Turtles (1981)

 Turtles (hell yeah, turtles are awesome!) seems like it might be a companion to Konami's Frogger. The cute animal games of 1981. Whereas Frogger was about the frogs trying to get home by crossing the street and the river, in Turtles you control a mama turtle who's trying to save her babies from a bunch of beetles that are infesting a high-rise. How the turtles got up there is left to the imagination. 

The way it plays out is that you run around a maze, opening boxes scattered about. Most of the boxes have your babies inside and when you open the box, the baby will climb on your back, at which point you have to take it to the "home" icon that appears in one of the corners of the maze. A couple of the boxes, however, are traps and house extra beetles. Most maze games at the time ripped off Pac-Man and would allow you to eat the enemies after getting a power pellet or something. The way the mama turtle fights back is that she's carrying a selection of bombs she can leave behind her and these bombs will temporarily immobilize a beetle. Bomb refills regularly appear at the maze center (giving you three at a time), so you want to stockpile these things whenever possible because the beetles are very fast and hard to shake once they're on your tail. A limitation of the bombs is that you can only drop one and can't drop another until a beetle runs over it, so make sure you make them count when you decide to drop them.

Turtles is a tough game but addictive and is a solid variation of the maze game formula that was prevalent in its time.