“Then comes the Turbo Tunnel speeder level...”
October 8, 2017 12:46 PM   Subscribe

Battletoads: The Strange History of a Nigh-Impossible Franchise by Gavin Jasper [Den of Geek] “In the early 90s, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were the kings of children’s entertainment. They were everywhere and like all successful concepts, they were followed by copycats. Over the years we’d see attempts to piggyback on their success with such concepts as Street Sharks, Biker Mice from Mars, and the Country Cuckoo Clock Codpiece Zulu Warriors. There was one pretender to the throne that appeared as a cheap Turtles knockoff at first glance, but had more than enough uniqueness to stand on its own. To a point, at least. I want to talk to you about Battletoads. Battletoads is one of those game franchises that had so much personality and quality that it should have survived for years. Unfortunately, it’s become a relic of semi-obscurity...”

• Why was Battletoads so damn hard? by Witney Seibold [Nerdist]
“To this day, Battletoads has a reputation as being one of the hardest video games – if not the hardest video game – ever made. The action was fast, the perspective frequently changed, and the screen frequently filled with enemies. The playable title toads, named Zitz, Pimple, and Rash (maybe not hip names in retrospect) were amusingly animated, and a lot of character was communicated through their movements (their fists and feet would enlarge in the midst of a good pummeling), but after several frustrating hours of non-progress (especially through the Turbo Tunnel level [YouTube] [Cinemassacre]), they soon transformed into blank-faced sacrificial lambs, dying hundreds and hundreds of times in a near-futile attempt to surmount the ever-increasing challenges of the game they lived in.”
• Battletoads can kiss my ass by Joel Peterson [Destructoid]
“Do most people really like Battletoads? Whenever I talk to anyone just about it, the pre-baked response is always, “I loved it. It’s one of the best video games on the NES. I could never get past that bike level though.” Like, do you even realize what you’re saying? The infamous Turbo Tunnel, also known as “the bike level,” is the third fucking stage in a thirteen-level game. The first two levels are little more than a tutorial. No; that’s not even fair, because they aren’t preparing you for most of what the rest of the game is in the first place. You effectively experienced the intro to the game, were crushed by it, and gave up. How do you “love” it? In the first two stages of Battletoads you are introduced to the basic mechanics in what is essentially a beat-'em-up style of gameplay akin to Streets of Rage or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. These are the stages everyone remembers playing with their siblings or friends. ”
• Finding New Respect for Battletoads' Classic Soundtrack by David Pemberton [Kill Screen]
“The soundtrack—remastered specifically for this release—was composed by David Wise. His credits include Star Fox Adventures, Diddy Kong Racing, and the upcoming Yooka-Laylee, though he is best known for his work on Donkey Kong Country. His compositions are notably atmospheric, a style derived from mixing sound effects from his games with melodic and heavily percussive accompaniment. A good example in the Battletoads soundtrack is the “thwomp thwomp thwomp” of “Pause,” a track cleverly placed at the end of side A. The beat that carries the song is made from the punching sound effect used in the game. It’s heavy and fierce and surprisingly thoughtful for something meant to play during bathroom breaks. That’s part of what makes the Battletoads soundtrack so enjoyable to listen to. Every note is specific, every sound intentional; every track does as much to create a narrative landscape as the design of the levels they accompany.”
• Battletoads Retrospective by Levi Buchanan [IGN]
“Appreciably, Battletoads makes few bones about its inspiration. Rare was aping TMNT. Each of the toads has a specific style, which is very similar to the turtles employing their own signature martial arts weapon. The Battletoads are hit with "extreme" names, too: Pimple, Zitz, and Rash. Names like this are also relics of the era, when videogames were starting to test the waters of taste. These names seem tame now, but the Battletoads' names were just part of the gross-out humor epidemic that was hitting kids' pop culture. What made each of the two Battletoads you and a friend controlled -- Zitz and Rash -- special were Smash Hits that finished off an enemy. For example, Battletoads grew enormous, cartoon-ish fists to flatten an enemy after peppering it with normal punches. But even though the emphasis of the game was on fighting, Rare added some extra mechanics to help separate Battletoads from games like TMNT and Double Dragon, such as racing stages. These racing stages weren't actual races, but more like obstacles courses that demanded fast reflexes; and if you didn't have those, at least a keen ability to memorize obstacles.”
• Battletoads: The Complete History - SGR [YouTube]
“Battletoads - along with Rare's back catalogue - may be owned by Microsoft these days, but NES owners will always have a special place in their hearts for Rash, Zitz & Pimple, three radical amphibians with plenty of attitude. Created at a time when Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles dominated TV, gaming and toy aisles, Battletoads was an action plaftormer which ramped up the difficulty and crammed in plenty of original ideas, and was rightly hailed as a smash at the time of release. It triggered a series of titles across Nintendo systems (and the arcade), all of which are covered in this new video by Daniel Ibbertson, the host of Slope's Game Room.” [via: Nintendo Life]
posted by Fizz (35 comments total) 13 users marked this as a favorite
 
I've just always assumed that the game ends when you get to the Turbo Tunnels. I was never able to get a handle on the timing for those jumps and ramps. That level is brutally punishing. Apparently the difficulty ramps up even further after that point. Not that I'd ever know that.
posted by Fizz at 1:04 PM on October 8, 2017 [2 favorites]


The only Ninja Turtles "copycat" I care about is the Samurai Pizza Cats (which in the opening seems to be spelled "Samuri", but then, it IS a silly cartoon)
posted by oneswellfoop at 1:17 PM on October 8, 2017 [3 favorites]


Don't forget The C.O.W.-Boys of Moo Mesa, which was a show about cowboys who were actual cows.

The plot summary from Wikipedia, because it's amazing:
...an irradiated comet struck the late 19th century Western plains creating a miles high mesa shrouded in clouds. Everything trapped on top of the mesa was "cow-metized" by the light from the "cow-met" and "evolved" into a "bovipomorphic" state. Inspired by old tales of the Wild West, this new bovine community developed to the point where they emulated that era's way of life...
posted by dephlogisticated at 1:21 PM on October 8, 2017 [10 favorites]


I can’t beat the turbo tunnels on a damn emulator with save states. Those double jumps are a killer.

Also, watching a play through, they don’t even give you a decent game ending!
posted by leotrotsky at 1:23 PM on October 8, 2017


If we’re talking about TMNT copycats, you can’t forget one of the worst NES games ever, The Cheetahmen.
posted by leotrotsky at 1:25 PM on October 8, 2017 [1 favorite]


I was freakishly good at the Turbo Tunnels. I passed them on the first day of renting the game. We got as far as the Terra Tubes (level 9).

I think I was so good because of my rhythm and sight-reading skills and drum lessons. The modern analogue of the Turbo Tunnels is Guitar Hero or Rock Band on hardest difficulty, I'd say.
posted by naju at 1:43 PM on October 8, 2017 [8 favorites]


I had a game genie, which allowed me to start the game on any level, so I have played every level of battletoads, despite beating the bike level only once or twice in my life. The difficulty curve was ridiculously uneven. I beat the final level many times, but some of the other race levels were even harder than the bikes, in my memory. I did love that game, as impossible as it was.
posted by agentofselection at 1:44 PM on October 8, 2017 [1 favorite]


I played a lot more of the Battletoads/Double Dragon crossover, which seemed to balance the difficulty a bit better (though it did have another turbo bike stage).

(I'm not of the NES generation - I'm of the "discovered as a middle-schooler that emulation means hundreds of free video games even though we're still on dialup" generation.)
posted by atoxyl at 1:50 PM on October 8, 2017 [10 favorites]


The speedruns on youtube last between 12 and 45 minutes. Part of the reason those old games were so difficult and straight-up unfair was so they could stretch an hour of gameplay into twenty because you'd never get through the first time. You'd have boss fights where you'd have to memorize the attack patterns and figure out a strategy with trial and error, you'd never past them on the first try.

Today, if you tried to sell a game for full premium price and it only lasted an hour, the internet horde would crucify you.
posted by adept256 at 2:13 PM on October 8, 2017 [2 favorites]


I am convinced that a great deal of the reason why this game's name lived on was due in no small part to the fact that up until a couple years ago, one perennial 'raid' that would pop up on 4chan's /b/ was to post the phone number of one's local Gamestop and encourage the greater world to call them and ask if they had Battletoads. I have no idea why this was considered so funny, but man does it ever seem like one of the tamest things that site ever did to anyone today.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 2:15 PM on October 8, 2017 [15 favorites]


You effectively experienced the intro to the game, were crushed by it, and gave up. How do you “love” it?

This is both a fair question, but also maybe missing the context? I mean, not to get all "kids these days", but games of the era were fucking hard, and also relatively fewer in quantity -- so e.g. despite it being punishingly hard, I've beaten Ghosts 'n Goblins a handful of times. I don't think I was necessarily amazing at NES games, but I think I was of an age where I had a lot of free time and new games weren't showing up anytime soon.

Battletoads was similar for me. I don't think I ever actually beat it, though I made it past the speeder bikes a few times. Nonetheless, it does hold a special place in my heart.
posted by tocts at 2:15 PM on October 8, 2017 [6 favorites]


I remember occasionally playing the co-op mode with a friend as a kid. But yes, we died to the tunnels early on.

Sometimes I watch speedruns of this (especially by The Mexican Runner, who is, indeed, a Mexican speedrunner) and they are just insane. Sometimes he does the tunnels BLINDFOLDED.
posted by dhens at 2:21 PM on October 8, 2017 [1 favorite]


The trick for the speeder bike part is to unfocus your eyes
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 2:48 PM on October 8, 2017 [2 favorites]


I also made it past the bike stage despite being pretty mediocre at games as a kid. My friends and I really liked it and we had a lot of time on our gands.
posted by tofu_crouton at 2:51 PM on October 8, 2017


I've never been particularly good at video games that required good reflexes; the only time I've gotten a remarkably high score was at the Star Trek arcade game, which was pretty easy to do (the trick was to herd the approaching Klingon ships into a group, then hit them with a photon torpedo that would obliterate them all). I'm here mostly just to say that the best TMNT parody ever was Pre-Teen Dirty Gene Kung Fu Kangaroos, which is not only absurdly contrived but has a sort of rhythm to it.
posted by Halloween Jack at 3:08 PM on October 8, 2017 [5 favorites]


You effectively experienced the intro to the game, were crushed by it, and gave up. How do you “love” it?

You love it the same way people love Sappho's poetry. I'm not even joking here.

There were so many rumors and fairy tales and urban legends about the higher levels of Nintendo games when I was a little kid. It wasn't just Battletoads. A lot of those games, nobody I knew had ever played all the way through. But we heard rumors about the bits we hadn't seen — some passed down from older siblings or friends-of-friends with a Game Genie, some of them ripped off from magazines, some of them probably just made up — and those rumors turned into a living folklore so rich that I never even owned a Nintendo and I remember some of them.

Every once in a while, someone achieved a new personal best and managed to confirm one of the rumors, which just made the rest of the still-unconfirmed rumors that much more tantalizing.

Which meant that any time I went over to a friend's house and played the same boring old first level of some game and died basically right away, I was also reaching towards an enormous fantasy world of imagined awesome levels that I would never see with my own eyes. Knowing that I was dreaming about the same unseeable awesomeness as thousands of other kids was… I don't even know. Reading Sappho and knowing everyone else is wondering what the rest was like too is the only thing that comes close.
posted by nebulawindphone at 3:37 PM on October 8, 2017 [29 favorites]


Anyone else found it weird that it was difficult to control a toad-based character while it was jumping? Sometimes I had trouble just getting to the speeders in then third level, because I couldn't jump over the chasms before the speeders are picked up.

Ah, the Space Invaders that steal your life level things from the top bar. That was totally breaking the fourth wall.

Also, watching a speed run, it's funny that the game never allowed you more than like, 5 lives total. Any more 1ups you earned/found just didn't register. That's not hard, that's just being an ass, game developers!

I played the Gameboy and SNES versions, which I think I had better luck than the NES version. The third level moved so fast on the gameboy, the screen certainly couldn't refresh fast enough - it was all done by memory.

The snakes were a ton of fun.

The NES version had an ice level?! Forget that bollocks.
posted by alex_skazat at 3:56 PM on October 8, 2017 [3 favorites]


Re-watching via a speedrun, an interesting thing: I feel like the snake-like platforming in later SMB games may have originated right here in Battletoads. I could be wrong, but I can't say I recall an earlier game having something like it (does an SMB game pre-SNES even feature it?)
posted by tocts at 4:36 PM on October 8, 2017


Don't forget The C.O.W.-Boys of Moo Mesa, which was a show about cowboys who were actual cows.

My favorite TMNT knockoff was the short-lived Super Turbo Atomic Ninja Rabbit. To this day I'm still upset that they cancelled it without resolving that really awesome cliffhanger.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 4:39 PM on October 8, 2017


Yes, I know Super Turbo Atomic Ninja Rabbit is a hoax.

My real favorite TMNT knockoff was Bucky O'Hare and the Toad Wars, which had a much easier NES game.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 4:42 PM on October 8, 2017 [3 favorites]


I think my favorite description I've ever heard of Battletoads was "the NES's best-made terrible game." The programming chops on display are nothing short of stunning, and yet they used them to make a game that is generously described as “punishing.”

On the other hand, I still literally cannot believe that Arino managed to finish this game over the course of two episodes of Game Center CX. Like, he's literally famous for being bad at action games.
posted by DoctorFedora at 5:16 PM on October 8, 2017 [2 favorites]


the first two levels are full of clever play innovations, executed remarkably well, any one of which could have been the centerpiece gameplay element in an entire game. Like the first level was fascinating — it had dragon creatures you could knock out and ride on! You could take apart the robot monsters and use their legs as clubs! The boss fight was from the boss monster's perspective, something I had never seen to that point. And the second level was also fascinating, and more or less completely different in every particular from the first level — instead of just brawling with monsters as in the first level, you have to learn how to time your swings perfectly so as to slip past things you can't kill, kill things you can kill, and prevent enemies above you from cutting the line you're descending on.

Likewise the third level was completely different from the two that went before, and so on and so on.

Characterizing the first two levels as a "tutorial" requires misunderstanding the nature of battletoads. It's impossible for battletoads to have a tutorial, because the skills required for each level were almost totally different. Really, to some degree each level was in a different genre. All of these different genres were executed really well... but because the designers were committed to making the game difficult, and because being good at one level never really trained you to be good at any of the subsequent levels, the learning curve was a series of perfectly vertical walls, one after the other.

like, the speeder bike level is nothing like the rest of battletoads, but it's nevertheless a perfectly good metaphor for the sensation of playing battletoads — it's exhilarating and complex, but eventually the experience of running into solid walls over and over again grinds you down and you give up.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 5:18 PM on October 8, 2017 [23 favorites]


I'm skipping through a long-play video of this, and it's the first time I think I've ever seen one of their expert players die in a game. I do agree with Buick, though, there are some truly interesting elements of game design here. Also some seemingly terrible ones: like levels that seemed designed around repetition in a game that has a set number of lives. The snake level especially stuck out to me: there are a number of moves that the level makes that I can't see your average player being able to anticipate, and it really would be just about remembering which snake does what.
posted by codacorolla at 5:51 PM on October 8, 2017


When I rented it, I got to the next-to-last level. I used warps (yes, the game has them) but no cheats.
posted by JHarris at 7:08 PM on October 8, 2017 [3 favorites]


a while back, while putting off finishing a dissertation, I hit on the idea of putting together some sort of blog-like serial content entity based around playing through old 8-bit games that I had started but not finished when I had played them as a kid, and then writing exclusively about the parts I had never seen before. I was going to call this blog-like serial content entity "Not Nostalgia" — the idea being that when I reached a certain point in all of these games. I was no longer having a nostalgic experience, but instead enjoying something entirely new to me. The plan was to focus on games that I had liked, but which had a level, puzzle, boss, or jump that I had simply never been able to get past — games like Ninja Gaiden, the NES TMNT, the NES Star Wars, Battletoads, and so forth.

I decided to start with Battletoads. This was either a mistake or a good idea; I gave up on the Not Nostalgia idea very quickly indeed, and as such I've got a finished dissertation but no videogame blog.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 7:14 PM on October 8, 2017 [8 favorites]


There's a warp in the speeder bike level that it's almost hard not to hit.
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 7:15 PM on October 8, 2017 [4 favorites]


4chan needs their battletoads (imgur link, no profanity,sexism, racism etc,just old fashioned cruel, cruel pranking)
posted by lalochezia at 8:50 PM on October 8, 2017 [3 favorites]


There's a warp in the speeder bike level that it's almost hard not to hit.

Wait: so I failed to finish the level and failed to not finish the level?!
posted by alex_skazat at 8:50 PM on October 8, 2017 [1 favorite]


Re-watching via a speedrun, an interesting thing: I feel like the snake-like platforming in later SMB games may have originated right here in Battletoads.

There's some moving platforms in the original guts man's stage. There's a lot of megaman games and I haven't played them all, so maybe one of them had something similar? But I can't think of anything on the NES with snake blocks mechanics.
posted by pwnguin at 12:13 AM on October 9, 2017


The furthest I ever made it on my own was the %&$#ing snake level, and I never made it very far in that one because by the time I reached it, my stockpile of lives was too low for me to perform much memorization, and achieving it was so relatively rare that I didn't really build up any memory over repeated visits either.

I did use my Game Genie to beat the game once but it wasn't very satisfying. Like I would cheerfully spend hours playing Bomberman with 99 lives or SMB3 with infinite air-jumps turned on, but Battletoads with cheats on was just a broken game.
posted by Scattercat at 3:24 AM on October 9, 2017 [1 favorite]


Battletoads is of what I call the "Mt. Everest" school of game design, intended by its designers to be a gigantic, legendary challenge that will keep people occupied for a long time.

By one way of thinking, this is giving players their money's worth. And one can see that Tradewest and Rare were banking on Battletoads becoming a big hit. They had checked off all the boxes: a trendy theme (TMNT animal hero teams), snarky British humor, brilliant game design, some of the best technical wizardry on the NES (seriously, the game is a programming feat), a strong push by Nintendo Power, and long-lasting challenge. And it was somewhat successful, or else it wouldn't have gotten the sequels it did, but it didn't become the franchise they wanted.

Tradewest itself is an interesting story waiting, I think, for someone to tell it. They also released the NES version of Rare's brilliant yet woefully overlooked Solar Jetman, which Rare also really wanted to be successful, but in different way; it is said that they had home computer ports of Solar Jetman contracted out for the European market (it's kind of like a more forgiving version of Gravitar), and a while ago the Commodore 64 version turned up, a surprisingly NES-like game for a home computer. Sadly, it has only a fraction of the NES game's 13 levels. Release plans were cancelled, I read from its developer, when the NES game didn't do as well as hoped.

Rare was such a strange and interesting company. They got their start on home computers (as "Ultimate: Play The Game"), transitioned to NES becoming one of their first third-party developers, released several of its earliest hits, then set themselves up as kind of the best of both worlds in NES development: both a highly-skilled prestige studio with great programmers, artist, musicians and designers, AND willing and able to chase cheap contracts and throwaway software taking advantage of fads, like a British Tose.
posted by JHarris at 4:04 AM on October 9, 2017 [3 favorites]


I wonder how many controllers were destroyed thanks to Rare and Battletoads. I know mine survived by the bloody skin of it's teeth (or buttons?)
posted by Samizdata at 4:06 AM on October 9, 2017


I was a really good game player as a kid, and thought I could beat even the most difficult games -- Castlevania, Ninja Gaiden, Street Fighter 2012 -- but yeah, I never got past that damn Turbo Tunnel.

... but then again, I never actually owned Battletoads, just borrowed it.
posted by ELF Radio at 4:33 AM on October 9, 2017


Part of the reason those old games were so difficult and straight-up unfair was so they could stretch an hour of gameplay into twenty because you'd never get through the first time. You'd have boss fights where you'd have to memorize the attack patterns and figure out a strategy with trial and error, you'd never past them on the first try.

Developers from that era have admitted that they padded games with unnecessary difficulty purely to get players to be unable to beat a game in a rental.
posted by NoxAeternum at 10:08 AM on October 9, 2017 [1 favorite]


Also, let's give the game credit for a bizzare achievement - one of (if not the only) example of a battle fought in the second person view.
posted by NoxAeternum at 10:12 AM on October 9, 2017 [3 favorites]


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