Play this radical Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles fan game for free

If you've got fond memories of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, specifically the cartoon and action figure version from the 1980s and '90s, then do I have the fan game for you. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Rescue-Palooza! is a homage to the arcade and NES games starring the Turtles, filled with voice lines from the show. 

Shredder has decided to celebrate the 30th anniversary of his rivalry with the heroes in a half-shell by kidnapping their entire supporting cast, so you (and maybe a co-op buddy) have to rescue them all, after which they become playable characters. There are 60 of them, which means basically every character you remember (even Usagi Yojimbo, the rabbit from Stan Sakai's comics who met the Turtles in a crossover).

It plays a lot like the old TMNT arcade game, which is to say it feels like Golden Axe. Bebop and Rocksteady are still jerks to fight, and after I rescued April O'Neil she hit Shredder with a microphone. This rules.

You can download it from developer Merso X's website.

Thanks, DSOGaming.

Jody Macgregor
Weekend/AU Editor

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.