I have very fond memories of pumping quarter after quarter into the 1989 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Arcade game. So when the arcade-perfect port hit XBLA on Wednesday, I was all over. And you know what? That game kicked my ass the first few times I played it.

I’m theorizing that it’s because the game is eighteen years old, and far simpler than the games I’m used to playing nowadays. The mechanics, I mean, are so straightfoward, and yet I think I’ve just become trained to look for complexity in my games. Combos, blocks, etc.

TMNT Arcade predates all that. One button, one attack. Want to hit your enemy? You have to be lined up on the same horizontal plane. Don’t want to get counter-attacked? Back off after a single hit. You stay in there button mashing, the computer doesn’t care. It’ll punch right through you.

Either that or I just wasn’t as good at the arcade game back in the day as I’d like to think. There’s valid support for either argument.

I’ve been on the fence about the upcoming movie for a good while now. I like the visual style, I have no qualms in that department. The big X factor was who the movie was directed at. We’ve known the answer for a while, and that’s a younger crowd. However, after seeing this featurette, I’ve become pretty interested in seeing it anyway. I don’t need my turtles to be dark and bloody and gritty, swearing up a storm for me to enjoy them. Just not overly cheesy, let’s-further-retard-our-children-with-crappy-entertainment simple.

I’m also interested in playing the new TMNT game that drops next week on one of the consoles. I played the PC demo a while back, and I enjoyed the simple Prince of Persia-style platforming the game offered. But the PC controls were torture. It’s definitely a title that begs to be played on the console only. Now my only toss-up is whether to snag it for the 360, which I inevitably play more, or grab it for the Wii and hope that the motion controls make up for any drop in graphics quality there may be (not that TMNT is graphically remarkable regardless).