You may have noticed that we recently launched a new, soon-to-be regular feature on the site, Retro Recap, designed to gather up all of the best retro gaming news and content of the past week in one convenient place.
Well, it isn't alone, as we've also been kicking around some other ideas for making Time Extension a more fun place to visit in 2026.
Another of these, for instance, is the Community Challenge - a new regular feature I'm personally pretty excited about, where we'll be posting a new retro challenge every week that we've never personally done before, attempting it ourselves, and encouraging readers to take part. The idea behind this moving forward is that members of the Time Extension community can submit their own challenges for us to try out, testing not only our skills but also those of other readers as well.
Without further ado, this inevitably brings us to the very first challenge, and one of my own personal Mt. Everest's: Battletoads' Turbo Tunnel — a level that, try as I might, I've personally never beaten, despite several attempts across multiple platforms over the years.
Watching speedruns and videos of skilled players online, I always wanted to beat the level without crashing or resorting to save states, so I set about over the course of several hours earlier this week to finally try and memorize all the obstacles and learn the techniques that would lead me to victory (rather than try and wing it as had been my previous slapdash approach).
The Turbo Tunnel, in case you've never played Battletoads, is the third stage in the game and is notorious for featuring a bit of a difficulty spike over the first two levels. It starts similarly to the opening of the game, with players battling enemies in the style of a beat 'em up, before you are confronted with a pair of bikes and are tasked with navigating through an increasingly difficult barrage of obstacles, ranging from stone barriers, annoying enemies, and perfectly-timed jumps.
In the past, I could, at best, get beyond the first few barriers without issues, but would eventually hit a wall (pun intended) as I got onto the later parts of the level. Namely, the annoying stone block positioned in the middle of the path, just before a checkpoint, which I can only imagine was placed by satan himself.
Eventually, though, on this most recent playthrough, I successfully managed to learn the stage and moved on to some of the other difficult obstacles, including that absolutely ridiculous last rush of walls right before the end, which requires some pretty spot-on timing on behalf of the player.
The biggest set of breakthroughs I made here came from the realisation that it's significantly easier to use the toad's shadow as a reference point as opposed to the bike itself, and that tapping up and down is actually much more preferable than holding down the directional buttons. Previously, the mistake I had been making, for instance, was oversteering to move the bike out of the way of these walls, but I would then struggle to make it back to the other side of the path. The solution here was to focus on simply trying to stay in a pair of "safe zones", which are both situated below the crack on the path and give you the time to respond to whatever's next.
In total, it took me five hours to finally crack the level, with the recording below showing my first successful attempt:
Now I just need to find someone mad enough to attempt the two-player mode with.
Did you manage to complete the community challenge? What challenge do you think we should feature next? Let us know in the comments!