Turrican Anniversary anthology collections

[watusi]

I deeply love Turrican so this seems worthy of a thread:

 

https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2020/09/classic_run-and-gun_blaster_turrican_is_making_a_comeback_and_fans_might_need_deep_pockets

 

Quote

Strictly Limited has revealed that it is launching two Turrican-themed collections at €34.99 a pop, as well as two quite expensive collector's editions.

 

Turrican Anthology Vol. 1 will consist of the Amiga versions of Turrican and Turrican 2, the SNES Super Turrican (and Super Turrican: Director's Cut), and the Mega Drive Mega Turrican Score Attack. 

 

Turrican Anthology Vol. 2, on the other hand, will feature the Amiga's Turrican 3, the Mega Drive's Mega Turrican and its Director's Cut, plus the SNES Super Turrican 2 and Super Turrican 1 Score Attack.

 

These two collections will be bundled together in two special editions. The Collector's Edition has a poster, keychain, artbook, soundtrack CD, stickers and making-of Blu-Ray, and costs $99.99. If that doesn't sound anywhere near expensive enough for you, then you'll be pleased to learn that the Ultra Collector's Edition will also include a 20cm figurine of our hero, an acrylic diorama, four soundtrack CDs and an instruction booklet.

 

shame its split over two collections but I'll hoover these up just to be able to play them on the Switch

 

https://store.strictlylimitedgames.com/collections/turrican

 

Who else loves Turrican?!!

 

 

[Vimster]

Yeah, splitting them up is a bit of a swizz, frankly. 

 

If you want some Turrican-style action on the Switch but don't want to be splashing out try Gunlord X. 

[MikeJ]

Turrican is a game series I have never really "got" despite the feverish love for it in Amiga circles. I have been playing T2 again recently to see what I have been missing and find it enormously frustrating (mostly because you can't see far enough ahead and fast moving enemies plough straight into you giving no time to react), but people who enjoyed it back in the day still seem to really love it. It certainly still looks nice and the music is great.

 

From my (non-Turrican lover) perspective this collection seems to be a pretty cynical money grab as they are just a bunch of ROMs but that's the collector-focused retro gaming market for you.

[Soulstar]

I saw it on LRG the other day and noticed the collectors editions were like $200. There were two separate volumes too which I’ve noticed has become more of a thing to spread out the cost to make more not to mention the millions of variations of editions like the rerelease or Super Turrican 2 on a snes cartridge. 

 

Its a cool game series but ive only really a limited experience with it. I did used to the play old ones on the ST years ago and had both SNES games in my wildcard. Super Turrican I got as far as a stage with a train on and lost all my lives and every continue on that one bit due to falling through the gaps of the train after spending ages getting there and decided not to play it again. ST2 I really liked because it was more like Contra but then that’s not the style of game the classic series is known for where they weren’t linear. 

 

I wouldn’t mind getting these but I just don’t want to have to get both of them and it doesn’t feel right without having both. I did a similar sort of thing with Darius and spent like £137 or something on a crazy edition. 

[Vimster]

2 minutes ago, mikejenkins said:

From my (non-Turrican lover) perspective this collection seems to be a pretty cynical money grab as they are just a bunch of ROMs but that's the collector-focused retro gaming market for you.

This is firmly for the shelf-filler collectors, I feel. 

[K]

Splitting the collection over two volumes, and charging £35 each is obscene. I could possibly, maybe, just about understand it if it was truly comprehensive and contained everything, like the original C64 versions and the NES versions, and the PC version with the re-done graphics, but it’s just the Amiga games and the console entries.

 

I’m all for re-releasing older games, but this is even more of a piss-take than that Flashback reissue that was the SNES version on a disk, and which got the original game’s year of release wrong. 

[Qazimod]

I liked T2 on the C64 but it was pretty much the only Turrican game I played, so I don’t have a strong attachment to the series. It’s nice to see it make a comeback, but it does seem a bit pricey compared to other great retro compilations...

[SeanR]

Does it include universal soldier?

[phillv85]

The splitting over 2 discs made it an easy no for me. I’ve no real attachment to Turrican. I’ve played a few of them, including the crappy Universal Soldier one on the MD. I might have gone for the lot at £30, but i’m not having the piss taken out of me.

[dumpster]

Turrican is an Amiga game from the era when anything that looked like a console game on Amiga automatically got good reviews.  Turrican was impressive for the Amiga with the smooth scrolling and great music, but it's not the all time classic Amiga owners made it out to be.  For the most part it's boring - shiny, impressive looking and sounding, yes, but boring.  Splitting this over 2 full price releases is absurd.  It might have a place in retrogamer's memories but it's not something I could see myself wanting to play through every version again in 2020.  

[nakamura]

Along with what @dumpster says, Turrican also fails badly with camera movement. It simply allows you to go too far to one side, meaning enemies spring up on you. 

An average, but beautiful and a treat for the ears. 

[K]

I don’t think anyone would argue that they’re re-releasing the game because it’s a classic; it’s more what that game represents, and how it evokes that era of games. None of the Turrican games were ever really much good, but the music and general vibe were wonderful, and it never fails to put a smile on my face whenever I load it up on an emulator. Until I play it for more than ten minutes and realise how annoying it is.

 

That’s presumably what this company are going for with this. It’s odd that they chose Turrican specifically to gouge their customers with - I guess games in the series seem to be in demand on eBay. I’m extremely dubious of the business model of these limited runs companies anyway, given that it seems to be based on charging people three times the digital RRP for the same game, except in a standard PS4 case, and six times the price for it in a bespoke box. But this just seems like overt exploitation of their customers. 

[Vimster]

Turrican 1 and 2 were a technical marvel on the C64. Slick presentation, great music (even if it was a rip from Transformers The Movie), it was a taste of console gaming on an 8bit micro. The one vertically-scrolling level with the bonkers parallax scrolling and fab tune was mind-blowing. Has it aged well? Maybe not. 

[nakamura]

Yeah I've no issue with a re-release, I actually like Turrican despite my comments. But the delivery of this is cynical as hell. 

[Rex Grossman]

29 minutes ago, dumpster said:

Turrican is an Amiga game from the era when anything that looked like a console game on Amiga automatically got good reviews. 

 

It came out in 1990. No Amiga reviewer gave a shit about console games in 1990.

I believe it went on sale before even the Mega Drive had launched in the UK. The trend you're talking about didn't start until about 1992.

[dumpster]

31 minutes ago, Rex Grossman said:

 

It came out in 1990. No Amiga reviewer gave a shit about console games in 1990.

I believe it went on sale before even the Mega Drive had launched in the UK. The trend you're talking about didn't start until about 1992.

I disagree.  I'm talking about how games like Great Giana Sisters (1987) were hailed as being every bit as good as Super Mario Brothers which was obvious nonsense.  Turrican was a good game by Amiga standards but it was more of a tech demo than a playable game (in my opinion). Definitely a product of its time, great in 1990 but not a game I'm anxious to revisit, especially at those prices.

[Rex Grossman]

Just now, dumpster said:

I disagree.  I'm talking about how games like Great Giana Sisters (1987) were hailed as being every bit as good as Super Mario Brothers which was obvious nonsense.  Turrican was a good game by Amiga standards but it was more of a tech demo than a playable game (in my opinion). Definitely a product of its time, great in 1990 but not a game I'm anxious to revisit, especially at those prices.

 

I didn't like Turrican at all but as someone who bought pretty much Amiga magazine of that era I don't remember there being any console-chasing going on in 1990. Consoles were still so niche over here. As for GGS, it was more famous for being a direct copy of SMB. It came out in 1987, just like the NES did over here. How many people in the UK bought an NES that year? There did come a point where if an Amiga game resembled a console game it was held up as a classic but that's more around the time of Zool. Turrican didn't look like a console game or play like a console game. It played like a C64 game.

[Stoppy2000]

10 minutes ago, Rex Grossman said:

 

I didn't like Turrican at all but as someone who bought pretty much Amiga magazine of that era I don't remember there being any console-chasing going on in 1990. Consoles were still so niche over here. As for GGS, it was more famous for being a direct copy of SMB. It came out in 1987, just like the NES did over here. How many people in the UK bought an NES that year? There did come a point where if an Amiga game resembled a console game it was held up as a classic but that's more around the time of Zool. Turrican didn't look like a console game or play like a console game. It played like a C64 game.

Agree with this... I think it was the release of Sonic in 91 that really started attracting the console comparisons? 

As for Turrican - I loved the c64 version. I still think it holds up as a decent game. If they released a complete package with the c64 version includes I might have been tempted. Only at a budget price though. 

[Vimster]

Yes, Turrican came out in a period between the early days of PC-style mouse-driven games as well as marginally-enhanced versions of 8bit games, and the era of console-aping, often with games that would go onto console and be better. Roughly 1989 to 1992 was a really interesting time for Amiga games, the height of big-hitters from Bitmap Brothers, Psygnosis and Sensible, and programmers from continental Europe including Factor 5. Turrican and more significantly Turrican 2 were very much a part of that. 

[SeanR]

I won a copy of the Atari ST version of Turrican II, from a magazine, which may have been Atari ST User, for my art.

 

My ART!!!

[Rex Grossman]

11 minutes ago, SeanR said:

I won a copy of the Atari ST version of Turrican II, from a magazine, which may have been Atari ST User, for my art.

 

My ART!!!

 

Scan or it didn't happen.

[SeanR]

5 minutes ago, Rex Grossman said:

 

Scan or it didn't happen.

 

http://www.atarimania.com/atari-magazine-atari-st-user_17.html

[Rex Grossman]

Just now, SeanR said:

 

http://www.atarimania.com/atari-magazine-atari-st-user_17.html

[SeanR]

7 minutes ago, Rex Grossman said:

 

yeah, sorry, just going through them.

 

the competition is in this issue, page 37

 

http://www.atarimania.com/mags/pdf/atari-st-user-issue-64.pdf

 

results are in the september issue:

 

http://www.atarimania.com/mags/pdf/atari-st-user-issue-67.pdf

 

I'm just finding out what page...

 

[edit] Page 122, and it was Turrican, not Turrican II...

 

Edited September 2, 2020 by SeanR

[K]

1 hour ago, Rex Grossman said:

 

I didn't like Turrican at all but as someone who bought pretty much Amiga magazine of that era I don't remember there being any console-chasing going on in 1990. Consoles were still so niche over here. As for GGS, it was more famous for being a direct copy of SMB. It came out in 1987, just like the NES did over here. How many people in the UK bought an NES that year? There did come a point where if an Amiga game resembled a console game it was held up as a classic but that's more around the time of Zool. Turrican didn't look like a console game or play like a console game. It played like a C64 game.

 

Yeah, the benchmark for games in that era was the arcades, not the consoles - if you had a really slick action game like Turrican, it was held up as being arcade quality, rather than console-quality. That said, multi-format mags of the time like C&VG were very aware of the Mega Drive and banged on about it endlessly, but I've just looked up the reviews of Turrican (Issue 102, C64 version; it doesn't look like they reviewed the Amiga version) and Turrican 2 (issue 112), and they don't reference consoles at all - just arcade games. I guess the writers were familiar with Mega Drive games, but probably didn't use it as a reference as their readers will almost certainly have never seen one. They might have seen a Master System in the wild, but 'console quality' isn't going to carry much weight if Aztec Adventure is your point of comparison.

[MDY]

On 02/09/2020 at 15:35, Vimster said:

Turrican 1 and 2 were a technical marvel on the C64. Slick presentation, great music (even if it was a rip from Transformers The Movie), it was a taste of console gaming on an 8bit micro. The one vertically-scrolling level with the bonkers parallax scrolling and fab tune was mind-blowing. Has it aged well? Maybe not. 

 

That very well might be why we're not seeing the C64 original.. 

 

In case anyone hasn't heard them for comparison..

Spoiler

 

 

 

While I do still quite like Turrican (the shmup level midway through Turrican 2 was an astonishingly good bit of coding on the ST considering the hardware) it just couldn't compare with the stuff that was starting to hit the consoles at the same time. I had an Amiga owning mate that insisted that T2 was still better than Super Contra 3 on the SNES..  Yeah.. No.

[SeanR]

the review of Turrican two is in that link I posted to the competition, page 33. Not a single mention of arcades or consoles.

 

 

[chris on the moon]

I've been waiting years for an easily playable turrican 2 without having to eff around with an amiga emulator  but... thirty pounds? Definitely too much. I wonder if the people who originally made this will even get that money?

[matt0]

I probably would buy a decent Turrican collection for the price of one of those Konami classics collections.

 

That’s probably generous considering the relative quality of the games.

[spanky debrest]

I never had much access to them myself but I'd been hearing about the excellence of Turrican on C64 and Amiga since they were a thing. They were legendary and definitely used as ammo during the great computer-console wars preceding the Nintendo-Sega ones.

 

I have since given Mega Turrican and modern spiritual successor Gunlord a fair crack and struggled to get too involved with either. I think the 'Euro' design sensibility embodied by the need to memorise large exploratory yet claustrophobic maps seemingly filled to the brim with enemies, tonnes of power ups and metriod-esque secret passages is a taste I never acquired. This sort of stuff didn't really exist in the arcades or on the Master System. I always found it a bit.. cold.

 

I'll be interested in how well the Directors Cut of Super Turrican goes down with fans seeing as one of these compilations frees it from being locked to the Super NT, and curious about how much extra content it actually has over the one shipped in the '90s though.