Too Much Game, Too Few Buttons

Boy, this sure has been a couple of weeks, hasn't it? The spread of the COVID-19 virus has put the American way of life on hold, shutting down restaurants, cancelling sporting events, and forcing people to keep their distance from each other. If anything positive can be said about this disease, it's that it happened now in the internet age, rather than twenty five years ago, when home entertainment options were more limited and a lengthy quarantine would have been a bored-to-death sentence. Could you imagine trying to get through this ordeal without streaming, downloads, forums, or online anything? Scary.

This image from the Turrican 2 instruction booklet
gives you a pretty good idea of what this run 'n
gun shooter was all about, even if its depiction of the
lead character looks more like the T-800 as drawn
by Sergio Aragones.

These days, we've got plenty of ways to waste time without human contact. Personally, I've been entertaining myself by blowing the dust off my Playstation Classic, installing the latest version of AutoBleem, and indulging in the dozens of Amiga computer games that I missed when they were first released. As a console gamer, playing some of these feels like stepping into an alternate dimension. The original Turrican on the Genesis was dreadful, and didn't get a worthwhile sequel until Data East released Mega Turrican in 1994. However, there's a trilogy of Turrican games on the Amiga, with the first two held in fond regard by fans of the system. It's Turrican 3, essentially Mega Turrican but with some special effects removed, they didn't like so much.

There's one other thing worth mentioning... despite the system being designed with graphics and especially video games in mind, the Amiga never had a standard controller of its own. Players were expected to dig out their old single button sticks from the Atari 2600 and play games that way until the 1990s, when they were generously provided with two button controllers. By then, versus fighting games had made six button controllers the new standard on consoles, leaving the Amiga hopelessly ill equipped to handle these titles. Oh, Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat were still released for the Amiga... you just had to play them with a two button joystick, or even a single button joystick if that's all you had.

Please sir, may I have some more? Buttons?

Even the stock three button pad of the Sega Genesis had started to chafe by the end of that system's life, so you can only imagine my pure delight in having to play Amiga games a quarter of a century later. Take Turrican 2, alluded to a couple of paragraphs earlier. Your hero can jump, fire, use a short-range energy whip, curl in a ball a'la Samus Aran, release a screen-clearing wave, and unleash a desperation attack where the player bounces around the playfield like the world's deadliest pinball. 

How do you do all this with just one button? As the old joke about porcupines having sex goes, "very carefully." You jump by pressing up on the joystick, which has always felt wrong to me in every genre but fighting games. You fire your weapon with the fire button, naturally, but only rapid taps. Holding it down while standing perfectly still activates the energy whip, which can be arced around your soldier. The morph ball- er, "gyroscope" is triggered by holding down and pressing the space bar on your computer. Be sure you're holding down on the controller while you're reaching for the space bar, or else you'll fire the wave! Finally, you pull off the death blossom by pressing space and the fire button together.

Well, I'm exhausted. In all fairness, you have the option to play the Amiga version of Turrican 2 with a two button joystick, but even that hardly seems like enough. This is clearly a four button job, which is likely why Turrican fit so snugly on the Super NES and why there was an option in Mega Turrican to use the top buttons of a Sega Arcade Pad as the smart bomb. Amiga game developers didn't have a four button controller at their disposal until the CD32, damn near the end of the life of the brand, which is why far too many games on the computer feel so constricted. Could you imagine a Strider-like game where you had to press up to jump, instead of a button dedicated to that task? Could you imagine a Terra Cresta clone where splitting up your ship and dropping a smart bomb could only be accomplished by wildly spinning the stick in either direction? Amiga owners don't have to imagine it... they lived it.