This article was published in issue 9 of Komoda & Amiga Plus.
What brought great pride to the Commodore 64 owners in the second half of the 80s and 90s? Hmm… definitely games. Is there any other 8-bit platform that can boast such marvelous scrolling shooters, fast platformers and interesting puzzles? Even my friend Michał, who was the owner of the Atari 65XE back in the days, of- ten visited me because of the unique atmosphere of the C64 productions. I could say that Atari owners envy us.
Commodore 64’s good reputation is probably associated with all mass production software. And rightly so. Companies such as US Gold, Codemasters, Ocean, Thalamus, and Rainbow Arts, all offering programs on this platform, made the C64 most likely to be seen by users as a gaming console. Many titles could have a huge impact on this. Let me narrow the topic to one of them. Turrican – every retrogamer knows this title well. Not surprisingly, it’s just the effect of Manfred Trenz’s collaboration with Chris Hülsbek. Oh yes! These gentlemen know how to extract the beauty of audiovisual landscapes. But the version of the game that I will present soon can be a bit surprising, so… Turrican is a mutated, unconquerable warrior, armed with a new generation of weapons. It was designed to eliminate the absolute monster – Morgula, which is a serious threat to humanity. Commodore and Amiga users know our intrepid hero from the following parts of the game: Turrican, Turrican II: The Final Fight, and Turrican 3. However, not everyone knows that a different version of this program has been released, known as Turrican USA +3D (NTSC), published on csdb.dk in August 2015 via the Underground Domain Inc. group. In principle, the word “group” is only in the name, because there is one cracker Alwyz, who is very well known on the C64 scene. Generally, the whole trick is that the existing program has been modified to fit into NTSC hardware with a trainer and some instructions text file added in. In principle, the design of the game remained the same: scenery, sprites, bosses, bonuses etc. So where is the difference? First of all the graphics, which may surprise you. The modified version of NTSC has been simplified and the tastes are not so good. At some point the background coloring is modest and rough. Anyway, everything is explained by the following comments that can be found on the web: “OMG what a color palette mess!!!”, “This version looks worse than the real one, some of the parallax is missing also”, “Ughh… why did they do it?! There was no need to make changes for an NTSC version.“ Such reactions are completely natural when we get a product that has worse quality than the original. But when we look at it from a different perspective, we imagine that this is the only version of Turrican games, and then the graphics are more positive. Why? Because we do not have a comparison to what was previously a sensational. No worries, the playability did not suffer in this particular way. Believe me that for any shooter devotee this will not matter much, especially since the spirit of the original is very noticeable here. In conclusion, I would like to assure you that, despite worse graphics, nothing is preventing you from launching a mutated robot and splashing into an extraordinary futuristic world. In general, this is a rather interesting modification, which can be treated as a variation of the original game. If you are interested in the game, you can find it here: https://csdb. dk/release/?id=140234.
