#cowabunga collection

Beat Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles [NES] today !

Imagine Casey Jones just Invading the Entire Cowabunga Collection of Classic 80s and 90s TMNT Video/Arcade Games by Konami

I finally got around to playing the TMNT Cowabunga Collection! It's super rad! Digital Eclipse always do excellent work with their retro compilations, but it seems they've been given a bigger budget to mess with this time and it really shows.

There is an absolutely *insane* amount of museum content in this one, folks. Design documents, promotional/catalogue stuff including stuff sent to stores, comic covers, a full music player and even screencaps from every TMNT series right up to the recent ROTTMNT.

The game selection is really nice, and covers Konami's entire Turtles output from the NES up to the SNES and Genesis, including Game Boy games and ports. Many of these games are absurdly rare and expensive, so to own them as part of my collection finally is really cool! There are fighting games, beat 'em ups, platformers and even a Metroidvania! From the iconic arcade game to the infamous NES game, there's a great selection here for any style of player.

Also! Game enhancements! You're given the ability to toggle bespoke improvements for each game like reduced flickering, improved framerates, even better map icons for the Game Boy Metroidvania game! Also, select games have multiplayer enabled! The fighting game, Tournament Fighters, even goes as far as to boast rollback netcode for silky-smooth online punchin'. Online isn't my thing, but it's a super cool feature for online players.

Circling back to the museum content - I really love that the Nintendo and Sega branding hasn't been censored/omitted from the box art scans. It was a pretty conspicuous thing in the Disney Afternoon Collection, so it's cool to see they secured the rights to use all that stuff here. Also odd to see the Nintendo Seal of Quality in a PS4 game! This also extends to the naming of the consoles, it literally just says NES, SNES, GEN etc as opposed to "Console N" and "Console S" and "Handheld" like in the Disney Classics Collection. Much less confusing!

As far as emulation goes, it's all pretty stellar. Nice integer scaling, remappable controls, rewind, save state (although seemingly only one per game). I'd have liked to see some nicer CRT filters, as the ones featured here are pretty subtle scanline overlays and don't do much for me. I really loved the TV Filter setting in Disney Classics Collection, so it's a shame it's not as good here.

My other criticism is of the game selection screen - it looks really nice and fluid, but is on a carousel organised by console - you're never shown the full game list and navigating the game menu can be a little disorienting, as slick as it looks. Folks into UI design likely know how frustrating carousel layouts get over time. The option to just switch to a basic list would've been greatly appreciated.

OTHER THAN THAT THO this is an absolute gold standard for retro compilations. It's lovingly presented, well-built, content rich and super, super comprehensive. If you're into the Turts, retro games or you just want a fun variety of games to play with your buds, this is an absolute must-buy.

Here's waiting to see what Digi Eclipse does with the upcoming Atari 50th Anniversary Collection! I can't wait, but for now, The Cowabunga Collection takes pride of place in my ever-growing Retro rerelease collection.