Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III: The Manhattan Project was a beat 'em-up video game for the Nintendo Entertainment System based on the 1980s animated television series.
It has the craziest storyline of all the Konami games based on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. However, since the 1987 series was so zany, it fits with the franchise perfectly. In the game, Shredder and Krang stole the entire island of Manhattan and it is up to the ninja turtles to get it back.
As it is for the Nintendo Entertainment System, it only has two action buttons. However, it makes great use of what is available. It manages to have most of the moves from the arcade games thanks to button combinations. It also pushes the Nintendo Entertainment System to its limits. It has the fun enemy animations and background object interactions from the arcade games that weren't present in the NES version of the original arcade game. It lacks the ability to have different kinds of enemies on screen at a time, but since the enemies have a ton of character, it's not that noticeable while playing through the game.
The game also has quite a nice soundtrack that evokes the feeling of the arcade games. It also has voice clips, but, of course, they are highly compressed due to the limitations in file size available on NES ROM cartridges. This was pretty standard practice at the time, and voice clips weren't common on the NES at all, so it's cool they're included. It really does help to evoke the feeling of the Konami arcade beat 'em ups.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III: The Manhattan Project is a worthy member of Konami's 90s ninja turtle beat 'em up oeuvre. When I was a little girl, I avoided the NES Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles games due to the small size of the sprites and backgrounds necessary for the games to fit in the small resolution of the console. This was a mistake on my part, as Konami managed to translate all of the gameplay, style, and charm from the arcades into Nintendo's little grey box. If you are going to play this, and you should, opt for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Cowabunga Collection. That way you can reduce the flickering that was necessary to push the console to its limits. That's one of the great things with emulation, we have much stronger hardware now, so we don't have to live within those limits anymore and can experience games at levels the developers could only have dreamt of back in the 1990s.
Final Verdict:
4 out of 5
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