Turrican (C64)

"Hello and welcome to Turrican, be my guest! Another day another try, but remember... shoot or die! Ha ha ha!"

Today I'm playing legendary run and gun platformer Turrican, created by two of the blokes that brought the world The Great Giana Sisters: designer Manfred Trenz and musician Chris Hülsbeck. Apparently some anonymous artist with the initials 'MT' thought it'd be good idea to entirely rip off this badass Manowar album cover for this loading screen artwork, and hey it probably was. Definitely smarter than ripping off something like Lovesexy by Prince anyway.

Turrican came out on a lot of systems and is probably best known as an Amiga game, but I'm going to be mainly focusing on the C64 version as it's the original all the others were based on. Shouldn't take me long to regret that choice I expect.

Look at that classic rainbow effect on the text, using every colour the humble C64 was capable of throwing on screen. Funny how you never see things like this in games these days.

You know what isn't funny though? This is playing the wrong theme tune (youtube link). Well okay the music isn't actually bad at all, but it's not the song I'm familiar with. It seems like Chris Hülsbeck's famous Turrican theme (also a youtube link) was actually a replacement song made for the Amiga port of the game. Possibly because the original theme was straight stolen from the Transformers: The Movie soundtrack.

Hang on, I just need to listen to the Amiga theme five more times over before I hit 'fire' to start.

I love that block transition. I deliberately left the game on for 500 seconds here to run out of time so the animation would loop properly, so I hope you appreciate everything I do for you.

Man, just look at that bar at the bottom of the screen, you think they put enough icons down there? All those cryptic pictures, who knows what they all could mean? Well I'm pretty sure that the red running man on the left is my lives counter, the number to the right of that is probably my continues, Iron Man's head is my timer...

...and then I suppose the boxes to the right of that must be counters for my diamonds, my balls, my flies, and... oh whatever, I'll figure it out.

Actually I think I've just figured something out already:

I knew that I recognised that running bloke from somewhere! He's the blue guy from the developer's logo, who's apparently broken free and gone into hiding, changing his colour to red as a cunning disguise.

I keep waiting for the awesome music to start, but... there's nothing. Only the crackling of my high-energy particle beam and the twinkling of power-ups. Well I've learned something today: Turrican, a game famous for its soundtrack, has no in-game music on the C64.

Oh, when the game started I decided to head left instead of right for a change and found this invisible block on a nearby hill while I was testing out my gun. Look at all those cryptic power-ups, who know what they all could mean? I mean seriously, who uses a red circle to indicate 'three way shot' and green to indicate 'laser', especially when other power-ups have letters on. It's just confusing.

Amiga

Meanwhile on the Amiga version, the music is thankfully present and accounted for. Looks a fair bit prettier too. I went wandering and I found this cave off to the side for me to explore. The time limit doesn't exactly encourage straying from the path, but I'm doing it anyway.

By the way this energy stream is actually my secondary fire mode; the gun usually just fires regular bullets. Annoyingly I have to hold the fire button down for a couple of seconds before the beam will activate, so I don't expect I'll get to use it much in a fight. Unless I just sit here and wait for enemies to come over to me.

C64

Amiga (etc.)

ZX Spectrum

Amstrad CPC

Game Boy

NES

There's at least 7 ports of the game, with the Amiga, Atari, Mega Drive/Genesis and TurboGrafx-16 versions similar enough for me to group together, and the NES getting its own remix of Turrican 1 and 2 combined called Super Turrican. Sadly the PC was left out entirely this time around.

Man, I love that Amiga walk cycle animation, with his spiky shoulders and shiny gun. I also like that he's made the effort and gotten himself a proper sci-fi looking hat, while most of the others seem to be wearing motorcycle helmets. Though he did seem to make the mistake of fusing it to his torso, so his head turns from side to side as he runs. It'd give any normal man a splitting headache, but fortunately Turrican is no normal man. Probably.

Holy crap, I can't believe that I just got Turrican blown to pieces by accidentally touching a Contra-style power-up pod. That's a bit harsh isn't it? Next time I'll have to make damn sure to blow them open before going anywhere near the things.

The game isn't entirely unlike Contra so far, mixed with a little bit of Metroid style exploration, and the health system is somewhere in the middle. By that I mean I get a life bar, but holy shit it disappears fast. It constantly depletes whenever I'm in contact with a hazard, so if I can't blow an enemy up or get out of its way in time, well I've just lost a life. Annoyingly there's no temporary invulnerability after taking damage.

Well this cave turned out to be worse than worthless to me, so I'm going back outside in the sunshine.

Mega Drive/Genesis

When I had the laser power-up in the other version I was able to one shot these annoying little turrets, but it's taking a little more work with the 3-way gun I'm carrying now. I have to keep jumping up, taking a shot, then ducking back down out of the way. I'm half tempted to just make a run for it, but if I accidentally step on one of those things my suit will explode before I can count to two.

The Atari-ST, Mega Drive/Genesis and TurboGrafix-16 versions of the game all look a lot like the Amiga version, so there's no much point to showing them all off. They all play very similarly too, though I think I'd have to give the Amiga and Sega versions the edge in slickness (and Amiga the edge in music).

Mega Drive/Genesis

Though the Mega Drive and TurboGrafx-16 versions both have this guy on their title screen, which is definitely... a difference. Actually it reminds me of the European box art to Mega Man 2, which gives me a great excuse to link to an scan of it: http://www.gamefaqs.com/nes/563442-mega-man-2/images/box-58990

Great, now the game's dropping rocks at me from space, how simply delightful. What am I supposed to do, use my energy beam as an umbrella? Actually that doesn't sound like a terrible idea.

Oh by the way, see that tower in the background? Back in 1990 someone at Apogee Software apparently thought it'd look really nice in their new Duke Nukem platformer and started 'borrowing' Turrican's pixel work, which you can see in this external link! http://www.nemmelheim.de/turrican/news/duke/ You know, if you're interested in that kind of thing.

Some games are good at giving the player enough room in front of them on screen to see what's coming up and to avoid blind leaps into possible certain death. Turrican really isn't.

I mean look at that gap on the right between me and the edge of the screen, that's all the space I get to identify enemies coming my way and react to them.

Ooops, it turns out that I was actually jumping over a bottomless waterfall. There goes another Turrican suit. Boooom.

Still, I'm not quite out of lives just yet!


SOON, AFTER I LOST ALL MY LIVES.

Whoa, there's something I haven't seen in a long long while. I turns out that I have to rewind the cassette to just to use a continue. Well I'm sure that ain't going to get old fast, especially the rate I burn through the things.

Wait, why am I even using a continue, I'm still on the first stage.


EVENTUALLY, AT THE START OF LEVEL 1-2.

I can't believe they put a boss fight at the start of level 1-2! Now I need to somehow outwit a giant disembodied hand that likes to hover over my head and slam its fist down on me. Man, I'm getting Super Smash Bros. flashbacks here.

Still, it's a fairly impressive boss for a C64 game I reckon. Not that I'd really know, seeing as I've probably played less than 20 of them in my life. Oh damn, now I'm dying to see what he looks like in the Speccy version, if they even managed to get him working at all.

ZX Spectrum

The C64 version Turrican is a marvel of programming skill and ingenuity, making the hardware perform feats that no one expected it was capable of, while still holding a silky smooth frame rate throughout. The ZX Spectrum version... not so much, though to its credit it does have still have a full range of scrolling instead of relying on flick-screen, and it does have the giant robot fist boss.

Fortunately I have managed to develop a clever tactic to take the guy out:

1. Stand at the edge of the screen.
2. Activate my energy beam gun and swivel it around to point it at the nasty old fist until I've won.

I don't much want to win though, as that'd mean I could keep playing and this version is painful to play. The Amstrad CPC version too. They're incredibly slow and really not worth anyone's time.

Oh hi 'blind jump next to possible bottomless pit', I haven't seen you in several seconds!

This turned out to be doubly hilarious because when I destroyed that power-up pod a 1up fell out... right into a certain death hole just off the bottom of the screen. There's a good chance that thing's just there to lure people to their death.

Super Turrican (NES)

Super Turrican on the NES (not to be confused with Super Turrican on the SNES) isn't a straight port of Turrican 1 like the others, though I'm struggling to tell much difference in level design or gameplay so far. Well okay this waterfall is a little different perhaps, as I remember being able to actually jump across it in the other versions.

I'd investigate more of the game to find out if it diverges further except, well, I can't jump across the waterfall! Can't go any further if I can't get across. And yeah I did climb back up Blind Jump Mountain to look for another path across, no luck.

You know how most platformers let you jump up through ledges? Well Turrican doesn't do that. Nope, instead I have to jump around the edge of each platform to get up, and every time I take one step upwards I end up messing up on the next jump and falling two steps back. But hey, it's not like I'm in a rush.

Damn, this is really getting annoying now.


TIME PASSES.

And so I finally fought my way past bats, lil' walkers, giant robot fists, malevolent floating eels, bouncing spiky balls, meteors and the heavens themselves trying to strike me down with thunderbolts, only for my journey to be brought to an tragically premature conclusion by my most indomitable of foes: the baffling dead end. Did I go the wrong way or something? I mean the platforms up there did snake around a bit, so I suppose it's possible I'll to jump back up that cliff and go a different way.

Oh! I see what I'm supposed to do here: I shoot the brick on the right and it makes a lift appear. See, this is what playing too much Metroid does to your mind. When I can't get a door open my first instinct is to attack the scenery.

I've finally made it to level 2-1, and it's indoors! With any luck that means smaller areas, fewer blind jumps, and an easier time predicting where the enemies are going to leap from next. I'm a hopeless optimist I guess.

And then I go and accidentally shoot out the floor I'm standing on with my 3-way shot while trying to get out of this ambush. There's no way back up the elevator shaft by the way; unlike Metroid this game is more or less a straight run to the final boss.

Game Boy

Speaking of, uh, this place that I am in... here's what it looks like on the Game Boy version!

The graphics are a bit different, but it's still pretty much the same game. Much more playable than the ZX Spectrum and Amstrad CPC versions too. It's a bit awkward controlling it with only two buttons though, which might sound weird as the C64 only has a one button joystick, but the original game also makes use of the keyboard to activate special abilities. So all the systems without a keyboard struggle a little by comparison.

And here's me getting blown up after falling into another bloody power-up orb. A pair of them in fact!

The dumb thing is, the view distance is so short that by the time I saw the hazard it was too late for me to do a thing about it. I had a 50/50 chance of choosing the right part of the ceiling to drop through and I chose wrong. It's a cruel game sometimes.


AND THEN I WAS ATTACKED BY A FISH.

Oh shit, it's a fish! And it's shooting piranhas out of its mouth at me! I think I'm going to go find a corner and cower in it.

Amiga

Oh that's real funny, giving me absolutely no place to dodge the fish. It didn't seem to float this low to the ground in the C64 original, so it's possible this was unintentional glitch created when they ported the code. I bet in testing those programmers probably always killed the fish before it even came close to them, using the unnatural gaming skills that all game developers have.  

But I am but a mere mortal, so I'm going to have to resort to spamming my special attacks.

Amiga

Yeah, yeah, how you like that? I've turned into an invincible Metroid-style spiky ball and I'm firing off screen-clearing energy waves at your weak point! Well I was until I ran out anyway.

Well I'm all out of special ammo now and it's still not dead, though I kinda figured it'd survive my onslaught. I've even ran out of shuriken morph ball transformations (this never happened to Samus Aran). It's okay though, I get a refill of special attacks each time I get Turrican killed, and I'm sure I'll be managing that a few more times before the end of this fight.

Oh by the way I should point out that you respawn at the nearest safe place to where you were killed in this, so there's no long trek back to the boss fight. Using a continue on the other hand is going to set you back a little. The C64 version is kind enough to restart you at the beginning of the current level, while the Amiga version (and most of the others it seems) puts you right back at the start of the entire world. So basically you really don't want to lose all your lives in the Amiga version.

Oh shit, I finally managed to kill the fish... and he exploded into more fish! I didn't ask for this!

So, uh, I just jump through the stream of falling trash then? I'm sure that can't have any negative consequences at all.

Oh, looking at my currently pathetic pea-shooter of a gun reminds me of something I like about the game. Collecting multiple power-ups for a weapon type boosts its power, and collecting a different weapon power-up instantly switches you over to that gun instead. But you don't seem to lose the power boost if you switch back, so you're not getting punished for choosing a different type of gun. Or more likely, accidentally jumping into the wrong power-up by mistake.

Okay this has me worried. The games been extremely stingy with gems up to this point, and now I run into a hundred of them in the same room? I get a free continue for collecting 300 of them, and I'm starting to worry I'm going to need it soon.

By the way I thought these things were spikes at first, as they look entirely different to the gems on the first world. I only realised what they were after accidentally falling into some along the way. It doesn't help that you can't shoot through them, so they seem like a wall.

Another boss so soon? It doesn't matter, I'm loaded up with ammo and there's no mystery how to beat this guy. He's got an obvious weakpoint, I've got an obvious place to stand, and all the thing even does is slowly slide towards me along those rails.

Have an ultra powerful grenade shot you bastard! I had to lean over to the keyboard and press F7 to fire that so you'd better appreciate it.


9 SECONDS LATER.

Oh shit, I can't believe I ran out of time! I totally had him!

But then a funny thing happened after I respawned and unloaded my fresh supply of super-weapons his way: absolutely nothing. He just trundled over and drilled my poor Turrican to death, then all the Turricans that followed after him, as the boss's drill was stabbing through my respawn point. Wow, harsh.

Time after time I used up one of my precious continues and fought my way back here, and time after time I failed. The most obvious boss turns out to be the hardest to defeat, as there's only one way to kill him and it's not bloody working!

Amiga

I ended up watching a youtube video to figure out the special trick in the end, and the solution turned out to be painfully simple: I just had to hammer that fire button as fast as my poor tired fingers could manage.

By the way that huge amount of lives I'm dragging around with me isn't an indication of my improved skill, I just stumbled across a stash of them along the way. See, it always pays to explore! Except for the time I went exploring and then ran out of time during the boss fight on the C64 version just then. That didn't really pay at all.

I'm glad I kept going a little longer now, as level 3-1 is a surprise vertically scrolling jetpack level. With in-game music!

It's also got a whole lot of bullshit too. Like these barriers blocking off the top of the screen. One life lost if you didn't grab the 3-way shot power-up instead of the laser, as it doesn't seem that you can shoot your way through otherwise.

Amiga

And now there's laser blasts coming in from off screen, well that's just fantastic. I love trying to dodge speeding bolts of energy fired from a gun that I can't even see.

Surprise boss fight! And here's me with only a single life left, 4 pixels of health, and zero continues. If I beat this guy it'll be a miracle, but hey at least I had a good run. I got way further in the game than I ever expected I would and I've got a good idea of how it plays now.

Aww look at that. I actually managed to kill the boss, then got shot by a surprise laser turret sliding in from the top of the screen. I'd actually stopped paying attention as I assumed it was the end of the levels. Ooops.

Well at least now I know that there's no saves, no passwords, and that earning 500,000 points doesn't earn me shit. Game over.


I think that overall I liked Turrican a lot more than I was expecting. The limited continues kill all my ambitions of ever actually finishing it, but I have to admit I was expecting to hate the game and I really didn't. I figured I wouldn't make it more than 3 screens into it before being obliterated and to be honest that is kind of how things went down in most of the ports I played. But the C64 and Amiga versions eventually won my interest, and I found I was willing to put up with little things like the leaps of faith, cruel level design and a lack of temporary invulnerability after taking damage, because they're slick, they control well, and there's definitely some joy to be found in there. At least on the platforming levels.

Really though it's just made me more curious about the sequels, as there's a lot of room for improvement here, and it'll be cool if it turns out they eventually improved on it. Infinite continues and being able to continue on from the level you were killed on would be nice. Also passwords maybe! I know better than to expect a level select from a game ported from an 8-bit computer, but I'm sure they could've totally done passwords.

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Anyway that's all I've got to say about Turrican. But if you've got anything to say yourself, then you should totally do that. A comment box has been provided for the purpose.