames, especially the original arcade beat-‘em-up. Which was one of those coin-ops every Nineties kid made a beeline for on every seaside trip. As a fan, I thought I knew every Turtles game from this era… That is, until I picked up Digital Eclipse’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Cowabunga Collection and discovered the NES version of Tournament Fighters.

Legacy Of The Wizard – The family that slays together…

The first Dragon Slayer game to be released in the west, Falcom’s Dragon Slayer IV: Drasle Family reached US shores in 1989 when Broderbund localised the Famicom port for NES, renaming it Legacy Of The Wizard. It’s largely forgotten now, especially here in Europe where the game was never released. But it does seem to have achieved a cult status in the US where those who did play it have praised it as a hidden gem and an early example of the burgeoning Metroidvania genre.