Review: TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES: THE COWABUNGA COLLECTION is an Excellent Show of Media Preservation
Konami recently released Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Cowabunga Collection. This was a collection of 13 classic TMNT games spanning arcades, the NES, the Game Boy, and more. It brought some enhancements like online play for select games, a save feature so you don’t have to play the entire game in one sitting, behind-the-scenes goodies, the Japanese versions for 11 of the games, and more. You can play the game now on Nintendo Switch, PC (Steam), PS4/PS5, and Xbox (affiliate link) through their digital storefronts or physical editions are available at your favorite retailers including GameStop (affiliate link). The game has an MSRP of $39.99. Konami did provide me a digital copy of the game on Xbox for this review.
To start things off, let’s get the list of games up for everyone to know:
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (Arcade)
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time (Arcade)
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (NES)
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Arcade Game (NES)
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III: The Manhattan Project (NES)
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tournament Fighters (NES)
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles IV: Turtles in Time (Super Nintendo)
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tournament Fighters (Super Nintendo)
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Hyperstone Heist (Sega Genesis)
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tournament Fighters (Sega Genesis)
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Fall of The Foot Clan (Game Boy)
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: Back From The Sewers (Game Boy)
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III: Radical Rescue (Game Boy)
One thing you’ll notice is that there are some duplicates as some titles were released on multiple platforms. This is a strength and a weakness in my opinion. On the one hand, people always have preferences and it helps preserve multiple parts of gaming history. On the other, it can cause newcomers to go down the rabbit hole of “which version is better” on the internet and it takes up space that could’ve potentially been used for additional unique games. That being said, the roster is fun because it introduced many TMNT games to me that I didn’t know about. I knew about the arcade titles and the classic NES title known for being ridiculously hard, but I honestly didn’t know about any of the fighting games available.
Overall, I would argue that the Cowabunga Collection is a great preservation effort. Some of the additions like the save option and the screen filters and zooms are welcome in my opinion. I personally liked TV Screen the best and didn’t like the other filters at all. It’s also nice that you can toggle the background images off. Each game has some great background images, but they often felt distracting and so turning them off really helped. In another area of preservation, the Cowabunga Collection has the Turtles’ Lair section which is a virtual museum with box art from each game, music from the games, original storyboard sketches, concept art, and more.
As you can see, the Cowabunga Collection is a great value for fans of the Heroes in a Half Shell. It successfully accomplishes what it sets out to do and not much more. If you like or have ever wanted to play the classic games, this is a great access point with large availability. If you combine this with the latest game, Shredder’s Revenge, you’re in for one tubular weekend.
