I really miss today s consoles having a unique sound. Updated on 15 March 2021
How better to draw Music Week to a close than with a look at what happens when the past and the present collide?
Video game music is big business. Chances are if there s a game you re eagerly anticipating, the release of its original soundtrack isn t close behind, whether it s conveniently on Spotify or pristinely packaged as a vinyl record from iam8bit or dozens of other specialists that have emerged in the recent years.
Yet for Remute, that s all a bit too safe and conventional. At least for a producer who specialises in electronic music.
Turrican Flashback Review
Turrican! Turrican! Does whatever a Turri-can. Okay, no doubt that line doesn’t play out as well as the original arachnid based one does. But it does give a glimpse into my headspace when I first played this game back in the 1990s on my uncle’s Amiga PC. Turrican, a biomechanical warrior was not only created for battle but built to bioengineer inhospitable planets into living ones. So with his unique nature, powers, and cool silvery robot appearance, Turrican became a new superhero to me.
The general storyline for the Turrican games sees the player sent to colonized worlds that have become corrupted by an evil force. It is up to Turrican to set things right, collecting goodies and destroying all baddies in the process.
Turrican Flashback is a nostalgic paradise of synths and bullets
Nostalgia, as they say, is one hell of a drug, and in lockdown we’ve been getting very, very high. A generation of middle aged men – myself included – have helped push shares in Games Workshop through the roof as they rediscover the hobby that saw them through their teenage years. The Turrican Flashback collection, now available on Switch, scratches an itch that dates back even further, to a time when I was nine years old, playing games on my family’s Amiga 500.
One of the more prestigious titles in my adolescent games collection, I must have played through Turrican II a dozen times. It was among the first run-and-gun titles where exploration and discovery were just as important as reflexes. If you could find all of the hidden areas filled with extra lives, you could afford to bash your head against the occasional shmup sections and bullet-sponge bosses. And playing through a game with already