Digitalspy’s Turok retrospective

When I was growing up, I didn’t own Goldeneye. Or Perfect Dark. The two most recognisable FPSs on the Nintendo 64. However I did play Turok 2: Seeds of evil quite a bit, I’ll let you know. Because of this, I believe that the Turok series defined a lot of my expectations when it came to first person shooters. So when I came across this article on Digitalspy by Mark Langshaw, I must say that something ticked inside me when it came to looking at Turok as part of the FPS greats.

When I played it back in the day, I thought that it was a lot more like Goldeneye because it was the only other FPS that I knew about at the time other than Wolfenstein 3D, and I think that everyone reading this would agree that it is. But then what this article made me think about is that it resembles id’s DOOM a whole lot more.

This makes sense to me, it really feels a lot more similar than I originally thought. Think about it – they both had these similarities:

• They both fought against monsters (especially Turok 2) while Goldeneye had exclusively human opponents.
• They both had infinite clip size, whereas you had to reload in Goldeneye
• There wasn’t any aim homing
• Gore. Mucho gore.
• Over-the top weapons. The most bombastic weapon in Goldeneye is the rocket launcher =/
• Doom and Turok (1, not 2) had fairly similar level designs. Most of doom was set in Mars/Hell, and most of Turok is set in the jungle. Goldeneye had a much more colourful level selection.

There’s probably more that I can’t think about at the moment, but this just really came as a shock to me to realise that something that I thought was set in store really was another way.

And because I have no originality, here is the same video that Mark Langshaw embedded: