Nightdive Studios managed to secure the publishing rights for Turok and Turok 2: Seeds of Evil and re-release both games for today’s generation of gamer. If you missed out on the original releases from Acclaim Entertainment back in the late 1990s for PC and N64, you can take a bite out of history and experience the classic first-person shooters for the Xbox One right now.
Iguana Entertainment’s first two games were slick and have been remastered for today’s generation of gamer with sharper resolutions and improved playability. Thankfully, Turok 3 wasn’t made available because it was downright trash. I’m not spoiling anything for you because you should spare yourself playing the third game, but essentially the third game killed off Turok so his two annoying relatives had to take over.
His niece was hot but boy was the story awful in Turok 3. Killing off the main character like that also killed the series.
Anyway, the two good Turok games are available right now for the Xbox One for the not-so-cheap prices of $19.99 each.
I don’t know if gamers are going to be willing to toss $20 the way of Nightdive for each of the 20-year-old Turok games. $9.99 seems like a fairer price.
Both games are just under 1GB, so you won’t need a lot of hard drive space if you do decide to pick up a copy. I feel like these games are more-so for historical nostalgia value than actual playability. They’re not the easiest games to play these days due to the fact that old 3D titles have awful input latency, the FOV is usually shoddy, there’s a lot of screen space ratio distortion, and aiming isn’t anywhere near as refined as today’s shooters.
Sprite-based shooters like Doom and Wolfenstein 3D and Hexen and Heretic all aged a lot better when it comes to playability because they ran at much higher frame-rates; the engines supported fluid movement, and the rendering engines weren’t anywhere near as janky as the 3D engines that were out during the time.
A lot of it had to do with the fact that rendering full 3D vertex faces were just killers on the old limited processors back then, so there was just a lot of under-the-hood wizardry required to get them to run properly and render correctly. This caused a lot of issues between mechanical stability and graphics that makes them difficult to play these days compared to the old pixel-noded engines using 2D layouts across first-person z-planes.
Anyway, if you’re still keen on rekindling some nostalgia, you can do so by visiting the Microsoft store pages to pick up copies of Turok and Turok 2 for the Xbox One.
