Although the series didn’t start there, nor reach its climax, the Turrican has become an Amiga legend. The series returns for the second time in two years.
Party like 1990
When I had the opportunity to test the Turkey anthology, I couldn’t make the show. Only a few months ago the very similar Turrican Flashback came out, right? Well, no: this set was released in January 2021, and the content was a little lower than the current two-part package. There are a total of four old Turks with a lot of modern improvements, and in these you can find five different games; Nominally at least.
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In such a situation, the evaluation should start with telling you what a Turrican is – and this is important, because, apart from re-releases and emulators, the last time the high-profile game met a “bio-mutant” super soldier fighting in chrome armor was in 1995. Looking at the pictures, everyone can probably rate the game right away: in fact, Turrican is also a side-scrolling action game, somewhere in the confluence of Contra and Metroid and the least known, but most inspiring to developers, Psycho-Nics Oscar. The levels are usually huge, non-linear passage systems, full of hard-to-find rooms, pickup icons and, of course, enemies pouring in from all directions – and against them we can use a diverse arsenal. In addition to the various hand guns, this also meant the ability to transform into a bullet and, in later episodes, a fireable claw.
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Like most joystick-dreaming microcomputer action games, Turrican isn’t all about point-by-pixel precision, objective path building, or just a complex story, but the first part instantly became a legend due to the Amiga’s overwhelming speed, graphics, and music that remains a point of reference. Even if it wasn’t the main platform for developers: Turrican was originally released for Commodore 64, and from there it spread to almost all platforms at the time.
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After the beginning of the series, the Turrican story continued almost inextricably: two completely different games were released under the name Super Turrican, and Turrican 3 was actually a port of the Mega Turrican for the Amiga, but the Mega Drive version of the Turrican II was already released under the title Universal Soldier with the film bad. In addition, there are many other versions of the games, expanded or simplified due to hardware limitations – Part 1, for example, was also released for CDTV and ZX Spectrum. The collection, now divided into two parts, unfortunately does not want to collect all the exotic copies; This is somewhat understandable, of course, because it can be difficult to write an emulator that perfectly handles all relevant platforms and is full of modern solutions, but as a customer, it is difficult to let go of greedy extremes.
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Fortunately, what is found here is at least of the highest quality. Regardless of the game’s original platform, the same additional options are available everywhere: excellent CRT effects and other graphics styles can be played, a music player can be opened, controls can be fully customized, icons can be used, and even a very useful tool can be browsed on the map – even if It was weird that with this solution we can even create an almost wide image out of games not designed for this. Of course, we get all the basic functionality (but we still miss many lenient rereleases), so there’s a quick save and time-return option, plus you can scroll through old directories in the list.
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