Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles — That Damn Dam
Beloved, infamous, and unbeaten in a thousand living rooms.
Konami's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1989) is beloved and infamous in equal measure, and the reason is two words: the dam.
You switch between all four turtles, each with their own reach and health, across an overhead map and side-scrolling stages. It's ambitious and it looks great. Then you hit the underwater dam level, dodging electric seaweed while disarming bombs against a timer, and a generation of rented cartridges went back to the store unbeaten.
Brutal, a little unfair, and absolutely unforgettable. For a lot of us it was the first TMNT game we owned, and the cartoon-to-cartridge magic outweighed the rage. Mostly.