Turrican Flashback Collection does not go for extreme comprehensiveness, as a number of series games are excluded and the ones that do feature possess a litany of alternate versions in most cases which also don't show up here, but it is an act of deliberate curation in presenting the most widely played, liked and cohesive with each other four games available: Turrican and Turrican II: The Final Fight for Amiga, Mega Turrican for Mega Drive, and Super Turrican for Super Nintendo. I played through all of them.
To start with, the quality of Flashback as a collection and emulation package must be commended. The written synopses for each game provide light context in what's for many a less known series, and in their self-congratulatory way reflect the kind of clumsy enthusiasm and excitement the games themselves embody. Despite covering three system standards across four games, the control schemes are invariably standardized throughout and freely configurable in addition, making sequential play easy to settle into. Emulation quality is uniformly terrific, and the display options are some of the most granular I've seen in a commercial release, allowing for microadjustments of CRT filter types, their sharpness or blur, the scanlines displayed or not, or the screen curvature simulated. There's even a host of alternate colour modes that completely transform the palettes of the games if so enabled. Play considerations are similarly thought-out, as each game has their dedicated slots for save states, the "up to jump" control scheme present in the Amiga games is mapped to a face button by default (and can be restored for fidelity if desired), in-game codes for each game are catalogued in a menu, and there is an universal rewind function mapped to a shoulder button. There is practically nothing that's lacking here in how the material is presented and how it's thought to be best played for old and new audiences alike.
A seamless presentation is an important consideration in the face of what Turrican is: old computer-heads might know it, and maybe it's got more nostalgic cachet in its home territory in Germany or other European markets, but this is not a series that ever "broke through" into the public canon of video games shaped mostly by Japanese and North American audiences and tastes. And yet it's so inextricably bound to that simpatico field and genre; a colourful run 'n gunner with an exploratory bent, notably upbeat and iconically melodic approach to music composition, and a recklessly derivative touch to everything it's based on. The popular culture that ushered in so many video game dynasties just a few years before Turrican's debut in 1990 is a shared reference point of relentless "borrowing" across cultures, but in here subject to a recursive game of telephone, by Turrican itself being so clearly modeled after games that stole from other media to create themselves--the citations collapse upon each other in a great big mess that's ultimately charming because there's no filter for any of it. The running main villain for the series can be just literally Stryfe from X-Men comics; the key visual for the first game can be just a tracing of a Manowar album cover; the few human likenesses that ever appear can adopt the visual identities of "How to Draw Manga" illustrations; R-Type's Force pod can be set decoration within the games, somewhere, just because. It comes from a different time of looser restrictions in blurring the lines between tribute and plagiarism, made by young people exploring a medium and a profession which had hardly codified into anything that could've prevented such acts of unreserved piety and sacrilege both.
The unique perspective of a game developer in that era, in that cultural context, is what makes Turrican's reconciliation and exploration of console and arcade-based action games in a computer gaming context so unique and transfixing. It's shaky in applying that osmosed sum of knowledge into its own expression on nascent game design; things don't work the way consensus by averages has taught, and the impression is of a game learning to cope with itself as much as the player must. The spaces wander, ceaselessly, even aimlessly, impossibly large, and that's the breaking point for many neophyte players with this or any comparable game of the era that shares the design sense put forth here: the timer is as menacing a presence as any active enemy, as its dwindling seconds signal the inevitability of expiring amidst a labyrinth one doesn't feel they've been given enough tools to reliably or fairly chart. But still, these games for all their steep and forbidding exterior aren't as punitive as all that, as lives are doled out to such extremes that practically infinite respawns on the spot exist, the timer filled once more. And with that regained time, the odd logic of these spaces, the interweaving megastructures, on some unconscious level become a little clearer, more instinctively intuited, and so the exits to each stage come quicker and less laboriously. When that point is reached, there might even come an accompanying appreciation for the audacity of such large, drifting level design to exist in, as if the game is confident enough in providing enough string for the player not necessarily to trip themselves with, but to help find their way out of the labyrinth.
And Turrican isn't a monolith: this collection exists to showcase a totality of the series and whatever can be gleaned from taking it as a whole. Over the course of the series, the insecurities of the debut work are honed away by the second, retaining the guiding philosophies of the text but injecting more coherence, diversity and shine. For sequels as iterated polish, one can hardly do better. The console half of the package sees the series adjust to a distinct shift in audience expectations and, one must assume, consequently adopts a more understandable and straightforward form; gone are the befuddling mazes and dead-ends, and instead there is just momentum and twitch action. These changes aren't binary, they do not occur in a single grand gesture but rather chart how drastically the underlying character of the series gradually changed even in as brief a window as it remained extant and relevant. Thus it's even easier to relate Flashback forward as a singular cross-section of a series and its legacy, because it does such a compelling job of speaking for itself through both the games themselves and the most welcoming configuration of them seen, allowing anyone to have a fair shot at unraveling their mysteries and weird history on their own terms.
Please try this release of the games if the series has ever piqued interest before. If not, please seek out Chris Hülsbeck's music for them, at least--if there's any one thing to remember Turrican for, it's probably that.