Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Cowabunga Collection is getting a lot of great reviews. Across most platforms, it is hanging around the 80s on Metacritic. It’s not as good as the new game, Shredder’s Revenge, but it is close. Fans that grew up with these games seem to love them just as much as the newcomers. It’s been a while since such a robust collection was released across every platform.
Konami may not make games as much as they used to, but at least they are licensing great companies like Digital Eclipse to archive their work. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Cowabunga Collection is not a perfect collection. Honestly, it could take some ideas from Shredder’s Revenge to help make it the ultimate turtle experience.
6 Enhancements For Every Game
The best thing about remastered collections like The Cowabunga Collection is that they can allow players to finish games they weren’t able to before. For example, the original NES game is pure torture. That’s where a God mode, like in this collection, would come in handy.
Unfortunately, even though there are easy difficulty settings, God modes, and infinite lives cheats, those features only work for certain titles. Every game in this collection should get the invincibility cheat at the very least. Assist options in games need to become more universal and this should be patched in.
5 Add Video Components
The amount of printed materials that appear in The Cowabunga Collection is staggering. The team scanned in game manuals, strategy guides, documents, and so much more. Being able to look at print ads is also fun as they can be quite bizarre.
Unfortunately, there are no video components to the bonus features. Where are the commercials? Where are the episode previews for the cartoons? A behind-the-scenes documentary, or even an audio commentary, would have been awesome too. It may be a lot to ask, but some videos would make any remastered collection better.
4 More Missing Things For The Collection
The lack of video content is not the only thing that TMNT fans may miss from this latest remastered collection. Most aspects of the fandom are represented including the games, artwork, comics, cartoons, and so on. What about other physical media like the action figures? Being able to look at every figure released to date would be a daunting task.
It would make for a cool new feature in a patch though. There are other physical objects that could be added too such as pinball machines, handheld electronic games, full 3D versions of the boxes, and so on. What’s here in The Cowabunga Collection is great, but it’s okay for fans to want a little more too.
3 Music Tweaks
Not all of the games in the collection are fun to play whether it is alone or with a co-op buddy. The plus side to all of them is that the music is at least entertaining. These retro gems have some of Konami’s best soundtracks from the 80s and 90s. Thankfully, the music bonus features in The Cowabunga Collection. The only downside is that the background music for the menus cannot be altered.
There should be an added feature that will allow players to pick a song to always play instead or to have the collection choose one at random. Also, the team needs to get their lawyers on the line to get back the original 80s theme song. Playing the new version in the intro scene is fine but it is bizarre that it was changed in the first arcade game. It makes the experience feel lesser.
2 More Online Multiplayer
Of the thirteen games in the collection, with most having local multiplayer of some sort, only four of them can be played online. The four games included are the two arcade games, the SNES version of Tournament Fighters, and The Hyperstone Heist. Every game that features multiplayer should be able to get online.
In this case, it might have been a time issue. Maybe this means other games like The Manhattan Project or different versions of Tournament Fighters will get online support in a future patch. The fighting game community would probably appreciate the support for those two other versions at the very least.
1 More Games
Of the thirteen games in The Cowabunga Collection, only eight of them are original. The Hyperstone Heist for the Sega Genesis is close to a ninth original game but it is more like a remixed version of Turtles in Time. Most of the alternate versions in this collection are different in some form. All three versions of Tournament Fighters, for example, feature alternate character rosters and levels. It’s nice to have alternates but it's not the same as having a collection with thirteen original games. Some PC games, like Manhattan Missions, would be cool to see added along with PC ports of the games already included.
One giant alternate version missing from the collection is the remake of Turtles in Time that launched during the PS3 and Xbox 360 generations. That game has been delisted from digital stores for over a decade now. That’s one of the issues with retro re-releases like this collection. As much as they offer, there are always things fans can find missing. If these games and more can’t get added in with a patch then hopefully Digital Eclipse can get the go-ahead from Konami to make a second d collection instead.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Cowabunga Collection was released on August 30, 2022, and is available on PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.