Super Turrican (NES) Playthrough - NintendoComplete

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.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.

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