Stuff I Like: Turrican 2

Okay, it's well documented on this blog that I owned a Commodore 64 and from it inherited a deathly phobia of giant worms that burrow out of the ground. I should point out I am dealing with this phobia - I now own Forbidden Forest 3D for the PC and there is nary a worm in sight. Ironically it's two giant acid spitting serpents that keep sealing my doom, but that's another story for another day.

My family were fairly loyal to Commodore. We had a VIC-20 in the loft, a C64, and umpteen Amigas because basically my brother and I couldn't share one between the two of us. Of all the games I acquired for the Amiga Turrican 2 is one of the two games that I still dust off and play with WinUAE (the Amiga emulator). I'll post about the other one, but Alex might be able to guess what it is...

The basic plot of all the Turrican is that you are a guy who gets into a powersuit and goes off to kill mutants because they killed your chums. It's a multi-directional 2D platformer in the old school fashion - you kill monsters, grab powerups and choose from an array of weapons to aid you in your quest. Repeat and rinse.

I didn't say it was deep.

Also at about the midway stage of the game you also find a space ship and fly around in a suspiciously R-Type-esque set of stages. Which are amongst the most pretty space levels I've ever seen.

Its fair to say Turrican 2 is a relatively superficial game - indeed what makes it in my mind so great is the graphics and the music which really pushed the envelope in terms of the Amiga's capabilities. I even bought the soundtrack to Turrican on CD a while back.

This review shows the main points of Turrican 2 with some annoying commentary and also in sheer randomness soundbytes of Bruce Campbell in it - which I suppose is worth some bonus points.



Turrican 1 is pretty much more of the same, but just doesn't feel as classicly polished as its sequel. Turrican 3 is a major disappointment and the fact it was developed first for the console makes it

Remakes are available here for the PC but in my not-so humble opinion nothing beats the original.