By Quintin Smith on December 14th, 2010 at 5:29 pm.
Ho ho ho! Tis’ the season to be jesus christ it’s the 14th already and I haven’t started my Christmas shopping. Doomed.
Anyway, Good Old Games are having a dirty great Holiday sale and perhaps as a means of driving further interest they’ve (1) Added scrolling shooter Tyrian 2000 to their catalogue, and (2) Made it available for free. You can get it here. Tyrian 2000 was only an update of the original Tyrian which went freeware in 2004 (EDIT: Apparently Tyrian 2000 is also freeware!), so this isn’t exactly the world’s most generous offer, but it’s still a pleasant surprise. Want to see what you’re in for? Well! Have a gander at the following archive footage.
Listen to that music! Also, check out the incredibly long boss fight at 4:30. I’ve had relationships shorter than that boss fight.
14/12/2010 at 17:35 Namos says:
Carrot ships and banana spam! For the fruit and vegetable space consortium!
14/12/2010 at 17:38 Jimmy says:
Someone didn’t tell the dude in the video that [left] and [right] actually select higher levels of front and back weapons. he had them at level 1, which might explain the length of the boss fight.
14/12/2010 at 18:42 aequidens says:
Also, nobody informed him that the rear weapon can be pointed forward. I think it was with enter or slash or some key in that region.
14/12/2010 at 21:13 Arathain says:
Enter it is. Oo, that’s a bit helpful. I’d forgotten, if I ever knew.
15/12/2010 at 12:07 Pemptus says:
I believe it’s enter in-game and slash to test it out on the purchase screen.
14/12/2010 at 17:41 Wilson says:
If they’ve done something to make it work better it’s a great offer. I loved this game, and I can’t wait to play it again!
14/12/2010 at 17:42 mlaskus says:
Oh Tyrian, this game is a masterpiece. Probably the best shmup out there.
14/12/2010 at 20:36 squareking says:
Tyrian is absolutely awesome and, although it’s been free for a while, GOG’s placing of said game in the spotlight is equally awesome — but you, my friend, have a date with the latest build of MAME and a developer called CAVE. Then visit Toaplan, Takumi, Raizing and Psikyo.
14/12/2010 at 20:55 Urthman says:
Yes. Tyrian is a good game, but it’s not in the top 25 shmups of all time. It’s probably not even in the top 25 PC shmups of all time (many of which are also free).
If you like SHMUPS on PC, check out some of the links in the notes to this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJEr4d7BsdQ
And if you’re up for trying games in MAME, here’s a list of some of the best shmups ever:
http://shmups.system11.org/viewtopic.php?t=20406
As a start you could go to Kenta Cho’s webpage (http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~cs8k-cyu/index_e.html) and download rRootage, Parsec47, Tumiki Fighters, and anything else that strikes your fancy. They’re all good.
And make sure you give ChoRenSha 68K (http://www.tky.3web.ne.jp/~yosshin/my_works/download.html) a try.
And Warning Forever (http://www18.big.or.jp/~hikoza/Prod/index_e.html)
And Kamui (http://www.siterskain.com/products/data/kamui/index.html)
And one of the Shanghai Alice games (http://www16.big.or.jp/~zun/html/game.html)
14/12/2010 at 21:18 mlaskus says:
I don’t date, I conquer!
Thanks for the recommendations though.
14/12/2010 at 23:49 Casimir's Blake says:
NO, Squareking. Cave make bullet-hell nonsense. They cannot design levels. Tyrian has you flying through ships, caves and all sorts of places that must be avoided, as well as the usual collection of enemies. This gives the gameplay some purpose beyond racking up a score and surviving for 9 seconds longer, and makes the overall experience a lot more memorable.
Oh, how I loathe bullet-hell, empty-level shooters. Oh Techno Soft, how I and many others miss thee.
15/12/2010 at 01:11 Jae Armstrong says:
The best? Perhaps, but it’d have to beat down Perfect Cherry Blossom and Warning Forever and Ikaruga and an entire host of greats to get there.
Top ten, definitely. Top three, very probably.
15/12/2010 at 01:51 Urthman says:
[Spam filter ate this because it had too many great links, so I'll try breaking it up.]
Yes. Tyrian is a good game, but it’s not in the top 25 shmups of all time. It’s probably not even in the top 25 PC shmups of all time (many of which are also free).
If you like SHMUPS on PC, check out some of the links in the notes to this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJEr4d7BsdQ
And if you’re up for trying games in MAME, here’s a list of some of the best shmups ever:
http://shmups.system11.org/viewtopic.php?t=20406
15/12/2010 at 01:52 Urthman says:
As a start you could go to Kenta Cho’s webpage (http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~cs8k-cyu/index_e.html) and download rRootage, Parsec47, Tumiki Fighters, and anything else that strikes your fancy. They’re all good.
And make sure you give ChoRenSha 68K (http://www.tky.3web.ne.jp/~yosshin/my_works/download.html) a try.
And Warning Forever (http://www18.big.or.jp/~hikoza/Prod/index_e.html)
And Kamui (http://www.siterskain.com/products/data/kamui/index.html)
And one of the Shanghai Alice games (http://www16.big.or.jp/~zun/html/game.html)
15/12/2010 at 07:39 mlaskus says:
@Urthman
I realize that there are thousands of Japanese shmups out there, but I place Tyrian well above them all because I hate bullet hell.
15/12/2010 at 18:27 squareking says:
Yeah, bullet hell’s not for everyone. We don’t all like bleeding eyeballs. So-called ‘euroshmups’ (Tyrian, Jets & Guns, etc) and caravan-style shooters are awesome if you like the mechanic but want to actually beat the game without dogged practice. :) Honestly though, early Raizing titles like Battle Garegga and Dimahoo might be easier to pick up. The Gradius and R-Type series are wonderful, too.
14/12/2010 at 17:43 Bluebreaker says:
Tyrian 2000 has been freeware since 2004.
14/12/2010 at 17:47 EALouise says:
Oh wow, weirdness. The other day I was reminiscing about a shareware scrolly-shooty game I got off a PC Gamer disc. I thought it was awesome, but I completely forgot it’s name.
Turns out it was Tyrian.
14/12/2010 at 17:49 Mr Wibble says:
Worth it for the soundtrack alone.
14/12/2010 at 19:29 Wulf says:
This is a truth.
Well, that and the absurdity. How about 25% of the way in the developers decide they simply don’t care about story any more and it goes absolutely bonkers in that special sort of Fahrenheit way that I find really funny and charming.
One of the best things about Tyrian really was that it wasn’t serious business, many scrolling shooters at the time were serious business, coming out of Japan and all, which was serious business-land for gaming at the time (today that’s America, it appears). Tyrian was a true breath of fresh air by comparison. As has already been pointed out, it had fruit & veg ships.
It’s worth playing even today, if you can handle the difficulty. It’s still as bonkers as the day it was released. To be honest, I think part of the reason I’m so fed up with gaming currently is because whilst I like many modern ideas, I tend to think that games have too high of an opinion of themselves, they take themselves too seriously. That even counts for stuff like World of Warcraft, despite its cartoony demeanour and pop-culture references (you can be silly without those!), it still tends to have a high opinion of itself, its continuity, and its lore. I think this is why I like TF2 by comparison though.
I’m just rambling now though.
In short: Play Tyrian, it looks normal at the start, but you’ll soon see just how utterly bonzo it gets. It’s like watching the descent into insanity o the developers. Brilliant stuff. Anyone who’s played it will know what I’m talking about (I hope).
14/12/2010 at 20:07 mlaskus says:
I have to agree, the game is absolutely, positively bonkers.
14/12/2010 at 20:39 Jimmy says:
Speaking of pop culture references,
[SPOILER]
the single player storyline in Tyrian revolves around Trent Reznor
[/SPOILER]
14/12/2010 at 23:58 Wulf says:
I didn’t say that they were necessarily a bad thing, but they can be when a supposedly serious game is absolutely drowned in them, as is the case with World of Warcraft. Since Tyrian is obviously entirely silly, and it has no reservations about being silly, then anything goes.
15/12/2010 at 13:27 khamul says:
The soundtrack is available as part of the package from GOG, handily converted into MP3 for your personal-media-device convenience. So yes, WIN.
I’m listening to it now, and it’s like being thirteen again, only in a good way.
14/12/2010 at 17:50 Ashen says:
Like it’s been mentioned already, Tyrian has been freeware for quite a while. It also spawned OpenTyrian which is a port for most platforms you can think of.
14/12/2010 at 17:53 mlaskus says:
It got ported even to Android. Great for some shooty fun on the go.
14/12/2010 at 17:55 Dominic White says:
I’ve got the iPhone version. It works shockingly well on a touchscreen. Maybe not quite as good as mouse control, but better than keyboard.
14/12/2010 at 17:52 Navagon says:
Brings back memories of Super SWIV and other such SNES SHUMPS.
14/12/2010 at 18:00 PiMan says:
Odd – that picture at the top looks like Xenon 2 to me… Are they basically the same game?
14/12/2010 at 18:04 Dominic White says:
Similar aesthetics, but almost completely different games.
14/12/2010 at 18:05 Arathain says:
I like Tyrian. I shall download it again.
14/12/2010 at 18:09 Delusibeta says:
In other news, Humble Indie Bundle 2 went live an hour ago. http://www.humblebundle.com/
14/12/2010 at 18:31 Paul says:
Just gave 16 bucks. Thanks for the echo!
14/12/2010 at 18:10 djbriandamage says:
This game totally rocks. I’ve sunk dozens of hours into this thing. This is the shmup epitomized. Props to GOG for releasing this with a 130MB soundtrack.
I love it so much I take it with me. If you have a means of running homebrew software on your Nintendo DS you need to check out this port: http://vespenegas.com/tyrian.html
14/12/2010 at 18:19 Access says:
A classic of it’s genre for sure. Sadly, I’ve yet to see a game in a similar style with such deep customization as Tyrian.
14/12/2010 at 19:00 Dominic White says:
Jets N’ Guns is basically the only modern successor to Tyrians style. http://jng.rakeingrass.com/ – Very expensive on the official site, but it may be cheaper elsewhere.
14/12/2010 at 21:35 Evil Timmy says:
Does anyone have any similar recommendations? I’ve played the crap out of Tyrian/2000, beaten Jets and Guns dozens of times, even demolished the frequently brutal Raptor: Call of the Shadows (published by Apogee back in the day), but I want more. I’m not a big fan of the bullet hell-type SHMUPS, I vastly prefer this particular style, where you earn cash for taking out enemies/completing objectives, use that to buy upgrades, then carefully pick your loadout for the mission to deal with the enemies therein.
14/12/2010 at 23:54 Casimir's Blake says:
Yeah it’s nice when a shmup actually takes you places, right? Rather than utterly lazy empty screens full of enemies and bullets with, at best, a scrolling background with no obstacles. It is a particularly frustrating “minimalist” take on the genre, and sucks if you’re after “games as experiences”, not “games as challenges”.
15/12/2010 at 08:23 Spacewalk says:
Probably the only closest thing that you’ll get is the trial version of Fantasy Zone 2 DX and only then if you can get it to run (being non-Unicode and all that. Google for help on running Japanese language games on your Windows, there are guides everywhere for this). If you can you’re in for a short treat. Controls are arrows for movement, Z and X for shot and bomb and space for insert coin and enter to start (it’s an emulation you see). F1 for configuration, controls are on the third tab if memory serves.
Probably the only downer is that it’s a trial version so it’s quite short, times out before the second boss but depending on stuff you do there’s two different version of him.
14/12/2010 at 18:24 blah says:
Anything that Alexander Brandon was involved with must be played/listened to! XD
14/12/2010 at 18:33 Caleb367 says:
Tyrian’s one of the awesomest shooters ever made, period. In my opinion, only Jets’n'Guns Gold ever got close. And it too had a kickass soundtrack XD
14/12/2010 at 18:54 Plopsworth says:
Tyrian is a classic. I played the shareware version to death back in the day. The satisfying bubble-wrap like ability to blow pieces of the level apart, the varying levels, lovely art style with parallax scrolling scenery, the superb synth music and the fact that it isn’t a “bullet hell” type game made it great.
Watching the video I groaned that the player didn’t shoot the giant boulder at 2:02. I haven’t played the game in many years, yet I still immediately remembered the hidden bonuses.
14/12/2010 at 19:08 ErikM says:
Oh man.. I remember playing this 2 player when I was a wee one. Huddling close together by the keyboard yelling for the queue when those special bonus orbs came. Good times.
14/12/2010 at 19:26 Nick says:
Tyrian really is wonderful.
14/12/2010 at 19:26 noom says:
Tyrian is incredible.
One of the most amazing things about Tyrian, is there an entire extra game hidden in it if you have the right code (I can’t remember it, but it can no doubt be Googled) and that extra game was ALSO amazing.
14/12/2010 at 19:28 Nick says:
Was that the worms style game?
14/12/2010 at 19:32 noom says:
http://telcontar.net/Misc/vacant/Tyrian_Destruct.png
I looked it up. The code is DESTRUCT. It could be described as Worms style, aye. Somewhere between that and Scorched Earth mebbe.
EDIT
Intended as reply to above comment, obv.
14/12/2010 at 20:38 Nick says:
Yeah thats the one I was thinking of, it was great fun. Tyrian was one of the few shareware games I actually bought the full version of back in the day, I liked it that much.
14/12/2010 at 19:33 Rane2k says:
Great game! I played this a lot back in the day. :-)
As somebody mentioned before, the boss fight takes so long because the guy took a not-so-good primary weapon, didn´t upgrade it and didn´t switch the mode of his secondary weapon (the green stuff) to shoot more forwards (can be switched in-flight for different situations). :-)
Also, type “destruct” (minus quotes) in the main menu for a sub-game, there´s also a few other secret arcade modes, each with a separate secret code (TECHNO was one of them I think, for those of you who don´t care about the upgrade buying system ^^)
14/12/2010 at 19:36 Rane2k says:
Damn, ninjaed on the code by a minute. :-)
(Not going to edit this in my old post, as it will get eaten by the reply system whenever I edit.)
very good web!
14/12/2010 at 19:46 Navagon says:
TARDSTORE: ACCEPTING PYAPAL PYAMENTS SINCE 1873!
14/12/2010 at 19:57 Mist says:
Eh, successful marketing trick =). Downloaded the game and then remembered that I had transferred some funds to my Paypal account in order to buy Planescape Torment, but hadn’t actually bought it yet. Fixed now =)
14/12/2010 at 20:23 lafinass says:
THANK YOU!
I’ve been trying to remember the name of this game for years.
14/12/2010 at 20:25 noobnob says:
This year’s Christmas sale completely dwarfs last year’s offerings. If I recall, it was just a handful of games on the sale, and now GOG has almost 300 games with up to 50% discount! It’s great to see how it has grown so much in these two years.
14/12/2010 at 20:31 Neil says:
I actually didn’t play any Tyrian games, but I did play one from Epic MegaGames called Overkill that had a very similar look: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5gwPzefurs
14/12/2010 at 20:36 Collic says:
Trivia time : many of the ships in AI war are old Tyrian sprites. That boss is the raid starship model :)
I didn’t play this at the time, but it looks fun enough. I’ll give it a go.
14/12/2010 at 21:39 8-bit says:
I started the game up and it said detected Christmas. activate Christmas? y/n well I don’t know what its going on about so I just press y and it gives the game a bit of a Christmas makeover. Does anyone know if the game actually checks the clock on your computer or will it do that at any time of the year?
14/12/2010 at 22:24 Vykromod says:
It checks the clock. I believe that Christmas is detected whenever you start the game in December.
14/12/2010 at 23:11 pupsikaso says:
Tohou this ain’t, but it looks and sounds splendid!
15/12/2010 at 01:05 Will Tomas says:
forking shoes.
15/12/2010 at 01:29 Rune says:
It was mentioned, but no link. Here is OpenTyrian for Android. It works pretty well with the touch screen as long as you set the guns to auto fire. Otherwise it gets a bit tiring to hold down the fire button. I have a Samsung Galaxy Spica, and it works pretty well, although with some slowdown occasionally.
http://www.appbrain.com/app/opentyrian/com.googlecode.opentyrian#
15/12/2010 at 01:31 belstaff says:
thanks for share with us
15/12/2010 at 02:48 Sic says:
Fuck yeah, Tyrian!
15/12/2010 at 06:21 Antlerbot says:
Tyrian was good, though I always preferred Raptor: Call of the Shadows. Less space-y, more awesome fighter jet-y. Yes.
15/12/2010 at 08:34 Spacewalk says:
INTENSE SERIOUS FUN!
I remember being absolutely mad about Tyrian that I could see it whenever I closed my eyes. It’s probably because I was so into Xanac. That almost never happens these days, the last one was Mount & Blade which is about as far away from spaceships in space that you can get and then it’s usually nightmares about sending ten troops against an army of a hundred and sixty and none of us have horses.
15/12/2010 at 12:27 Hmm-Hmm. says:
Tyrian, yeah, I enjoyed that game a great deal. A game which deserves more attention.
15/12/2010 at 16:36 kulak says:
I have waited so long for this game to resurface into my memory hole.
good times.
best scrolling space shooter EVAR.
15/12/2010 at 23:10 ShadowSilver03 says:
Am I the only one who has this game on their HTC Hero via the Android market?
16/12/2010 at 08:53 Blob says:
I think a Demo for this was included with Jazz Jackrabbit. I loved it so much, it was the next game I bought. God, this brings back memories….
16/12/2010 at 12:53 stuntaneous says:
This is one of a handful of old, awesome games I loved but to date never found or remembered the name of. This post has made my fricken day!