Turok : Dinosaur Hunter
Hyper spooky game #8
Type of Game
It starts out as a walk in the woods and ends up in a hellish multiverse. Perfect.
Release date on our machines
March 1997—just what we needed to get us ready for the release of The Lost World in theaters a few months later.
Developer
Iguana Entertainment Incorporated—pretty clever to have a reptile in the name!
Publisher
Acclaim Entertainment S.A., which, by the way, ate Iguana Entertainment.
Turok : available on GOG.com, Steam, Switch, PlayStation and Xbox. It's the remastered version, but we're not going to complain, hey.
I'm going to have to really stretch things to come up with some decent content about this game. I remember two things about Turok: the dinosaurs, and the constant stress bordering on panic that gnawed at me throughout my playthrough. It was a one-time experience during an evening spent at my cousin Walter’s house, interspersed with sessions of GoldenEye and Lylat Wars. Those breaks were mainly to let off some steam from the pressure Turok generated, rather than to actually show me those games (apologies to GoldenEye fans for the slight I just made—I know how touchy you get whenever someone doesn’t sing the praises of your baby). Its anxiety-inducing atmosphere reminded me—with a certain pleasure—of our Jurassic Park sessions on the Super NES, more than three years earlier. It was more immersive, and prettier, too. No need to remind anyone of the indoor sections of the game developed by Ocean. Hahaha, uh… sorry about that. I don’t think I spent the whole evening getting eaten by a Utahraptor; we must have moved into Walter Valise’s room, no doubt to get eaten there too, but this time by the creatures from Incubation. That makes this article all the harder to sell, but it’ll be fine.
Brushing Against the Scales
By the way, thanks for including Utahraptors in the game—which were actually two meters tall—rather than doing what they did in Jurassic Park and calling them Velociraptors, even though those were only one meter thirty tall at most. You bunch of liars! In any case, if Turok made such an impression on me in such a short playtime, it’s because it deserves its own review, however superficial it may be.
Avoid the claws
If I remembered the dinosaurs correctly, I’d completely forgotten about the rest of the bestiary—namely humans, giant insects, and… demons? Oh, right! And aliens, too. But let’s go for it! Let’s mix it all up! Time travel, a parallel world where the concept of time doesn’t exist… wait, wouldn’t one be the exact opposite of the other here? Oh well, it’s already such a mess—no one will notice. But wait, did I mention the bionic dinosaurs and their robotic limbs? Not to forget the ones that have an artillery cannon bolted right onto their backs! Hahahaha, it sounds like the ramblings of a completely delusional teenager who thinks he’s come up with the best idea in the world by mixing together all the cool concepts from the action movies he’s seen. Man, I really want to understand how we end up with this chaotic blend of influences, even if it means I’ll deeply regret not having discovered it back then. It doesn’t stop there, because if I understood the synopsis correctly, Tal’Set—the protagonist you play—has to maintain a metaphysical barrier that separates Earth from the Lost Land, that famous dimension where dinosaurs mix with sci-fi and the seven circles of hell.
And Tal’Set is a Turok. That single word explains the whole rant about the barrier over there. Well, just writing this paragraph has worn me out. But it’s a good kind of exhaustion, like the one you feel after a long six-hour hike—not the kind that comes from, um… well, playing video games for six hours. Another point I’d completely forgotten: the protagonist’s ethnicity. You’d think we wouldn’t care—it doesn’t change anything—but no. Thanks to my subconscious for not making it a huge deal back then, though. I don’t even think I realized at all that we were playing as a Native American warrior. Luckily, I might have thought that was super cooool, man! See, I’m not racist! I like Turok—Native Americans are so badass! Citizen of the world and all that! Rastafari and Cowabunga, my friend! I could have spouted that kind of cringeworthy rhetoric back in the late ’90s. Let’s move on quickly to something else.
Thanks also to the male and female developers—uh… well, I guess that’s a plus for diversity in the gaming world. Or maybe not. I don’t know enough about the lore or the context of the game’s development to venture into the territory of cultural appropriation and racist portrayals. It seems to me that these questions have come up in various more or less reputable corners of the internet, though they haven’t quite reached the level of full-blown debates. Does Turok fall into the “Noble Savage” cliché, for example—as awful as that term sounds? But since it’s adapted from comics, we can just say it’s the fault of the comics published in the 1950s. Maybe they should have updated all that a bit before going ahead with it. I have an opinion, but I don’t really know, okay? I’ve noticed that the gameplay is often compared to a mix of Tomb Raider—for exploring ancient and paranormal myths—and Doom for… well, basic mindless slaughter, that’s it.
It’s too bad that the folks at Acclaim decided to keep the first-person perspective from the latter. They could have added some Crash Bandicoot-inspired design to the central hub, letting us come and go between stages as we pleased. And some Toejam & Earl for the concept of assembling an object by collecting a piece in each level. Except that here, you’re collecting pieces of a legendary weapon, not an interstellar sound system. Aren’t we just making things easier for the big bad final boss, who’s trying to rebuild that very weapon? To conquer the world, of course. What about the other weapons, by the way? The ones we use to blast those who are stopping us from collecting the pieces of the other weapon—the one we’re not supposed to activate? Well, like everything else, it’s all over the place, and that’s okay. Man, did I already mention that this convoluted lore is wearing me out?
Okay, let’s focus: the basic knife, the bow that’s always slung over the arm of any self-respecting Native—of course—plus pistols, shotguns, particle accelerators, fusion cannons, and “alien weapons” are all part of the arsenal used to slaughter one’s fellow man. This gear is also used to decimate the local wildlife to regain health, and I’d be surprised at myself if I’d agreed to kill cute animals while cyborg triceratops and rabid Pazuzu were attacking me from all sides. Maybe that’s why I kept dying over and over, for that matter. Male and female players back then generally raved about the game’s rather wild pace, even if they had to eat their words when they discovered Quake III Arena, huhuhuhu. The same positive feedback applied to the graphics, despite the N64’s infamous fog that limited visibility to two meters.
Like a Stegosaurus’s, actually (I have no idea, but I imagine them to be pretty nearsighted, poor things). A significant number of these male and female players apparently liked that fog, because they demanded its return in the remastered version of Turok, which had removed it in an attempt to please everyone. Nope—fog that adds a layer of immersion through anxiety in a rather nerve-wracking FPS like this one—I can understand why it rubbed a good number of male and female gamers the wrong way. Male and female gamers, yeah. That one really stings the anti-woke crowd, doesn’t it? Again? Male and female gamers! Hahah! In any case, I have to admit I really like this fog; I side with those who campaigned to keep it. Especially when you’re exploring levels named “Catacombs,” “Ruins,” “Jungle,” “Lost Land”… And you know what? The fog changes its color and opacity slightly depending on the location you’re in. Magnificent! Don’t ever try to get rid of the fog anywhere, okay?
Escaping the Roars
How’s the music? On the N64, I don’t have many points of reference, aside from the Mario Kart soundtrack, which forces its way into my brain pretty much every day, making me hum it and giggle like an idiot. Darren Mitchell composed this O.S.T., as well as those for the other two Turok games on the Nintendo 64. His résumé also includes work on South Park and Ghost Recon—projects that, it seems, kept him well-fed for a while. So I’m listening and… hey, it reminds me a bit of Pitfall on the Mega Drive. Especially in terms of the rhythms, and also the fact that the tracks all sound more or less the same. I could even swear I’ve heard the same synth melodies in several tracks. Oh right, there’s synth, so the comparison with Pitfall ends there. It’s probably meant to echo that game’s sci-fi vibe, while the percussion reminds you that you’re wandering through the ruins of lost civilizations. Well, with that in mind, I’m not quite sure which track to choose. Then again, there’s little chance I’ll pick the wrong one, since they all sound the same. It’s funny how these tracks feel more like ambient pieces I’d expect to hear during turn-based RPG battles in a game like Fallout, rather than in a pretty intense FPS like Turok. But I'm probably just talking nonsense. It seems like the PC version has the same pieces, but with a few extra arrangements—or maybe just slightly better sound quality. That doesn't exactly help me make up my mind. Okay, I'll go with the one from the catacombs. Just because it was my favorite song in Diablo. You've got to find some reason to make a decision.
What about Termites, then ?
To be honest, back in 1997, this game was a real hit. It made a lot of money, actually, which allowed Acclaim Entertainment to survive a little longer before it went extinct (just like a dinosaur HAHAHAAA). Even though it didn’t draw me into its own adventure, Turok did let me have a blast playing Burnout 2, and for that alone, I’ll be eternally grateful to it.
Then again, Walter’s Nintendo 64 takes me back to a very specific time, because it was set up in a room in the basement—precisely where we’d had massive toy battles right on the floor just a few years earlier. Well, I was twelve or thirteen—maybe it was time to put the Termitors aside. Now we could watch movies without having to go back upstairs. But still, the Termitors—does anyone remember how awesome they were? I loved those little creatures, maybe even more than the Cosmix or the Monsters in My Pocket. Neon-colored, probably toxic plastic toys like they don’t make anymore. Turok didn’t single-handedly pull me out of that phase of childhood, but thanks to him for playing a big part in it. What would I have looked like in front of my middle school friends if I’d shared my obsession with the Termitors instead of talking about guns and dinosaurs?
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