The most obvious contribution Shredder’s Revenge makes to Turtles in Time’s basic formula are multi-hit AOE Super attacks governed by a meter. Supers can be thrown out once the meter is full, and landing regular attacks is what gradually fills it, but there’s another way to get there, too: pressing the Taunt button locks you into an animation for a few seconds, at the end of which you instantly receive a full bar. The only condition that has to be met is that you can’t let an enemy attack interrupt your taunt, meaning it’s possible to use the downtime between combat rooms to safely stack up up to three Super bars (in Story Mode) and have them ready to rip the millisecond an enemy enters your general vicinity.

The obvious balance issues arising from this pose a question that’s unfortunately far more interesting than the game itself. Even within battles, the enemy AI can get so lethargic that it’s trivial to find breathing room for a taunt and delete entire rooms of mobs or take massive bites out of a boss’s health bar. Essentially, I kept having to stop and think: maybe I’d be enjoying this more if I stopped myself from exclusively jumping to the Instant Win-button at every opportunity?

To answer that question in a literal sense, I’m leaning toward “nah” — enemy behavior ranges from “literally won’t even attempt to track you across the screen” and “will grab you out of nowhere with no telegraphing” with little in-between, and they’ll even regularly enter the screen with active hitboxes when you might very well be in the middle of an uninterruptible action, leading to a good amount of cheap shots. It’s possible to launch enemies into the air with an uppercut or laterally and into walls with a satisfying dodge attack, but these hit reactions are yet another area with no pleasing middle ground: foot soldiers go from zero to death with basic launch-dive loops while most of the tougher enemy types take little to no hitstun. The final set of bosses actually attempt to counterplay Super spam by literally only being vulnerable in rigid intervals, but this results in fights where you stand in one corner, jump over any incoming projectiles and then walk up to get your three hits in. If that’s the kind of gameplay I can expect from a no-Super challenge run then I can’t say I’m interested.

But it’s also possible to look at my earlier question from a more philosophical angle: clearly, the existence of easy, exploitable strategies colored my perception of the game in a way that’s hard to shake retroactively. Fundamentally, I believe in the idea of encouraging players to find their own fun — be it from the perspective of a designer or even just when you’re recommending games to friends. Basically: why would I dismiss a game’s enjoyable qualities when its shortcomings are something I could technically opt out of?

Death Stranding, a game I may write a separate review for once the stars align, happens to be a case where I managed to do just that. The PS5 Director’s Cut includes the Half-Life Gravity Glove as an unlockable item, which naturally lets you beam objects directly into your hands from far away. I can’t imagine this would actually do serious harm to the game’s balance in practice, but I personally still stopped using it after a few missions — so much of what draws me to Death Stranding is the tangibility of its world, with every piece of cargo being spatially represented as a physics object. And the seemingly tiny quality of life improvement provided by the Gravity Glove was enough to undercut a lot of that appeal.

I may be stating the obvious now but what I’m trying to get at with this tangent is that Death Stranding clearly had something about it that hooked me, and that I wanted more of as I played — be that something as simple as the satisfaction of squeezing the right trigger to pick up a box of porn magazines and then letting go in the middle of Sam’s punch animation to organically hurl it at a guy’s head.

“Is it the game’s fault? No, it’s the players who are wrong.” — a hotly debated sentiment at least in my bubble, and one with enough nuances that I’ve been meaning to make a separate video about it. You may have come across or even held opinions like “it’s the designer’s job to force or at least encourage you to utilize all of a game’s mechanics;” DOOM Eternal game director Hugo Martin has famously described this idea as “pushing players into the fun zone,” even going as far as calling it a fuck-up on their part to not kill the player for fighting in a “boring/unfun” way (see the pre-release noclip interview.) I know I for one have traditionally erred on the side that you’re kind of a lamer if you can’t “FinD tHE fUn” on your own.

While I’m skeptical I’ll ever be fond of games like DOOM Eternal pushing their intended playstyle so aggressively that the experience turns into a glorified schedule, it’s cases like Shredder’s Revenge that make me realize my earlier perspective still was somewhat of an oversimplification. Because asking players to “find the fun” should naturally raise more questions: when or how do I know for sure that there’s no “fun” to be found? Could whatever cogent mechanical analysis I presented over the course of this 2/5 review still be missing the point? How much time do I owe any given game, how much experience with the medium and critical thinking of my own do I need to bring in to draw the most out of it?

Imposing rules and guidelines à la “X SHOULD be like Y” isn’t healthy for any artistic medium. But if there’s one idea swirling around in my himbo brain that seems worth sharing, it’s to encourage devs to at minimum know what the fun in their game is and put their best foot forward accordingly. I understand you may feel inclined to take the kiddies on a guided tour through the candy store so they don’t get food poisoning, but it’s okay to let go of their hand if you just make sure the stuff on the shelves is actually good. What I know is that Shredder’s Revenge’s bubble gum got a little too stale a little too fast, and it lacked the nuance to make me curious enough for another taste test.