C64 goodness–package look Turrican 2

Oh the Commodore 64.  I spent many an hour blasting bad guys in games that were good and many that were not very good at all.  Here I am going to have a look at one that was very good.  I actually bought it and on top of that managed to keep the box all these years! 

It’s the scrolling, platforming shootemup extraordinaire, Turrican 2!!


The first Turrican was a great game, huge levels, lots of exploration and some MASSIVE  bosses, even mid-level bosses.  Turrican 2 added better graphics, larger sprites, well for Turrican anyway and great variety of levels.

This is the floppy disc version of Turrican 2 as it came out fairly late in the c64’s life (1991) and most people had made the jump from the humble data cassette to the disc drive.

I always found it interesting how the artwork suit for Turrican never seemed to look like the actual sprite…

I remember being gobsmacked by the pictures on the back.  The C64  version of this game  looked impressive for their day, but those Amiga screenshots. OMG!

I wish that the backs of games spruiked their wares like that nowadays.  If I see a game I know nothing about, more often than not looking at the back only shows you the graphics, nothing about the type of game it is, or story.  Wasted opportunity for a sale a lot of the time.

Once we have the box open, you find some over packaging but I was always fine with that.  I wanted my discs protected!!  look at that glorious huge floppy disc.  They hold pretty much nothing now… Limited to KB, not even a megabyte on there.

The instruction manual is pretty good, not only giving you the story and explanations of the weapons available, it also tells you what the power ups do, as well as providing amusing cartoons in there.  It’s in three languages and I always loved this manual.  The pictures are crazy!

Won’t see a character smoking in stuff anymore!  Ha ha!  What I also like was that the shot up dudes in the manual weren’t in the game.  Heck let’s face it, the Turrican suit in the game looks nothing like the one on the cover.  Although it does look a bit like the style of the “The Robots” cartoon short that was in some Marvel UK Transformers.  I wonder….

There we go.  A retrospective look at an old Commodore 64 game packet.  This box style was fairly common for discs.  I used to have Altered Beast for the C64 and it was the same as well.  Some came as combo sets and had discs as well as datasettes.  It worked well a you could have quite a large instruciton manual in there too.  Handy.