T.M.N.T.

[Update] Oops… just now realized that mobygames was being picky about borrowing their pictures and bandwidth. Sorry. Thumbnails are fixed now. [/Update]

So Jared and I were going through some old SNES games this afternoon for something to do between me getting my ass kicked yet again in racquetball and supper. We found Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles IV: Turtles In Time. We were looking for one of the old school cooperative fighting games like Final Fight or Double Dragon, and thought maybe TMNT would fit the bill. So we fire it up. The title graphic looks awfully familiar:

We pick out 2 player mode, give ourselves a couple extra lives for the first run through, and start the game. As soon as the character selection screen appears, little lights start flashing in my head; this is looking very, very familiar. The opening/intro movie starts running, and Jared and I are both like “holy crap! We have played this game!”

It was a really surreal experience. I really have no memory of playing TMNT 4, but as soon as we started, I knew I had played it before. The game came out in 1992, which would put me at 6 years old, or roughly kindergarten. Since I don’t really have many concrete memories of kindergarten either, I guess that makes sense. But wow, what a weird/cool feeling to rediscover something that you once knew, but so long ago that you only know that you knew it… you don’t actually remember it at all.

Here’s the final boss, Shredder himself, to jar the memories of anyone else who might have once played the game. We beat him in 30 minutes, 25 seconds today, using somewhere around 5 continues.