As someone who has played the original Amiga 500 Turrican disk version countless of times I have to say that this is the best playing unofficial Turrican game I've encountered since. I wasn’t aware of the DOS version but apparently there was such port.
I’m bit on the fence upgrading games to high color graphics if the original looks good enough as there are some examples like the AGA version of the Chaos Engine (yikes!). The high color DOS graphics actually fare lot better than I expected but I have still a lot of things to say about the output as I’m not a huge fan of all the choices done. However as I’m so used to the original Amiga 500 version I won’t go too much into it here (ie. I really like the Amiga 500 graphics design and colors). Bonus points for using the Amiga player sprite though!
I played the game through using Retroarch with latest version of PUAE 2021 core. I wanted to keep things as simple as possible so I used the floppy version and it worked from start to finish without any issues and thanks to VRR the PAL scrolling was perfectly smooth and the game speed was pretty much how I remember it from Amiga 500 (how it’s in my opinion supposed to be).
I don’t know if these are emulation related issues but here are some findings I did while casually played through the game:
- World 1-1: At the end of the level where there’s a pit on the right end of the level where you drop down and get a 1up I don’t ever recall getting stuck bouncing as a ball in the Amiga 500 version.
- World 1-1 Boss "Rob Ot": Hit sound in the Amiga 500 version was the default metallic one instead of the organic one. (This difference was present for some other bosses like the World 2-1 "Perri Scope")
- World 1 and 2: The water surface level aware color tint effect for the underwater player sprite was missing.
- World 1-2: it really caught me off guard that the levitation bug was fixed when shooting tiles beneath you. In the Amiga 500 version you could levitate as long as you kept firing the beam.
- World 1 Boss 3 “Scar Face”: the scream sound effect similar with the World 1-1 dragon enemies whenever the boss opened the mouth was missing. Also the bouncing beam attack sound effect was missing.
- World 2 Boss 2 “Jack the Gripper”: The claw attack clapping was around two times as fast compared to the Amiga 500 version.
- World 4 Boss 2 “Arnie Walker”: The sound effect pitch of the “Make my day” on these “walkers” was same and in the Amiga 500 version there was 3 random different variations: low, medium and high.