I remember renting a copy of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III: The Manhattan Project back when I was a kid. I remember liking the game a lot and I also remember not getting far into it because it was so hard. Since I recently played TMNT II, I decided to revisit this game to see if I could beat it now.

 

 

Let’s see how well this game held up!

 

Game Basics

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III: The Manhattan Project (which I will be referring to as Turtles III from here on out) is a hack and slash game developed and published by Konami. The sequel to the popular port of an equally popular arcade game, Turtles III was released after the SNES / Super Famicom had already come out, so it didn’t catch a lot of attention.

In this game, you can play with one or two players (co-op) and choose between the four Ninja Turtles (Leonardo, Donatello, Michaelangelo, and Raphael). Yet again, the Turtles are after Shredder and the Foot Clan, who have kidnapped news reporter April O’Neil and set Manhattan afloat thanks to alien technology.

 

 

In this game, you wield weapons and you move across planes instead of platforms. You have a health meter which depletes whenever you get hit by an enemy. You lose a life when your health meter is fully depleted. Like other TMNT games, Pizza power ups can replenish your health meter but there are a lot fewer of them this time around.

 

 

By default, each player gets three lives and you have three Continues. You can gain an extra life every time you earn 50,000 points. When you lose all lives and Continues, it is Game Over.

 

Basic Moves

Similar to its predecessor, each Turtle in Turtles III can do a normal attack with the B button and jump with the A button. Attacking in mid-jump still does a diving kick. A new move given to the Turtles in this game is the lift attack. Pressing Down and B will make your Turtle poke his weapon out, then move it up in a lifting motion. Most enemies will get tossed behind your turtle and can damage other enemies on the way down.

 

 

The toss attack deals more damage than normal attacks and can kill off most of the regular enemies in one hit. Even if the toss attack doesn’t lift the enemy, it’ll still deal a lot of damage. As a means to balance this, you earn more points by defeating enemies with your normal attacks. Using the toss attack too often will result in not getting as many extra lives as you can had you used normal attacks.

 

Special Moves

What clearly differentiates the Turtles from each other in Turtles III are their special moves. Each one has his own, which can be done by pressing the B and A button at the same time. Using a special move drains one bar from your health but deals a lot of damage to your enemies. When you’re down to just one bar of health, you can keep spamming special moves and your health will no longer get depleted. I dislike Michaelangelo’s special move the most. He launches himself feet first into enemies. This attack can hit flying enemies but has a wind-up delay. Because of the wind-up, I find it hard to land this move.

 

 

Leonardo’s special move has him spinning in place with both katana extended out. This lets him attack in front and behind him. It can even hit boss enemies twice if you time it right.

 

 

Raphael’s special attack is the one I like best. He does a torpedo-like attack that goes forward quite a distance and damages everything in its path. If you time it right, this move will take you far away enough that you’ll be able to avoid counterattacks. I love spamming this attack against bosses.

 

 

Donatello’s special is similar to Raphael’s. It is a rolling attack that goes forward and damages enemies in its path. It doesn’t seem to go as far as Raphael’s though.

 

 

You’ll be relying on these special moves, especially against bosses. If you’re not used to the special move of your chosen Turtle, you might have difficulty beating this game. Thankfully, you can change your chosen Turtle every time you die (if you still have remaining lives).

 

Increased Difficulty

When I remembered not being able to beat Turtles III back when I rented it as a kid, I got really curious. Was this game really that much difficult compared to TMNT II: The Arcade Game? Well, yes it was. The enemy A.I. in this game is quite different. Normal enemies do a great job in surrounding you and attacking when your back is turned. Enemy attacks have higher priority now. Regular Foot Soldiers can actually punch you out of your flying kick! And there are so many stage hazards and traps that seem to be unavoidable. So even if you have the new lifting attack and special moves at your disposal, it’s a lot harder to beat this game.

 

 

What I didn’t know back then was that a version of the Konami code would give you a secret Options menu. This menu has a stage select function which lets you start the game at your chosen stage. You can change the difficulty of the game from the default Normal to Easy. And you can increase your starting lives count from 3 to 5 or 7. I love how the game gives you different ways of adjusting how challenging it is. So far I’ve beaten this game on Normal difficulty with 7 starting lives. I’m looking to try and beat this with 5 starting lives and maybe later on I’ll try beating it on default settings.

 

Enemies and Boss Battles

The big draw of licensed games is the ability to fight against the villains of that license and Turtles III has a bigger roster of villains from the TMNT franchise. First, you get to face a lot of different Foot Soldier types with different weapons and attacks. Unlike the previous game, you can actually face off against two enemy types at the same time in TMNT III.

 

 

But the bosses are really where it’s at. As can be expected, you’ll face off against Rocksteady, Bebop, Krang, and Shredder in this game. But other less popular characters are in here too, like Leatherhead, Groundchuck, and Dirtbag. Each of them has their own distinct moves and attack patterns.

 

 

And of course, this game’s highlight for me are the boss fights. You get to face some popular villains from the cartoon series like Rocksteady, Bebop, Baxter Stockman, Krang, and of course Shredder. They all have at least three different attacks which helps avoid making their battles feel repetitive.

 

 

I was really satisfied with how many actual TMNT characters made it into this game as enemies. I’m just wondering why Baxter Stockman wasn’t in the game. Baxter is a character who I believe is more popular than someone like Groundchuck or Dirtbag. He could have been a flying boss that would give players a reason to pick Michaelangelo more often. But it’s a minor nitpick and not really an issue with the game.

 

Visuals, Sounds, and Presentation

I don’t know how to feel about Turtles III when it comes to graphics. This game looks really good. Sprites are quite detailed and are animated well. Stages have detailed backgrounds that makes it easy to identify what places are actually being depicted. There are even moments when enemies would come out of spots in the stage, which are nicely animated too. But this game suffers from a lot of flickering, which can really be off-putting. If you play this game on original hardware, you’ll have to tolerate the flickering issue. Playing this via emulation will allow you to get rid of the flickering completely. I just wished that Konami figured out how to make the game run better on the NES hardware.

 

 

Konami really knew how to compose great music for their NES games, and this game is no exception. All the stage themes are so good. Of course, the classic TMNT theme from the cartoon is in this game but isn’t overused at all. The game even has digitized voice clips that really show how much developers have learned developing NES games over the years.

 

 

And finally, this game improves on the presentation a lot too. The cutscenes, while still making use of static images, look so much better especially since the game uses a lot of text to narrate the game’s story. The HUD is clear and clean, but I do have one nitpick. I absolutely hate how the Turtles in the HUD all have the same color bandanna. I can understand why they did this, but I would have preferred showing all four turtles in the HUD with their appropriate colors.

 

Final Thoughts

Now this is how you make a sequel! I mentioned that I was surprised at how simple Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Arcade Game was, where you only had three different attacks to use for the entire game for all four Turtles. They fixed that in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III: The Manhattan Project and improved on every other aspect.

This game should have been more popular, but being released in the later years of the NES when the SNES was already available really killed this game in the market. The only real problem with this game is the constant flicker in the graphics – but a lot of NES games suffer from that anyway. I’m really impressed with how good this game was. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III: The Manhattan Project is definitely a must-play for NES fans.

 

If you want to check out the other Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles video games that I played and wrote about, click here! Or click here to check out every NES video game that I’ve played!