Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tournament Fighters (NES)

The NES Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tournament Fighters is notable for being the last Konami release for the 8-bit platform, as well as one of the few competitive fighting games released for the system during the genre's post-Street Fighter II boom. In this version, the Turtles are forbidden to use their weapons in Shredder's fighting tournament, forcing them to compete unarmed instead.

Anti-Piracy
As with most of the games Konami published after 1990, this game features a copy-protection routine. When you press Start at the title screen, the game checks for the string "&copy; konami" in VRAM. If the check fails, a flag is set, making the final enemy (Shredder) difficult - if not impossible - to beat.

If you do happen to defeat Shredder, the game will then loop back to the beginning of the fight.

Regional Differences
Even though Konami skipped over Manhattan Project in Europe, they still released the NES Tournament Fighters under the Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles banner over there. There was no Famicom release of Tournament Fighters this time.

Oddities


The NES Tournament Fighters allows mirror matches for every character except Hothead. There's a trick to circumvent this in "Vs. CPU" mode, though:
 * 1) Start a match as any other character, then choose Hothead as your opponent.
 * 2) End the match (it doesn't matter if you win or lose), then choose "rematch".
 * 3) Select Hothead as your character and the CPU cursor will be highlighted at Hothead as well.
 * 4) Simply choose Hothead as your opponent again (don't move the cursor to another character) and start the next match.

The CPU-controlled Hothead will have a different palette from yours, which suggests that the game was originally going to allow Hothead mirror matches. However, during the actual fight it will become obvious why it doesn't: due to their large sizes, the two Hotheads will cause a very large amount of sprite flickering.

Using the Game Genie code will allow Hothead vs. Hothead matches in "Vs. Player" and "Vs. CPU" modes. Using the Game Genie code will allow all four players in "Tournament" mode to use Hotheads.