Super Turrican

Nintendo thought highly enough of Super Turrican that it released by itself on March 3, unaccompanied by any other additions to the Wii Shop that day. And though it's disappointing for some who'd ask for more quantity on the Virtual Console, there's no denying the quality of what we did receive. Super Turrican is a great experience, one that served to establish of firm foundation for Factor 5 as developers of home console video game software. It's a blast to play, as it expertly balances paying homage to other popular action designs with its own innovations and mechanics. And it pushed the envelope of what the Super Nintendo hardware could accomplish now over a decade and a half ago. 800 Wii Points is an easy price to pay for a game this good – and luckily, there should be more where this one came from. Super Turrican 2 is also a likely future release for the Virtual Console, as is the Genesis installment of the franchise, Mega Turrican.

Super Turrican makes your Super NES look and sound stunning. It offers a big challenge and lots of it, although the game is not entirely outstanding.

Turrican will be new to most game players, after all, and you can't be too inventive when restricted by 4 megabit cartridge. Indeed, judged by this fact alone, Super Turrican scores quite highly, packing more graphics and sound into its 4 megs than most games manage in 8. It's still short on variety, though - at least it doesn't offer quite the same size of playing area that the first two games did. But the game has been streamlined and tightened up, and thankfully there doesn't seem to be quite the same aimless jumping about that the first game was full of. The bonuses are more cleverly hidden too.

This was one of the early efforts from Factor 5, the team that would later bring us the phenomenal Rogue Squadron series. Unlike that Star Wars sim, the Turrican series had more in common with Contra and Mega Man than it did with any X-Wings. It's unfortunate that so few people recall this action-packed affair, since it pulled some fun ideas from a number of sources to emerge as an excellent sidescrolling shooter.

Super Turican hat keine Probotector-Klasse, macht aber dafür auch Einsteigern Spaß.