Awesome to see the full version of Super Turrican finally get released. If AtGames makes a SNES, will it come with that unfinished Steven Segal game? FDS adds an extra sound channel to the Famicom, so some games had to have some music changed for the NES versions. It's not that much of a downgrade from what I've listened to though, nothing like the drop in quality that CV3 suffered when Konami had to remove their chip.
CV3 is one of which I knew already but going through the FamicomC library I didn't know even FDS LoZ had better music. The NA Link's Adventure had better everything overall.
You mean Universal Solder? The unfinished port of a completed Genesis/Megadrive game that started as a port of Turrican 2? I guess we're not missing much if they never make one That was van Damme though.
Who knows, it might come from me! I have a suspicion that Analogue and Factor 5 know damn well it's going to get out there, and don't especially care. Analogue's stance on modding and ROMs is already "we don't tell people what they can do with our hardware".
I have Mega Turrican on Mega Drive and I played the hell outta Turrican 3 on Amiga. That game was awesome. Although my favorite songs are on Turrican 2, I preferred Turrican 3 as a game much more.
Mega Turrican and both 16-bit Super Turricans (not the 8-bit one) shifted towards a more console-style type of level design from the original maze-like levels of Turrican 1 and 2. While it's sorta sad to see less exploration, the more linear style is really a better fit for Turrican's blast-em-up game mechanics. Apologies to Manfred Trenz! Turrican 3 was a modified port of Mega Turrican, so that applies there too. Super Turrican on the SNES was my introduction to the series. Thankfully, it makes a good introduction, since the style is somewhere in between Mega Turrican and the original computer games. Now that Factor 5 is reunited and has their IP back again, they're supposedly planning a new Turrican. The "director's cut" of Turrican 1 seems like a nice loss-leader to stir up interest in the series again. In the future, I'd like to see a Turrican game try the opposite of the shift the console Turricans made, and go full metroidvania style.
On the topic of CV and music, I've been playing the X68k game (the one that was ported to PS1 as Chronicles) on the emulator I was talking about earlier so I could play it with MIDI and it fucking rocks. I wish I had this option for more Japanese games from that period. I mean this masterpiece - Fits right in with the quality of their products I think.
Turrican 3 was released first. Mega Turrican was developed first. In the time it took to find a publisher for the Mega Drive game, Neon Studios ported it to Amiga and Rainbow Arts published it themselves. That's how much harder it was to get on the consoles! @RabidYak: Oh god, I think I'd rather have Universal Soldier!
There was a Steven Seagal VG?!?! I gotta have it! Super Turrican and Super Stars Wars trilogy reminds me of dark SNES times where there was nothing interesting left to rent. Both surprised me at how good they were. @RabidYak, stage 7 is so quirky. Almost danceable.
If I had all the time and money I could ask for, I'd like to put together an external MIDI synthesizer box with one of Yamaha's XG-based wavetable synths in it. I had a Yamaha DS-XG soundcard (PCI slot) on an older PC for a long time, and it was AMAZING. It really did wonders for the Windows version of Sonic 3 & Knuckles. I'd love to hook that up for old computer emulators, SCUMM-VM, etc.
Huh, guess you were right. Turrican 3 Development Diary Except for the Neon Studios part. They did not port anything. Factor 5 made all the games at once. Even Super Turrican. NEON Studios just provided the Bob/Object system which gained them the big credit. As can be read in their diary. I remember those days, when I bought Amiga Games and the demodisk had the Turrican 3 demo on it. Best demo on a mag ever
I might still have the Yamaha XG-100 Soft Wavetable somewhere in the depths of my archives, if you're interested. For my first PC I had to decide: Pentium 100MHz and Soundblaster 16 or Pentium 75MHz and Soundblaster AWE32. Thank God I decided for the AWE32. The sound was sooo much better than on my friends' PCs. And not much later I upgraded to 150 MHz anyway. So no biggie
It's a cool soundtrack as a whole IMO, although that really goes without saying when it comes to CV. I never had really good MIDI hardware unfortunately, just an original AdLib and then a SB16. After that I had an Aureal Vortex which was great for new Windows 98 games, but it's MIDI was shit. I didn't get to spend allot of time with the goods until the MT-32 emulator in SCUMMVM and now i'm all over it whenever I get the option. Going to setup an AdLib Gold system in PCem soon so I can play Dune as Shai-Hulud intended.
I was referring to the main programmer for the Amiga port, Peter Theirolf, who was a founding member of Kaiko. The game's Wikipedia entry implies that Kaiko was breaking up and Theirolf had moved on to Neon. This bit may be incorrect, but he wasn't part of Factor 5 either way. In the process of trying to research this, I discovered that Theirolf has re-formed the Kaiko brand! Evidently they did the PS4 conversions of the Darksiders games. There's not much detail, but we can glean some interesting stuff from their game credits page--especially the "games of the founder" section: KAIKO Games He did do programming for Neon Studios, but he doesn't list Turrican 3 as one of these. But he does list Turrican 3 as work that he did for the original Kaiko. So the bit about Theirolf working for Neon at the time is probably wrong, but it was definitely Kaiko as opposed to Factor 5. Honestly, some of the old-school European game developers are so interconnected that it's hard for an outsider coming into that scene (having been mostly a DOS and console kid) to keep track! I've read that Factor 5 was originally the Amiga-oriented branch of Rainbow Arts... Huelsbek frequently did music for both Rainbow Arts and Factor 5, but he was also a member of Kaiko... some of Kaiko's games were published by Team 17, etc... SoundBlaster cards were often a bit better for sound effects. The main advantages of the DS-GX series were having a genuine OPL-3 chip (so Adlib emulation sounded much better than anything other than an actual Adlib) and near-professional quality MIDI playback. If you could do without perfectly accurate OPL sound, the best possible option would've been a Sounblaster Pro or AWE-32 with a Yamaha daughter board (like the DB50XG) to provide MIDI sound generation.
