Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tournament Fighters, or Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles: Tournament Fighters in Europe, is the title of three different fighting games based on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, produced by Konami for the Nintendo Entertainment System, Sega Genesis, and Super NES and released during a period between 1993 and 1994. Konami produced a different fighting game based on the franchise each featuring a differing cast of characters for the platforms. All three versions of the game were re-released as part of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Cowabunga Collection in 2022. with online play using rollback netcode for the SNES version of the game.
The NES version of Tournament Fighters was the final game Konami released for the platform in North America and the PAL region in 1994. It was also the fifth TMNT game released for Nintendo home consoles. Unlike the other versions of Tournament Fighters, it was not released in Japan. Tournament Fighters was one of the few fighting games released for the NES during the fighting game boom.
The game's single-player Story mode has the player taking control of one of the four Turtles (Leonardo, Raphael, Michaelangelo, and Donatello), as they hold a contest amongst themselves to see who is fit to take on Shredder's challenge. After defeating the first three opponents, the player proceeds to fight Casey Jones and then Hothead (a character based on the Dragon Warrior from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Adventures comics and the action figure of the same name) before the final match with the Shredder. In addition to the Story mode, the game also has two Versus modes (one against the CPU and another against a second player), as well as a four-player tournament mode. An option mode where the player can adjust the game's difficulty, continues, and speed is also available.
The gameplay follows many of the standard fighting game conventions. Battles consist of three-round matches and the first player to win two rounds is the victor. Each character has their own repertoire of basic punch and kick techniques, as well as command-based special moves. During battle, a flying monitor with Splinter's face will sometimes appear that will drop a red ball power-up at the middle of the stage that can be retrieved by either fighter. Whoever retrieves the ball power-up will be able to use it by inputting the appropriate command.
The NES version allows the player to match any character against a clone of himself, with the exception of Hothead. The game does not allow such a match under normal circumstances, but there is a way to bypass this restriction in the game's "Vs. CPU" mode. The second Hothead will be colored differently, as with all same character matches in the game, but the game will also flicker due to the large size of both characters.
In Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Cowabunga Collection, the NES version of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tournament Fighters has three enhancememts.
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