The 90s were a simpler time, one where first-person shooters weren't nearly as worried about gritty realism, loot boxes or logical plots. Back in the 90s, you shot dinosaurs. And sometimes those dinosaurs carried their own guns, because why not? The good news is that Xbox One fans will soon be able to relive those glory days thanks to upcoming remastered versions of the first two Turok games.
To be clear, we said remastered, not remake, as in you're basically playing the same Nintendo 64 classics but with cleaned up visuals and whatnot. These weren't built from the ground up like the recent Shadow of the Colossus or Crash Bandicoot offerings. Expect polygons, simple textures and action that has survived the test of time pretty nicely.
The team at Nightdive recently revealed that both Turok: Dinosaur Hunter and Turok: Seeds of Evil will launch on the Xbox One this Friday, March 2. Those games hail from 1997 and 1998, respectively, an era when first-person shooters were really starting to come into their own. And while it's clear that Nightdive poured a lot of time and attention into these remasters, they didn't go so far as to make any drastic changes. What we're left with are games that likely look and play exactly how you remember, whereas you probably wouldn't feel the same way if you were to boot up the actual N64 cartridges. It's funny how nostalgia can play tricks on us.
If the Nightdive studio name is ringing some bells, you might recall that they made the news last week by announcing that their other project, the System Shock reboot, was put on hiatus. The official story is that the team is taking some time to refocus, as their vision for the project began to morph it into something other than what they had promised through crowdfunding efforts. In other words, they set out to make a modern version of System Shock and found they were instead making something totally different.
It's good news, then, that these Turok remasters were a much more straightforward undertaking. Again, projects like these require a lot of work, but probably not the kind of work required of a top-to-bottom remake. And honestly, we wouldn't have it any other way with Turok. That game is something of a time capsule, representing a very specific era in gaming. The original Turok games just wouldn't feel so absurdly perfect if they boasted modern graphics, controls and bonus features.
I especially like the listings on the Nightdive website where they promote the game the same way it would have been promoted back in the 90s, with the Turok games boasting "completely 3-D virtual worlds," "bionically engineered dinosaurs" and "14 monstrous high-tech weapons."
