For this month's "Maps Of The Month" featurette, I wish to draw your attention to Will Mallia's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tournament Fighters (Super NES) maps.
Channel 6 presents "Tournament Fighters", a televised fighting tournament. It happens to feature aliens and mutants and even... Shredder? Is it part of some evil plan? The Turtles will join the tournament to prove they are the strongest. Or, in the "Story Battle", Karai and the forces of the Shredder Elite have kidnapped April O'Neil and Splinter, so the Turtles will fight through anyone that stands in the way of their rescue attempt. Either way, prepare for some of the best 16-bit fighting action based around licensed characters, ever!
Interestingly, there are three completely different versions of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tournament Fighters - the NES, Super NES, and Genesis games are nothing alike, despite all being developed by Konami. (Will Mallia also mapped the NES version and zagato blackfist mapped the Genesis version.) They are three separate stories taking place in unrelated settings and therefore have exclusive arenas. Aside from the four Turtles themselves, the rosters are almost totally unique per game. The only exceptions are Casey Jones, who is playable in the NES and Genesis versions, Shredder, who is in the NES version, but appears as "Cyber Shredder" on the Super NES, and Karai, a boss character who is playable in the Super NES version with a code, and the 2022 Cowabunga Collection rerelease of the Genesis version. If any other character is your favourite, you're only going to find them in one game. While the rare NES game is one of the only fighting games - and among the last few games overall - on the 8-bit platform, the Genesis one may be the first fighting game to have instant replays, and the Super NES version is one of the earliest fighting games to have a "super meter" with its "Ultimate Attack gauge", and the only one to feature online play in the Cowabunga Collection. All three of them would be of some interest to Ninja Turtles fans.
So to recognize the effort put into mapping this tubular tournament, Will Mallia's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tournament Fighters (Super NES) maps will be known as VGMaps.com's Maps Of The Month for August 2022.
