Retro Perfect: Battletoads

Bobbins occasionally moonlights over at Retro Prefect the home of Jonas Bruner, old games and censorship. You might see this work at http://retroprefect.blogspot.com/ …..eventually.

I’m sure everyone remembers how big the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Battletoads were. That group of four three turtles toads took the world by storm almost overnight. I think you would have been hard pressed to find someone that didn’t know the names Leonardo, Raphael, Donatello, Michelangelo the normal battletoad, the big battletoad , the one in the captains hat and their wise rat owl master Splinter Owl in a jumper who was in charge of the battletoads. Personally my favourite was Raphael One in the Captains hat who wore a red bandanna captain’s hat.

It was fairly obvious what Tradewest were trying to do when they spent a lazy afternoon “inventing” the battletoads – personally I would have just made them Samurai Terrapins and had done with it. (Pollock, Lichtenstein, Warhol and Buchanan) But then the Game boy version of Battletoads was the first video game I ever bought so my judgement obviously isn’t up to much.

The premise of the game was simple - take one of the battletoads, have him shuffle up to the baddies in the sort of bizarre forwards moon walk that everyone in roaming beat em ups does, hammer the b button until the enemy has been defeated, pretend that it was a good stand in for playing metamorphic force at the metrodome. And who could argue with that? Well I could because battletoads lied to me.

Lie Number 1: Battletoad(S)

Despite featuring numerous exciting looking toads on the box art and being called battletoadS, you could only play as the middle battletoad who was the most generic looking of the bunch! “Mother why can’t I play as the one in the captain’s hat or the big strong one?” “Because Tradwest hates you and so do I.” Needless to say when it came to designing my battletoads birthday cake I omitted the boring battletoad in favour of a new battletoad of my own design wearing a classic horned Viking hat.

Lie Number 2: This game will be a bit like double dragon and won’t feature horribly difficult spaceship levels which don’t feature on the box art.

i.e. the second level of Battletoads where your toad has to steer a sort of space Volvo through tiny gaps in massive space saw blades. Saw blades which move faster than tetris blocks after 99 lines and mean instand death when you smash into them. Unfortunately I never developed the joint skills of autism and clairvoyance required and so never got to see the third level which according to the instruction book was a swamp.

Line Number 3: The game had a third level.

No Gameboy games had a third level; they just printed pictures of it in the instruction book and then made the second level impossible. You couldn’t fit that many levels onto the little carts as the bullet-proofing took up all the space. For proof of this see Zool, Navy S.E.A.Ls, Spiderman – revenge of the spider slayers, flying warriors 2 in 1 and every other game I had for the Gameboy.

The biggest let down I experienced with Battletoads however was its wasted potential. How could a game featuring a toad mindlessly assualting craggy arms glued to cliff walls and musclebound cows end up as such a disaster?

Overall I would give this game Battletoads VS Doubledragon out of neither as good as streets of rage.