Universal Soldier [SNES – Unreleased]

Universal Soldier [SNES – Unreleased]

Turrican was released in 1989 for the Commodore 64 and 1990 for the Amiga and Atari ST. It was Programmed by Rainbow Arts and Factor 5. Then Accolade made a port to the Sega Genesis, GameBoy, and Turbo Graphix 16. The Accolade Ports were a huge disaster. However, Accolade wanted to do the same thing with Turrican 2, which is known to be the best Turrican game and in general one of the best games ever made. They screwed up a classic and they wanted to screw up another.

However, the members of Accolade wanted to make their new port into a game based off of Universal Soldier to make more money. Universal Soldier was released for the Sega Genesis and Game Boy and was given horrible reviews. It’s a shame they took such a great game and turned it into a mess. There was going to be a Super Nintendo version but Nintendo didn’t license it despite the message on the title screen.

The Super Nintendo version was even worse than all of Accolade’s previous ports! The controls are messed up, the music sounds good at first but it becomes a mess. For example, one of the best songs in Turrican 2 is “The Wall” but in the SNES Universal Soldier version you can’t even hear the song because the beat is too loud. The Sound effects are annoying, the graphics are obviously ripped from Turrican, and the collision detection is beyond terrible.

If it was released, it would probably be called one of the worst games ever made. If you want to try this disaster a ROM of it was leaked on the internet.

Thanks a lot to Edward Morley for the description / info and to SNES Central for these images!

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11 thoughts on “Universal Soldier [SNES – Unreleased]

  1. atarix

    I guess this is some kind of fake or something.
    The ingame screenshot looks like a game using engine/gfx from famous Turrican game series. It can be hack/remix/remake or something else.
    Check TURRICAN title via google.

    Developer of TURRICAN is FACTOR 5 team, which is still active today and do some titles for nextgen consoles and pc.

  2. Shuu

    It sounds kinda weird. I had this game in cartridge for SNES in that pirates “Super 5 in 1” stuff
    I used to like as much as I got so far in this game.
    btw, speaking about Super Turrican, that game always freeze at the same stage NO MATTER what cartridge you had. Even the original ones, it freezes when you reach the fourth level, I don’t remember now wich one exactly was…
    I never liked Super Turrican

  3. Nichole

    This snes version was actually reviewed in GamePro #39, maybe someone there was the party who leaked it.

  4. Sam Jones

    Console conversions of Turrican II for the Mega Drive and Game Boy were produced by The Code Monkeys for Accolade, who had kept the rights for the console ports of the franchise. But at a late stage, Accolade also acquired rights to produce a game spin-off of the Jean-Claude Van Damme movie Universal Soldier and decided to rebrand the game as Universal Soldier.[2][3] Turrican’s sprite was changed into a marine and several other substitutions were made. Amongst other changes, the eyeballs-walking-on-fingers became mini tanks, and instead of a large mech/steel dragon in the first stage, the player now faces a large representation of Dolph Lundgren’s character in the film.

    The three shoot ’em up stages, cut out from the port, were replaced by the developers with three original stages (a Vietnam jungle, a fortress, and a motel/car junkyard) that in theory should link the game to the film’s atmosphere. The rest of the original Turrican II stages are still present and remain mostly intact in overall design, though some of them appear in different order, along with the three new levels differently scattered through them.

    A Homebrew version of Universal Soldier was also produced for the SNES, but it was never published and only exists in the form of leaked ROM.[

  5. Mark Kirkby

    Just to update this info a bit, I have edited the Wikipedia page to reflect more accurate info over this port. I actually wrote the port and it was developed alongside the Genesis (Megadrive) and Gameboy versions. The start of development was about 2 months behind the other due to the extra time to get the dev kits delivered to our offices. The leaked version is a pre-production Alpha version and the final version was approved by Nintendo for production.

    From memory, Accolade decided not to release due the the game requiring a larger ROM size and the extra cost Nintendo required for their production. I remember being asked to remove some levels to make it fit but that would have compromised the game so much they decided not to go ahead. Besides, the Megadrive and Gameboy versions were out by then but sales were poor because of the name and graphical changes.

    Only later did the guys at Accolade realise they should have left it alone and retained the Turrican 2 name. But remember that this was in the middle of the “film license” frenzy of game production and marketing men just hadn’t got a clue…

    1. Mark Kirkby

      PS. as I have mentioned in the WIkipedia article, the SNES version was based on the C64 source code and the Amiga graphics.

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