This month’s retro game is reminiscent of the 16-bit glory days for platform games. And Amigan’s amazing heritage.
Even if you do not recognize the name Turrican so chances are good that you heard the music, composed by the incomparable game composer Chris Huelsbeck. Turrican was a platform sensation when it was released Amiga 500 1990 – a sleek, side-scrolling platform shooter with a focus on mammoth weapons, explosions and surprisingly open tracks. Now this is again in a retro collection consisting of the game’s four incarnations for a reasonable amount of money (both in physical edition and digitally). Can it be more than a nostalgia trip for the already saved?
Turrican Flashback, as the collection is called, is published by German ININ Games and is produced in collaboration with Factor 5 – who was the creator of the original games. Factor 5 first consisted of the coder Manfred Trenz who originally created Turrican on C64, but later of a bunch of German indie developers who managed to push Amigan’s hardware in new ways, under the then publisher Rainbow Arts: a level of graphics and soundtrack that really only The Bitmap Brothers could challenge. When I was little, Nintendo’s 8-bit console was the slot machine everyone should have. Sega Master System was a distant second. I never had either or, I got an MS