Super Turrican (NES) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 25 ส.ค. 2024
- A playthrough of Imagineer's 1992 run-and-gun platformer for the NES, Super Turrican.
If you ask old-school console gamers, the Turrican series never seemed to register much of a blip on the radar. They were always known as "good" games with great music, but their ports always got lost among the shuffle on the 8 and 16-bit consoles. Ask 80s PC gaming fans and you'll get a wholly different reaction. The series was a phenomenal success, especially in Europe, on machines like the C64, Amiga, and Atari ST.
I never much got into late 80s PC gaming, but I will say that Turrican games were incredible accomplishments for their slick gameplay and for the technical feats they represented. They were bleeding edge gaming.
But what chance did it have being released a couple of years later on a machine weaker than any other platform the games had been released on?
Well, you know how sometimes a game will redefine what you think of as "possible"? This is one of those games for the NES hardware. It's blazing fast, yet no matter how much flies around the screen, neither the game's speed nor its framerate ever wavers in the slightest- not even during it's cool special effects (that lightning storm!). Flicker is carefully programmed to never allow any bullets to completely disappear from view for longer than a frame - just think back to how many deaths you've suffered in NES games because the action got too hectic and you never saw the bullets that were coming at you? There's nothing like that here despite the constant barrage of bullets covering the screen, and the controls feel nigh perfect. Well, except for the awkward use of down+start button to roll into a ball. That was a little annoying to get used to, though I suppose it was necessary given how everything is mapped out on the NES controller.
The whole idea behind the game is to run around the maze-like levels, killing robots that are trying to kill you while collecting power-ups that are often hidden in really devious places. You have two standard guns - one is a gun of your choosing through weapons pick-ups, with normal Contra-style stuff like lasers, wave cannons, etc. The other is harder to explain - when you hold down B, you're alternate appears - a rotating death tentacle, I guess you could call it? It extends straight out from the player and can be rotated 360 degrees. The angle is completely controlled by the player, meaning you don't have any "blind spots" in your firepower. Pretty ingenuous. The NES version also provides a run button, which further speeds up an already fast game.
The levels bear close resemblance to ones in the computer games - there have been some edits, but this is not a "port" of any game. It's more of a "remix" of a few different titles. And it's not at all the same game as Seika's SNES Super Turrican.
It's not an easy game though. I'm not particularly good at Super Turrican - at the higher difficulty levels, it requires a level of sustained focus that I just can't muster, so I left the game on the default setting. If I try to put it up any higher, I get slaughtered left-and-right. The difficulty does scale well, though - noobs will be able get by on the easy difficulty just fine until they learn it.
It looks and sounds great. The enemy designs are simplistic and the sprites are small, but they are all well animated and and fit in well with their surroundings. They probably had to be small in order to have the game running this well. The music is fantastic as well, just as any Turrican game's music should be.
And, for the real kicker - the entire game was built by one guy. Just look at the credits. Manfred Trenz, developer of the original game and programmer extraordinaire, handled every aspect of the game himself. Damn. And I suppose it is fitting: Super Turrican is to the NES was his Rendering Ranger is to the SNES - titles that make the impossible possible.
This was a European exclusive that was never released on any other platform (hence the video running at 50fps), so it's not surprising that it's so obscure. Just a bit sad.
This is an NES masterpiece, hands down.
__
No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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![Turrican Longplay (Amiga) [QHD]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/P7jP0qQgL-c/mqdefault.jpg)
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Super Turrican was an amazing technical achievement, and somehow its gameplay retained everything that made the PC games such classics. And just think - the whole game was made by just one guy. O_o
NintendoComplete That 1 guy was lucky he made better games than what Infogrames made with Mickey, & that game was made by multiple people!
Made by one guy. Like Touhou! ^^
The Real Sean W. Stewart As well as Big Rigs(I think).
...Well, then again, there are lots of great games made by a single person I could also name. Cave Story, Undertale, Axiom Verge...Or just two guys, like the original Binding of Isaac (art and programming) World of Goo, Hotline Miami...The list goes on and on!
Many games for the 8 bit micros were made by sole programmers, like Manic Miner for the ZX Spectrum by Matthew Smith
Phenomenal-looking game for NES! Holy smokes, this has to be one of the best-looking 8-bit games I've yet seen.
Now just out of sheer curiosity, I wanna check out Rendering Ranger for SNES!!
The Real Sean W. Stewart Oh just wait, it's impossibly good looking for an SNES game
Dude it’s literally a solid colored background….have you never seen other NES games or..?
Huge props to Manfred Trenz, too bad so many games he made late in lifespan of system (Enforcer for C64 in 1992, Rendering Ranger for SNES in 1995) and not many people played them :(
Yeah, Enforcer was/is an incredible shootem-up.
In Europe pretty much everyone played them: I'm not even from Germany and here in my country the retrogame community idolizes Trenz.
He deserves credit. Only bad thing in this game is the scrolling
@@markmeric8580 Oh Yeah, The Enforcer was great. Graphics, sound... and it was finally a playable version of the R-Type concept, because Katakis and R-Type were far too hard for me :)... And one error there and you started from the beginning with no extras, this was solved much better in The Enforcer.
Wow, didn't know Turrican was released for NES. At first I thought that you're playing a homebrew port.
Mr. Grongy It was a super limited release iirc
It was only released for NES in Europe. :(
@@Veganerd_ the game planned to be published by Seika in US but was cancelled for unknown reason. There's a magazine advertisement about Super Turrican on SNES which also include the NES game on the advertisement.
@@Veganerd_ And Australia.
the last Turrican entry where series creator, Manfred Trenz, was directly involved. When is the more well known SNES Super Turrican?
Super turrican 1 and 2 for the snes ones are the best ones in my opinion
@@shaunduzstuffs agreed
@@shaunduzstuffs I'm more of a Mega Turrican fan. It's a lot more polished than Super Turrican, which is a shane too since it could have turned out really well had it not been rushed, and Super Turrican 2 is just a bit too linear, though at least polish isn't an issue there - despite the poor first impression that I got with Level 1's design, the rest of the game was super solid, just not as great as MT.
@@DeskoDev world 3 MT
This look like it could be a hidden gem nes game
I rented this game a lot as a kid, I loved it!! But never could beat it until almost 30 years later, last year in my Famicom. One of the best achievements to me.
Cool 😃J'y jouais sur Amiga 500 mais je connaissais pas la version NES . Ça m'a donné envie d'essayer. Merci d'avoir ressuscité ce sympathique jeux 😉
I’m so happy more people agree this is a masterpiece! I have it on my flash cartridge and play it on the real nes all the time! (I hope to buy a real copy of the game too someday!) the music is just so good, it is a much more faithful conversion of the amazing Amiga music than even the Genesis version of Turrican 1 or 2. Which is insane but hey that’s what happens when you have such an amazing developer like Manfred do it, hehe!
NintendoComplete yeah, I found out about Rendering Ranger from the video SNESDrunk did on it. I’m so happy more people are spreading the word about this series, and Manfred’s work. I discovered the series by complete random on a collection of games I got for my Genesis. And that game was Mega Turrican. But I had to go back and play all these earlier installments, they’re just amazing achievements. I still kinda hope someone will someday make a rom hack for Universal Soldier on Gameboy, to make it more like Turrican 2. And maybe make the music more like the Turrican 2 tunes in this game. But hey I can dream heh. Oh also, is there a more reliable way to get past that one jump on Level 2? I saw you did the trick of rolling up in ball form, then rolling off the edge and then exiting ball form and jumping in mid air. But there must be an easier way to do it, right? lol I could never figure it out
Although the NES sound chip cannot compete with the C64 one.
Agree! Or the Amiga music, heh! Or the Genesis’ music from the game Mega Turrican (not for the Genesis port of the original Turrican though, the composer Chris Huelsbeck didn’t have any involvement in that one and they butchered his compositions lol
I'm sorry, but I think this game is shit.
Manfred Trenz is a wizard
Just a heads up: Turrican was not an 80s series. The first game was released on the C64 in 1990
CarozQH Oh I know. I was meaning that 1990 was essentially still the 80s, that's all :)
I loved the ending theme and other in-game music.
wow a nes game made by 1 person in 1992, not bad at all
Manfred Trentz is the man!
Do you plan on doing a playthrough on the SNES version? The music is too good 😭
The enemy re-spawn rate in this game is outrageous.
We need a port of rendering ranger for nes !
What I really like about this version is that it isn't really a port, it is more a reimagining of the original game. The final Morgul boss is way cooler in this version.
My only complaint about this game is it never left Europe.
And the scrolling
I hear people badmouthing the NES version, but was it really that bad?
Where the heck is the shredder boss, I remember it being near the piston tunnel thingy.
That's in the "original" Turrican 1 for C64/Amiga/Megadrive etc. This is "Super" Turrican for the NES, a bit different.
@@1xWertzui Yeah I realized after playing it, more of a redux director's cut of T1
I'm sorry, but I don't like this game. First of all, the physics are poor, two the music is awful and the roll feels horrible as you bounce off the enemies. Nowhere near as good as it's Amiga counterpart and not that much better than the Mega Drive version (that might be a lil harsh).
fuck this soundtrack... i love it! old good times y.y
I wish I could play this on real hardware - I only have an NTSC console and from what I've tried in an emulator the brutal difficulty becomes outright psychotic; still doesn't beat playing the Genesis version at NTSC speeds though :P
Get an everdrive
Doesn't the shield last a bit too much in this version?
The difficulty in the options menu was only at 2 out of 4, I think, maybe that changes, I might have a look as I have this on the NES, its not an easy game, this guy makes it look easy though!
Your going to need it it’s kicked ass time
Is it me or does this guy look like The Predator?
Is the black border at the bottom meant to be the lines of resolution on 50hz tellies that the NES can't fill, thus left usused?
Edit: reworded
It's just the overscan area, I believe. Some games filled it with garbage, others didn't. One really nice thing about this game is that you can play it on an NTSC machine and it runs at the correct speed! Hurray for good programming!
If I'm correct, the NES outputs a 240 line image. 240 lines produces noticeable borders on all 288/576 line tellies, so that wouldn't be overscan, although this means that nothing is ever cut off vertically. According to NESDev wiki, PAL developers need to minimise artifacts that wouldn't have been shown on NTSC consoles. Did your emulator automatically generate the borders? (Border being 48 lines worth)
I've heard Super Turrican runs at a slightly higher (and incorrect) pitch on NTSC consoles. Is this true?
TRUXTON I suppose that would be it then. Iirc, I didn't clip the edges of the image myself, nor did I with the emulator, so this is merely the original picture upscaled to a 4:3 720p image. Sounds like you've got the right idea in what you're saying there.
The way Super Turrican has the scrolling set up, artifact glitches would appear on the very bottom and/or top of the screen when scrolling (similar to how SMB 3, the later Megaman games and Kirby has glitches on the side edges) so they basically turned screen drawing off at the bottom of the screen to hide it.
@@NintendoComplete Sorry to respond to an old comment but I can't see how the game can run correctly on both a PAL and NTSC machine? Does it detect which console it is being played on? I've never heard of a NES game doing that. They are region locked. And how do you determine the 'correct' speed of a PAL only game?
The final boss is a joke lol stand on his head back where the bullets can't reach you and fire downward on his head
Super Turrican is Super Turrific, if any y'all asked me personally.
Try to pass Terao no Dosukoi Oozumou))good game
Анатолий Борисов Haha is that sumo wrestling? I don't know the game
I played it about 20 years ago)) on the cartridge, it may have been called differently)) the meaning of it is the following: you need to win opponents in my 4 in the round, each time they become stronger when you or your opponent runs out of energy you can make a special combo, such as a wheel or a ring to fling or just throw out of the ring, this is one of the few games that I did not pass as a child, did not understand its meaning))you play many similar games thought that you will be interested in playing it)) there you need to get the title of shogun)) no channel has not seen the full passage, only fpagmenty)) if you believe Google is called Tsuppari Oozumou
Take like
Wow, that was not a good port :-o Especially the sound is unbearable for me. And that for a console that came after the C64... crude :-o
It’s an excellent port. Maybee the best
Honestly where the hell is Manfred Trenz? I feel like he just fell off the face of the earth
I think he was involved in the development of Crush/Katakis 2 at some point, not sure if he was for the final release.
Oh yeah, he founded his own studio as well, Denaris Entertainment Software, but the website's been down for a while - makes me a bit worried. They made a few games a while back and even a Mario Kart GBA tech demo, but they haven't developed anything for a while. I do wonder where he is now.
I made the Crush comment a bit more accurate too.
Yeah, i heard about some of that. It's just weird he has zero online presence today. It's possible he moved on to do work outside of video games, as his work is pretty niche.
@@AngusBeer I decided to do a bit more research. During an interview with Factor 5 members in a Retrokompott podcast, they confirmed that Manfred Trenz has retired from game development and left the scene. Unfortunate, but everyone moves on eventually. It's also unfortunate that they won't be able to include the C64 versions in the collection; he was on board but there are other members of Rainbow Arts that still have rights to parts of the game that are preventing them from distributing the original game. He's still receiving royalties for the collection though.
@@DeskoDev Thanks for this update btw! I forgot to reply haha
graphics are very nice but music is one of the worst ever heard
All these years I never knew there was a port for nes
Only pal version