turrican

Super Turrican [Beta – SNES]

As we can read on Wikipedia, Super Turrican was developed by Factor 5 and published by Seika for the Super Nintendo. Factor 5’s Super Turrican plays similarly to Mega Turrican and shares a similar visual style, but the game has a different set of levels and features a freeze beam in place of the original lightning whip. DEC noticed some reference about the beta version of Super Turrican on the Factor 5 web site (http://www.factor5.de/secrets_super_turrican.shtml) and several other web site relay this information when the already known version was planned to the Wii virtual console. 

Turrican: Cyclone (Factor 5) [PS3 – Cancelled]

After finishing Lair, Factor 5 was working on a new Turrican game for the PS3, but as the partnership with SONY was later terminated when Lair was a critical as well as a commercial failure, the development of this new game was stopped. We dont have an official name for this game, and it’s labeled simply as “Turrican” or  “Project Cyclone” just because of the name of its artworks. Project Cyclone was put on hold still in early development and probably we’ll never see it again.

From the few artworks that remain, we can notice a character that looks a bit like an evolution of the one in Turrican and we can only wonder if this project was going to be a resurrection of the unreleased Thornado for the GameCube.

Thanks to Gone is Gone and Hey Hey for the contributions!

Images: 

Thornado [N64 – Prototype]

thronadologo64

Also know as “Turrican 64”, Thornado was an action game / third person shooter that was in development at Factor 5 as a spiritual successor to the Turrican series, but with some inspiration from Metroid. This project was originally announced for the Nintendo 64, but it seems that only an early prototype / tech demo was created before it was put on hold, probably because Factor 5 was too busy to work on Star Wars: Rogue Squadron.

Originally they wanted to call the game “Turrican 64” but they could not settle on an agreement with the rights owner of the “Turrican” franchise, Rainbow Arts / Softgold. Eggebrecht said that it was internally referred to as “Thornado”, a mixture of “Thor” and “Tornado”.

The game would had featured eight levels with shooting and puzzles elements. Additionally, the game had two protagonists, a male and a female  The music would have been done by Chris Huelsbeck again and a sample is still available to download from the official F5 website.

As we can see from the few screens below, F5 realized a nice Target Render for Thornado 64, that was used to show how the game would have looked on the Nintendo console. The scene shows a scenario from the end of time, in which you had to jump over cars, shots to enemies and then fight an huge final boss. That’s only a tech demo though and probably they never created a playable one.

After some time and many delays, Thornado was cancelled for the N64 and Factor 5 tried to move it to the new “Dolphin” hardware (later know as the GameCube). As we know, even Thornado GameCube was cancelled and after so many years the project vanished forever from the gaming world.

Thanks a lot to Celine for the contribution!

Images: 

Turrican 3D [PC – Cancelled]

turrican3dlogo.jpg

Turrican is a 1990 video game programmed by Manfred Trenz. It was first developed for the Commodore 64 by Rainbow Arts, but was ported to other systems later. Turrican 3D was intended to bring Turrican into the third dimension in 1999, but it was never released because publisher THQ stopped the development. Screenshots and videos show how the world of Turrican would have