Turrican 2
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''Turrican II: The Final Fight'' is the second game of the ''
Turrican ''Turrican'' is a 1990 video game developed by Manfred Trenz. It was developed for the Commodore 64 by Rainbow Arts, and was Video game port, ported to other systems later. In addition to concept design and character creation, Trenz programmed ' ...
'' series. The game, developed by
Factor 5 Factor 5 GmbH was a German-American Independent business, independent software and video game developer. The company was co-founded by five former Rainbow Arts employees in 1987 in Cologne, Germany, which served as the inspiration behind the st ...
was released in 1991 for the
Commodore Amiga Amiga is a family of personal computers produced by Commodore from 1985 until the company's bankruptcy in 1994, with production by others afterward. The original model is one of a number of mid-1980s computers with 16-bit or 16/32-bit processo ...
. This version was finished before the C64 version, but
Manfred Trenz Manfred Trenz (born 29 November 1965 in Saarbrücken) is a German video game developer. He is the developer of the ''Turrican'' video game series as well as the Commodore 64 version of the game ''R-Type is a horizontally scrolling shoo ...
cites the C64 version as the original design. ''Turrican II'' was also released for the
CDTV The CDTV (from Commodore Dynamic Total Vision, later treated as a backronym for Compact Disc Television) is a home multimedia entertainment and video game console – convertible into a full-fledged personal computer by the addition of optiona ...
,
Atari ST Atari ST is a line of personal computers from Atari Corporation and the successor to the company's Atari 8-bit computers, 8-bit computers. The initial model, the Atari 520ST, had limited release in April–June 1985, and was widely available i ...
,
Amstrad CPC The Amstrad CPC (short for "Colour Personal Computer") is a series of 8-bit home computers produced by Amstrad between 1984 and 1990. It was designed to compete in the mid-1980s home computer market dominated by the Commodore 64 and the ZX Spec ...
and
ZX Spectrum The ZX Spectrum () is an 8-bit computing, 8-bit home computer developed and marketed by Sinclair Research. One of the most influential computers ever made and one of the all-time bestselling British computers, over five million units were sold. ...
, and later for
DOS DOS (, ) is a family of disk-based operating systems for IBM PC compatible computers. The DOS family primarily consists of IBM PC DOS and a rebranded version, Microsoft's MS-DOS, both of which were introduced in 1981. Later compatible syste ...
, and also for the Mega Drive/Genesis and
Game Boy The is a handheld game console developed by Nintendo, launched in the Japanese home market on April 21, 1989, followed by North America later that year and other territories from 1990 onwards. Following the success of the Game & Watch single-ga ...
rebranded as ''Universal Soldier''. The Amiga version of ''Turrican 2'' along with ''Turrican'', '' Super Turrican'' and '' Mega Turrican'' were re-released on the PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch in 2020 to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the original game, under the name ''Turrican Flashback''.


Story

This is the text from the game's opening cutscene: ''The timedate is 3025. For decades peace, freedom, and the rule of law in galaxy have been enforced by the United Planets Freedom Forces. The United Planets Ship, the Avalon 1, is drifting through the outer reaches of the known universe. Colonel Ardon C. Striker and his crew are preparing for the final passage through the barrier of the galaxy.'' ''Suddenly, a huge battlecruiser materializes in close proximity of the Avalon 1. The crew hurry to take up their battle stations amid the sounding of the alert sirens. The automated defence systems of the ship activate, the anti-radiation shields surround the ship and finally the weapon systems are armed. Somehow, with some unknown technology, the enemy battlecruiser, with a flash of blinding light, neutralizes every defence system on the Avalon 1. The sound of an explosion fills the air as an airlock of the ship disintegrates and mutants begin to pour through. The crew fight to save their ship with their phasers and dozens of the invaders fall to death, but they press forward their attack and the crew of the Avalon 1 start to fall down while desperately engaging them in hand-to-hand fighting. One of the Avalon 1 soldiers, Bren McGuire, with tears in his eyes, fires the last of his phaser bolts, downing a mutant and diving to the ground as a chunk of structure falls from above.'' ''After an intense fight that wipes out all tripulants of the ship, there is silence as the evil emperor known as The Machine, half-man, half-robot enters the airlock and commands his mutants back to the battle-cruiser. The Machine surveys the carnage, steps forward and comes to halt with one foot on the prone body of Bren McGuire. "Excellent", he says to himself, "the crew of Avalon 1 are no more". Then, without any further hesitation, he turns and leaves the ship. Bren McGuire lays still until he is certain that he is alone on the ravaged ship. Realizing that he is the only one left to combat the evil of the invaders and restore peace and freedom to the galaxy, he gets up and hurries to the equipment room. There, Bren sights the new Turrican fighting suits, which are built of the most advanced technology known to mankind. Climbing into the suit, one last cry is heard from him: "Revenge!"''


Gameplay

''Turrican II'' can be described as a cross between ''
Metroid is an action-adventure game franchise created by Nintendo. The player controls the bounty hunter Samus Aran, who protects the galaxy from Space Pirates and other malevolent forces and their attempts to harness the power of the parasitic M ...
'' and '' Psycho-Nics Oscar''.Interview about games that inspired Turrican (German)
/ref> While the huge detailed labyrinth levels and the morph-ball function were inspired by ''Metroid'', the overall graphics design and weapons were inspired by ''Psycho-Nics Oscar''. The game is divided into five distinct "worlds", split across eleven levels, each with its own themed music provided by
Chris Huelsbeck Christopher Hülsbeck (born 2 March 1968), known internationally as Chris Huelsbeck, is a German video game music composer. He gained popularity for his work on game soundtracks for '' The Great Giana Sisters'' and the ''Turrican'' series. Caree ...
, plus a final showdown with the boss known as "The Machine". There is a music menu accessible by pressing the Space-Bar (Amiga version), where all the in-game music is available to be listened to. The music to ''Turrican II'' is widely regarded as one of Huelsbeck's best compositions, and it was performed live by an orchestra at the second '' Symphonic Game Music Concert'' in 2004. In 2016 Chris Huelsbeck created a limited Collector's Edition Box Set featuring new live orchestra recordings of music from ''Turrican II''.


Weapons

There are three primary weapons; Bounce, Laser and Multiple. Each weapon has several levels of firepower. In addition, there is a white laser "wall" which sweeps out from either side of the player. The player starts off with only three of these at the start of each life. There is also a very powerful secondary weapon activated by holding down the fire button. This takes the form of a long segmented steerable laser beam which is essential for defeating bosses. Power-ups Hidden in the worlds are many Power-Up blocks, which can be discovered by hitting them with weapon fire. They contain shields, health & primary and secondary weapon power-ups. Wheel The Wheel is an indestructible ball that the player can switch to by pressing the down key and then Space bar or a second button on a joystick that supports it. Unlike its predecessor the indestructible wheel mode can be used an unlimited number of times. The Wheel will destroy most small enemies on contact, others can be destroyed using the primary fire mode which fires small bombs on the ground. There is also an ultra-fire mode which can be used once per life by pressing fire and the space bar at the same time. Shield Protection from damage for a limited time.


Development

The
Amiga Amiga is a family of personal computers produced by Commodore International, Commodore from 1985 until the company's bankruptcy in 1994, with production by others afterward. The original model is one of a number of mid-1980s computers with 16-b ...
and
Atari ST Atari ST is a line of personal computers from Atari Corporation and the successor to the company's Atari 8-bit computers, 8-bit computers. The initial model, the Atari 520ST, had limited release in April–June 1985, and was widely available i ...
versions of ''Turrican II'', as published by
Rainbow Arts Rainbow Arts Software GmbH was a German video game publisher based in Gütersloh. The company was founded in 1984 by Marc Ullrich and Thomas Meiertoberens and acquired by Rushware in 1986. The company's decline began in the early 1990s: The dis ...
, began development in May 1990, and were released in February 1991. In a January 1991 issue of British gaming magazine '' The One'', ''The One'' interviewed team members from Rainbow Arts for information regarding ''Turrican II's'' development in a pre-release interview. According to
Manfred Trenz Manfred Trenz (born 29 November 1965 in Saarbrücken) is a German video game developer. He is the developer of the ''Turrican'' video game series as well as the Commodore 64 version of the game ''R-Type is a horizontally scrolling shoo ...
, a designer for ''Turrican'' and ''Turrican II'', he picked the name from a
phone book A telephone directory, commonly called a telephone book, telephone address book, phonebook, or the white and yellow pages, is a listing of telephone subscribers in a geographical area or subscribers to services provided by the organization that ...
, and ''Turrican'' stemmed from the Italian name 'Turricano'; Trenz further stated that he "always get titles that way: there's loads of good material out there, you don't have to bother making it up." ''Turrican II'' has seven-layer
parallax scrolling Parallax scrolling is a technique in computer graphics where background images move past the camera more slowly than foreground images, creating an illusion of depth in a 2D scene of distance. The technique grew out of the multiplane camera te ...
, and was originally coded on the
Commodore 64 The Commodore 64, also known as the C64, is an 8-bit computing, 8-bit home computer introduced in January 1982 by Commodore International (first shown at the Consumer Electronics Show, January 7–10, 1982, in Las Vegas). It has been listed in ...
, as was its predecessor. While ''Turrican I'' was used as a base, ''Turrican II'' is primarily newly written code: Holger Schmidt, the programmer of the Amiga version, stated that "All we really kept were the scrolling routines. Everything else was optimized and rewritten because we needed more processing time for the sprites and animation." Trenz expressed that his design philosophy in creating ''Turrican II'' was 'making a game he'd want to play', and for this reason, more enemies and weapons were added; several design concepts that didn't make the cut for ''Turrican I'' due to time constraints were also incorporated into ''Turrican II''. Trenz also expressed that some ideas from fans of the original game were incorporated into ''Turrican II'', stating that "So many people wanted so many different things I couldn't please them all. In the end I just did the best I could." ''Turrican II'' was developed using Rainbow Arts' custom development system titled ''Pegasus''. Julian Eggbrecht, ''Turrican II's'' producer, expressed that a difficulty in the game's development was the game's scrolling conflicting with the game's desired
frame rate Frame rate, most commonly expressed in frame/s, or FPS, is typically the frequency (rate) at which consecutive images (Film frame, frames) are captured or displayed. This definition applies to film and video cameras, computer animation, and moti ...
, stating that "Action games consist of patterns of little bytes like a jigsaw and on 16-bit you waste a lot of time just by building up the screen. Hardly anyone has tried multidirectional in 50 frames before and at first we didn't think that it would work - most action adventures run in 25 frames or even 17 - but eventually, using a lot of tricks, we did it." Eggbrecht expressed that while the team wanted ''Turrican II'' to have 'arcade quality' graphics, he stated that the team tried to avoid "sacrifici ngpresentation to playability", giving an example of world two having a lower frame rate and less parallax due to the high number of enemies on that level. The Atari ST version of ''Turrican II'' was programmed by Thomas Engel, who managed to get the game running at a 25 Hz frame rate with the same amount of parallax and sound effects as the Amiga version: Eggbrecht stated that this was achieved not through hardware scrolling techniques, but by "using eight buffers and by pre-shifting all the enemies in memory." ''Turrican II'' has 10 sampled speech sound effects, and the game's sound runs on four
channels Channel, channels, channeling, etc., may refer to: Geography * Channel (geography), a landform consisting of the outline (banks) of the path of a narrow body of water. Australia * Channel Country, region of outback Australia in Queensland and pa ...
. ''Turrican II's'' sound and music was created by Chris Huelsbeck using Rainbow Art's custom sound utility ''TFMX''; Huelsbeck stated that ''TFMX'' "allows you to modify oundslike a
synthesiser A synthesizer (also synthesiser or synth) is an electronic musical instrument that generates audio signals. Synthesizers typically create sounds by generating waveforms through methods including subtractive synthesis, additive synthesis and ...
", allowing greater audio editing. The Amiga and Atari ST versions use a 16-color palette, but through programming techniques, the Amiga version has around 120 colors, despite being written in 16-color mode as opposed to 32-color mode due to memory constraints. ''Turrican II's'' levels were primarily made by Trenz, Andreas Escher, and Schmidt: Trenz first created the levels on the C64 using sprite, level and monster editors and then provided the raw data to Schmidt for processing. While Rainbow Arts used several other custom editors in ''Turrican II's'' development, they had no level editors for the Amiga and Atari ST, and thus edited level data at the code level as needed. The 'MegaWeapon' in ''Turrican II'' was partially inspired by the Lotus Blossom weapon in ''
The Last Starfighter ''The Last Starfighter'' is a 1984 American space opera film directed by Nick Castle. The film tells the story of Alex Rogan (Lance Guest), a teenager who, after winning the high score in an arcade game that's secretly a simulation test, is rec ...
''.


''Universal Soldier''

Console conversions of ''Turrican II'' for the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis,
SNES The Super Nintendo Entertainment System, commonly shortened to Super Nintendo, Super NES or SNES, is a 16-bit home video game console developed by Nintendo that was released in 1990 in Japan, 1991 in North America, 1992 in Europe and Oceania an ...
and
Game Boy The is a handheld game console developed by Nintendo, launched in the Japanese home market on April 21, 1989, followed by North America later that year and other territories from 1990 onwards. Following the success of the Game & Watch single-ga ...
were produced by The Code Monkeys for
Accolade The accolade (also known as dubbing, adoubement, or knighting) () was the central act in the rite of passage Ceremony, ceremonies conferring knighthood in the Middle Ages. Etymology The term ''accolade'' entered English by 1591, when Thomas ...
, which had kept the rights for the console ports of the franchise. The game was originally developed using the original C64 source code and
Amiga Amiga is a family of personal computers produced by Commodore International, Commodore from 1985 until the company's bankruptcy in 1994, with production by others afterward. The original model is one of a number of mid-1980s computers with 16-b ...
graphics as a base. At a late stage in the development, Accolade also acquired rights to produce a game spin-off of the
Jean-Claude Van Damme Jean-Claude Camille François Van Varenberg (, ; born 18 October 1960), known professionally as Jean-Claude Van Damme (, ), is a Belgian martial artist and actor. Born and raised in Brussels, his father enrolled him in a Shotokan karate schoo ...
movie '' Universal Soldier'' and decided to rebrand the console conversions as ''Universal Soldier''. ''Turrican's'' sprite was changed into a marine and several other substitutions were made. Among other changes, the eyeballs-walking-on-fingers became mini tanks, and instead of a large mech/steel dragon in the first stage, the player now faces a large representation of
Dolph Lundgren Hans "Dolph" Lundgren (, ; born 3 November 1957) is a Swedish actor, filmmaker, and martial artist. Lundgren made his acting debut in 1985 with a cameo in the List of James Bond films, James Bond film ''A View to a Kill''. Also that year, he h ...
's character in the film. The three
shoot 'em up Shoot 'em ups (also known as shmups or STGs) are a Video game genre, subgenre of action games. There is no consensus as to which design elements compose a shoot 'em up; some restrict the definition to games featuring spacecraft and certain typ ...
stages, cut out from the port, were replaced by the developers with three original stages (a
Vietnam Vietnam, officially the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRV), is a country at the eastern edge of mainland Southeast Asia, with an area of about and a population of over 100 million, making it the world's List of countries and depende ...
jungle, a fortress, and a motel/car junkyard) that in theory should link the game to the film's atmosphere. The rest of the original ''Turrican II'' stages are still present and remain mostly intact in overall design, though some of them appear in a different order, along with the three new levels scattered through them. In the end, Accolade only released the Mega Drive/Genesis and Game Boy versions in both North America and Europe. Accolade decided not to publish the
SNES The Super Nintendo Entertainment System, commonly shortened to Super Nintendo, Super NES or SNES, is a 16-bit home video game console developed by Nintendo that was released in 1990 in Japan, 1991 in North America, 1992 in Europe and Oceania an ...
version due to the high cost of larger capacity
SNES The Super Nintendo Entertainment System, commonly shortened to Super Nintendo, Super NES or SNES, is a 16-bit home video game console developed by Nintendo that was released in 1990 in Japan, 1991 in North America, 1992 in Europe and Oceania an ...
cartridges, so it only exists in the form of a leaked pre-production alpha
ROM Rom, or ROM may refer to: Biomechanics and medicine * Risk of mortality, a medical classification to estimate the likelihood of death for a patient * Rupture of membranes, a term used during pregnancy to describe a rupture of the amniotic sac * ...
. As none of the computer versions were published in North America, these disenfranchised ports were the only official North American releases of ''Turrican II'' until ''Turrican Flashback'' was released.


Reception

''
Entertainment Weekly ''Entertainment Weekly'' (sometimes abbreviated as ''EW'') is an American online magazine, digital-only entertainment magazine based in New York City, published by Dotdash Meredith, that covers film, television, music, Broadway theatre, books, ...
'' gave the game a D+ and wrote that "Universal in name only, this is very reminiscent of a mediocre action game called Turrican, featuring the kind of dinky enemies that have plagued the genre for years, as well as a hero who curls up into a buzzing circular saw. It's still no worse than the movies it has absolutely nothing to do with." In 1993, '' Commodore Force'' ranked the game at number seven on its list of the top 100 Commodore 64 games.


References


External links

*
''Turrican II: The Final Fight''
at MobyGames * {{Authority control 1991 video games Accolade, Inc. games Amiga games Amstrad CPC games Atari ST games Commodore 64 games Commodore CDTV games DOS games Game Boy games Metroidvania games Run and gun games Science fiction video games Sega Genesis games Turrican Universal Soldier (film series) Video game sequels Video games developed in Germany Video games scored by Chris Huelsbeck ZX Spectrum games Single-player video games Video games set in the 31st century Factor 5 games Rainbow Arts games The Code Monkeys games Enigma Variations games de:Turrican#Turrican II − The Final Fight