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Actually, I can't really complain about this one: Turtles in Time is a frickin' brilliant beat-em-up, with lots of creative use of level hazards. Even your "electrified turtle" graphic is used several different times (for the drill-bots grabby-beams, etc). So what if Giant Krang's Robot Body only lumbers by for a few screen-widths in the first level -- how else are you going to interact with a robot big enough to hug the statue of liberty?

So, why did I mention this? Well, mainly because I forgot that the skateboard lady is only in the NES TMNT II game because it is a nice set-up for...

The not at all Final Fight-knockoff Rushing Beat series of beat-em-ups takes a page from TMNT IV's book, by having a helicopter that hovers around the screen part-way through the first level, strafing you and your opponents with equal abandon. If any of those bullets hit you, you're immediately consumed in flames. Of course, that's a non-fist-or-foot related attack in a Rushing Beat-series game, so it hurts significantly less than being punched or kicked.

But you know what's even weirder? Brawl Bros takes a page out of Final Fight's car-smashing book, where you have to destroy an enemy's vehicle with your bare hands.

Except this time it isn't Bred's beloved car (whose destruction he bemoans with either taking the Lord's name in vain or calling it a car, depending on which country's verison you're playing). No, this time you've found that helicopter that was shooting at you in Level 1. You have survived its favorite game (namely, "shoot at dudes on a bridge"), so now you get to challenge it to a round of your speciality: bare-knuckle boxing!

Ah, Ghoul Patrol, the kinda-sorta sequel to the always-fun Zombies Ate My Neighbors. Like a lot of half-baked games, it's scattered with unfinished ideas. One of them is "rescuing animals (who are not your neighbors) for points." You'd be forgiven if you didn't know this was something that happened in the game, because it only happens in the first level. There are several very tiny birds, which blend in with the grass and leaves outside the building in the first level. If you happen to spot them and then touch them, they disappear and you get 50 points.

The "Genie Bottle" potion in the first level is a unique item. However it functions exactly like a Med Kit: it goes into your inventory, and when you use it, you get all your health back. There seems to be a few other things like this -- a golden beer stein in the pirate level, etc. This time it's kind of an inversion of the question...why did they bother drawing several different sprites if they're not going to program new functionality? It kind of smacks of "half-implemented ideas that got cut due to time constraints."

Who can forget the "Titanic Toddler" from Zombies Ate my Neighbors -- a boss that not only sucked up bazooka rounds and exploding soda cans like they were Gerbers, but who dashed around the screen, injuring and often smashing your character flat (in the game's only "unique damage sprite"). These giant babies only appeared 3 or 4 times in the game, but each time they were a big part of the level they were in, and your unique "smashed kid" stun-sprite often meant you'd take several hits in a row.

If you ask me, True Lies is proof positive that every movie adaptation should be done as a top-down run-and-gun, rather than a platformer. It's brutal fun, and you never have to think to yourself, "hey, I don't remember the part in Cliffhanger where Stallone's character had to jump over 3 tiny platforms, using a variety of long-jumps and short-hops!"

Another liberty that this Schwarzenegger-em-up took with the source material is the addition of civilians: especially in the first few levels, Arnie has to watch his shootin', or he'll mow down some innocent bystanders. And they actually strike a decent balance between action movie realism (the hero miraculously never injuries or kills bystanders) and how games normally handle civilians in the line of fire (if you shoot them, it hurts you): whenever you blow away a non-bad-guy, Tom Arnold pops up and says something like, "the chief's going to be mad; don't do that again!" After your third unjustified killing, it's Game Over.

So, I mention all this because after the first few levels, there are less and less civilians about. It's fortunate because the bad guys really start showing up thick and fast, and having to watch your fire would be a pretty hard limitation (which is one of the reasons that the Mall level is kind of fun).

But back to the subject at hand: see those Karate Guys pictured above? They're civilians, not enemies. Killing 3 of those 4 will end your game real good. It's especially insidious because this is the first time you've seen this civilian type, and they're in one of the last levels where you have to worry about civilians in the entire game. To make matters worse, they do little "Hi-yah" yells when they're nearby. Because this level is a hedge-maze, you'll be near enough to hear them long before you'll actually be able to see with them...so you'll hear that ominous noise a few times as you work your way through the maze, then all of the sudden you'll see these sprites for the first time.

If you've gotten this far in the game, you know it rewards a shoot-first-ask-questions-later kind of approach....so, to summarize: they put these guys in here to surprise you into accidentally killing them the first time you saw them. And if that's not an odd use of a new sprite, I don't know what is!

I don't even really know what to call it; this stick-figure face guy appears in exactly one window in the Oil Refinery level. He pops up, then waves/blinks/says 'HELP'/wears a hat...then goes back down below the window frame, only to repeat itself with a different action (click here for an animated version)

It's not hidden enough to qualify as an Easter Egg (it's right there in the window), and it's not "done" enough to serve some purpose (there's nothing special there, nothing you can do to the wall, and no way to get to the other side of that window). It feels like some crap someone put in a background layer and then forgot to remove!