Though I have been gaming since my early childhood, Turrican for the Commodore 64 was the first game I totally went nuts about.

Turrican is a rather simple Jump'nShoot programmed mainly by the German programmer Manfred Trenz, who is also known for porting R-Type to the C64 and programming The Great Giana Sisters (a Super Mario Bros. clone) and released by RainbowArts.

In the game you fight your way against an endless army of mostly robotic enemies. Most enemies will be defeated Turrican's main cannon, that is either a spread shot or a laser depending on which power up you collect, but in addition to that he also has a lighting beam, that stuns enemies and can be rotated by 360 degrees, a smart bomb in form of two lines of light, that hurt every enemy on screen, and the ability to transform into an indestructable wheel, that can lay bombs. (Hello there, Metroid)



Most of the levels have a linear structure, but there are tons of secret areas to find in the game. To access most secret areas you have to find hidden item blocks and use them as step stones to get to higher ground. Actually instead of just running from start to finish of one level, it is more rewarding to find all the secret areas and collect the 1UPs there. And you will need 1UPs because this game gets hard rather fast.

Two levels in the game stray from the typical Jump'n Shoot and are normal vertical Shoot'em Ups. They aren't anything special, but are a nice diversion from the rest of the game.



I can't express how much I loved the game back than. I played the game almost every day for about a year and the much improved sequel was released. I finished the game about a hundred times and found every little extra in the game, I drew maps of all the levels and planned to send it to a computer gaming magazine, but somehow never did. I even designed my very own levels on paper and showed them to my father, who doesn't care about video games at all, to get his opinion if those levels would be fun to play.

The game didn't feature a lot of music. There only was the opening, the ending and BGM for the Shoot'em Up stages, but I loved the music. At one point my music teacher asked everyone to bring our favorite music to school so we can listen to it in class and I brought my self recorded Turrican music. (I just put the tape recorder next to the TV speaker) Sadly nobody liked it.

One year later the sequel Turrican II - The Final Fight was released and it feature more weapons, more enemies, bigger levels and prettier graphics. It was every I hope for at that time and I was not dissapointed with the game.

Turrican and Turrican II were ported to all kind of computers. The most popular is the Amiga version, that was programmed by Factor 5 (nowadays known for Rogue Squadron or Lair). The graphics were much better and it feature really great music.

The franchise continued on to Super Turrican and Super Turrican II for the SNES and Turrican 3 for the Amiga (or Mega Turrican for the Genesis, that is actually mostly the same game), but though they were fun games, the first two still have a very special place inside of my heart. (Although I can never play them again, because they aged very badly)