Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tournament Fighters

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tournament Fighters steered the popular turtle franchise away from traditional side-scrolling brawlers toward the 2D fighting-game genre in the vein of then-popular titles like Street Fighter. Instead of walking through streets and beating up dozens of henchmen at once, the player here picks one of the four fighting turtle brothers or other characters from the TMNT universe and faces off in individual duels on a confined arena, with its own set of special moves for each character.

The Super Nintendo version is the one that sticks most consistently to the classic one-on-one fighting game format – with smooth animation, a bold color palette typical of the SNES generation, and a cast of characters including both the main heroes and iconic villains from the show. The combat system here builds on a combination of basic punches, kicks, and special abilities tied to a specific weapon or character, similar to other fighting games of the era, but with turtle-flavored humor, unique victory animations, and references to both the TV series and comic-book source material that make the game a distinctive contribution to the genre rather than just a derivative one. This is the version most often cited as the most balanced and closest to the genre standard of its time, while versions developed in parallel for other consoles of the era differed significantly from it in both content and gameplay design – unusual even by the standards of the time for fighting games sharing only a name. Players who know the series only from other versions will therefore find a different character roster and a different fighting pace on the SNES than they were used to.

Why play it: The SNES version of Tournament Fighters will appeal to fans of classic '90s 2D fighting games as well as Ninja Turtles fans who want to see how the famous license fared outside its usual beat-'em-up genre.