Uploaded December 2021 | Updated September 2026, 1 day ago
So I played turrican a little back when I first started the channel (at which point, my capture setup added a 1.5 second lag to inputs, so I didn't really play the games usefully back then.... maybe I should redo that oie though), and was pleasantly surprised by it after hearing how terrible it was on tape - I find myself suspecting if people really were talking about turrican 2, though, because this one... isn't as great.
Particularly, it commits that sin that, if you die on the first level, and then select continue, you still have to reload the level - which, for a game where your first play of it is going to usually be bad, because it's a hard game with not-always-obvious physics and death pits right at the start, you're going to be doing that reasonably immediately.
So I actually did that, got frustrated when it asked me to rewind to counter position 986 - a position that made no sense. I assume that, if I possessed the instructions, I'd need the magic knowledge of resetting to 0 somewhere - maybe on the title screen - and started recording this entirely from scratch, since I wanted to load through to at least the second level, and I did make it there, however it then still wanted me to rewind to counter 986.... which seems like the start of the tape? Maybe? I'm not sure....
Feels like typical "we shoved this on tape at the last minute and didn't really think about it. Fuck you, get a disk drive" bullshit.
I mean, obviously a c64 classic, and a game worth dealing with this on, but a couple of little quality of life things could have made this so much more accessible. As with the death pits on the second level, there is a bunch of bits of this game which have just not aged as well as they should have.... if I was reviewing this now, I'd probably be inclined to give it around an 80%ish score rather than the 95%+ score I would have given it in 1991. It's obviously still _good_, but not _as good_. Part of that is there is a LOT of this game that this video just doesn't show - the shump sections being a good example of that. And that's kind of the bit that's aged badly - the game has amazing parts, but then hides them behind insta-death pits and a lack of hit invincibility/pushback - the fact that you can get killed by a tiny thing because it just drains your energy on a pixel contact was forgivable in 1991, but really isn't in 2021. It'd be such a simple thing to fix, but I guess back then.... brutal was the name of the game.
So I played turrican a little back when I first started the channel (at which point, my capture setup added a 1.5 second lag to inputs, so I didn't really play the games usefully back then.... maybe I should redo that oie though), and was pleasantly surprised by it after hearing how terrible it was on tape - I find myself suspecting if people really were talking about turrican 2, though, because this one... isn't as great.
Particularly, it commits that sin that, if you die on the first level, and then select continue, you still have to reload the level - which, for a game where your first play of it is going to usually be bad, because it's a hard game with not-always-obvious physics and death pits right at the start, you're going to be doing that reasonably immediately.
So I actually did that, got frustrated when it asked me to rewind to counter position 986 - a position that made no sense. I assume that, if I possessed the instructions, I'd need the magic knowledge of resetting to 0 somewhere - maybe on the title screen - and started recording this entirely from scratch, since I wanted to load through to at least the second level, and I did make it there, however it then still wanted me to rewind to counter 986.... which seems like the start of the tape? Maybe? I'm not sure....
Feels like typical "we shoved this on tape at the last minute and didn't really think about it. Fuck you, get a disk drive" bullshit.
I mean, obviously a c64 classic, and a game worth dealing with this on, but a couple of little quality of life things could have made this so much more accessible. As with the death pits on the second level, there is a bunch of bits of this game which have just not aged as well as they should have.... if I was reviewing this now, I'd probably be inclined to give it around an 80%ish score rather than the 95%+ score I would have given it in 1991. It's obviously still _good_, but not _as good_. Part of that is there is a LOT of this game that this video just doesn't show - the shump sections being a good example of that. And that's kind of the bit that's aged badly - the game has amazing parts, but then hides them behind insta-death pits and a lack of hit invincibility/pushback - the fact that you can get killed by a tiny thing because it just drains your energy on a pixel contact was forgivable in 1991, but really isn't in 2021. It'd be such a simple thing to fix, but I guess back then.... brutal was the name of the game.
