Ubisoft’s recent attempts at bringing the franchise back into the public eye have been spotty while the recent TMNT game was generally mediocre, the XBLA release of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Arcade Game was well received and the upcoming release of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Smash-Up for PS2 and Wii is looking to be interesting, if nothing else.
The games had lots of personality and were plenty of fun despite their quarter-munching nature, and they’re pretty much regarded as the gaming high point for the franchise, as from Tournament Fighters onward things started to go downhill. Back in the eighties and nineties, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise consisted mostly of beat-em-ups in the arcades and on the home consoles, which nostalgia tells us were lots of fun even though they were designed to completely frustrate us and eat our quarters. So the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise, as it relates to video games, could best be represented as a line graph that fluctuates in the beginning shortly before taking a gigantic nosedive, until recently. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time Re-Shelled
