Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Hyperstone Heist

The Good
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The HyperStone Heist marked the first time that the popular cartoon/comic book heroes hashed out their good versus evil battle on the Genesis.

I suspect that this was because Konami had the video game rights to do all Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles video games and initially, they did not make games for Sega. Nintendo had certain policies in place that... "strongly discouraged" (if you will) a software company, like Konami, from making games for both Nintendo and Sega systems.

Thankfully, this policy changed and by the mid 1990s it was pretty common place for a video game to be released for both Nintendo and Sega systems. Finally, Genesis owners could show off their own hack 'n slash turtle power. Right? Well, Yes and No.

The turtles first Genesis (or Mega Drive) adventure offers nice 16-bit animation, graphics, music and sound effects. The hack 'n slash game play mechanics are easy to pick up and their is no doubt that its certainly fun taking out familiar looking minions and nefarious bosses.

The Bad
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The HyperStone Heist liberally borrows the animation and levels from other Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle games.

Why not simply port the 1989 arcade game to the Sega Genesis or the SNES Turtles In Time? While the animation and graphics are well above average for the Genesis (walking on water aside),I could not help but feel like I was playing recycled and slightly washed out pieces of other TMNT games.

Heck, they could have simply adapted the two NES TMNT games into one cool Sega Genesis game.

At five levels, Hyperstone is also noticeably shorter, at five then TMNT games for the NES Nintendo and Super Nintendo.

The selection of bosses is also a tad bit strange; i.e. a boss from the live action TMNT films (don't get me started on how bad those films were) and a human (as opposed to mutated) Baxter Stockman.

The Bottom Line
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The HyperStone Heist is a nice entry into the Genesis library. It is certainly above average in terms of its animation, graphics, music and sound effects. But, Konami and the Sega Genesis are both capable of doing much more.