Donatello was always my favorite turtle.

Playing old arcade games on the xbox 360 is enlightening. I played Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on Xbox Live and was amazed at the difficulty of a game that is played with the traditional two buttons and t-pad of older games. It was weird to play a game I was so familiar with without hearing the jingle of a few dollars worth of quarters in my pocket and sitting down to a smaller screen instead of standing in front of a huge console including a joystick and huge buttons.

I could not remember the game being that hard back in the arcade when I was younger. Let's just say I would have been out fifty dollars had I played the whole game through with quarters! As soon as I started playing I noticed how difficult it was to move around on the 3d-like screen so that I was lined up to attack the Foot soldiers. I remembered that you had to follow the enemies shadows rather than try to attack their body. There were always ten to fifteen enemies that attacked at once which made it hard to advance with any more than half of your life remaining, plus the pizza box health was not plentiful. The difficulty of the game increased with number of players, but that just means that the number of enemies increased.

Although it was harder to play than I had remembered, it was also over much faster. There were only five levels, and since I did not have to keep feeding a machine quarters and take my time avoiding enemies so as not to die, the game was finished in fifteen minutes. It was apparent after I had respawned a hundred times that the objective of the game was not to learn the story of why the Ninja Turtles must defeat Shredder, or to save the city from his huge Drome-thing, but to pump in as many quarters as you could. For a media with such potential to create amazing technology and even beautiful works of art, arcades sure were a rip-off, scamming kids out of their hard-earned allowances so that they could play a video game about their favorite cartoons. As much as I loved arcades, I should have saved that money or invested in something equally as geeky as comic books, which would have at least paid off.

However, since my experience in arcades was always great, I suppose I cannot say that the designs of these games were entirely bad. The socialization between multiple players is something that I miss. It is so much fun to be standing next to friends or even strangers and calling for them to help you or distributing high-fives when you beat a boss. I have written before that I find the online world of gaming, while it connects you to millions around the world, still does not have the same impact as standing around with friends for hours trying to beat Ninja Turtles. I was connected with physical beings rather than the representation of someone through their WoW avatar. Though I think that both are valid ways of socializing, I prefer an afternoon at the arcade.