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Message: 6797
Author: jetsetdanny
Date: 09/03/2015
Subject: "Terry the Turtle" - Daniel's review
"Terry the Turtle" is a 2013 JSW64 HL12;W game by Jammajup (Purple Unicorn Software). It was released in three versions of varying difficulty level:
- Yellow ( Normal );
- Cyan (Intermediate);
- Red (Hard).
A Special Edition called "Terry The Turtle - Vektor" was released some time after the original edition.
The home page of the game is at http://www.jammajup.co.uk/purple-unicorn-software.html.
It is the second JSW game by Purple Unicorn Software, after "Pip the Pipistrelle" (see message 6762), and yet another example of a "Willy" game without Willy, with a little turtle as protagonist instead. The story (quoting from the text file) is that "after a major hurricane the turtles hatch to find the run across the beach to the ocean even more difficult as the whole island has been transformed by the bad weather". Consequently, Terry "has quite an adventure on his way to deep sea".
The game is very linear, it's basically a progressive journey from the starting point to the very end: the deep sea, with some minor detours. There are many one-way exits along the way, so it is usually impossible to move back more than a few rooms to the earlier stages of the game (in one of the variants, I can't remember which one off the top of my head, there is a teleporter which allows you to go back quite a way, but not to the very beginning). There are many rooms with no items, which you simply pass, either with some difficulty (avoiding guardians and other challenges) or very relaxedly, sightseeing, as it were. This long journey (through 128 rooms in total) was strongly evocative of the DrUnKeN mAsTeR's "Bizarre" for me.
Playing as Terry the Turtle, who is just 5 pixels tall, has a different feel than operating Willy with his 16 pixels. It's quite nice, actually, easier, I guess.
The graphics are very atmospheric, with the Vektor version having a slightly weird - mechanical? - feel to it (now that I think about it, because it was actually the first version I played). The deep sea and U-852 screens remind me of Herve Ast's "Willy on a Transatlantic Cruise". The concept of having thematic clusters of rooms with similar graphics - Beach, Subterranean Ruins, Fungi Caves, Ancient Greece Zone, Hades, Rana Zone and the Wreck of U-852 - works very well and deserves high praise, IMO. The thematic clusters reminded me especially of the games by Herve Ast and Stuart J. Hill (perhaps because of some affinity in the graphical department, which I seem to perceive, but I couldn't define precisely). This is a very positive association, of course.
Some of the rooms you encounter along the way are tributes to other video games. A very nice touch, they are. These tributes are different in each variant of the game, which makes playing all of the variants more interesting.
The sound is innovative, different from all other released games. The title screen sound (not really music) is, to quote from the text file, "a very simple military style ditty with a heart beat that flat-lines". The in-game sound, in turn, is "Terry's fast little heart beat".
The game does not
have a conventional JSW ending. Personally, I am not very fond of this - I
would prefer every game to have a definitive ending point evidenced by reaching the "toilet" (whatever it may actually represent due to having
been edited). However, as the author indicates, "flashing Terry Tokens
award lives but do not have to be collected to complete the
game,you just have get Terry to deep water".
Consequently, none of the versions of the game is toilet-completable or Maria-completable.
The Red version is the only one which is item-completable (the player is able to collect all of the items in the game).
The Yellow version has 157 items ("turtle tokens"), of which 85 can be collected.
81 items can be collected without a loss of life. 4 more items can be collected if you deliberately sacrifice one life in the room "U-852 Secret Load & Kill Screen".
The items impossible to collect are:
- 1 item in the room "Hidden Chamber" (unreachable);
- 1 item in the room "atrocious" (unreachable);
- 8 items in the cluster of rooms: "Maze Of The Minotaur" [technical room number 52], "Maze Of The Minotaur" [technical room number 53], "The Drink Of Dionysus" and "The Minotaur" (the upper left item) - in this version of the game, most of the game map in this cluster of rooms is a trap (you cannot get out of it if you go to the left side of "Maze Of The Minotaur" [52] or drop down into the central part of "Maze Of The Minotaur" [53] or exit the latter room downwards in the lower right corner).
- 62 items in the room "U-852 Secret Load & Kill Screen" (unreachable).
The Cyan version has 73 items, of which 61 can be collected, all without a loss of life.
The items impossible to collect are:
- 1 item in the room "Hidden Chamber" (unreachable);
- 1 item in the room "atrocious" (unreachable);
- 10 items in the room "U-852 Secret Load & Kill Screen" (unreachable).
The Yellow version has 48 items, all of which can be collected.
The Vector version has 135 items, of which 72 can be collected. This is actually more than the number of items indicated to collect on the game screen (68).
68 items can be collected without a loss of life. 4 more items can be collected if you deliberately sacrifice one life in the room "U-852 SECRET LOAD & KILL SCREEN".
The items impossible to collect are:
- 1 item (either one) in the room "STYX - THE RIVER OF HATE" - when you are falling down from "DESCENTION", you can collect either one or the other item; you cannot collect them both, because they are two blocks apart and there is no way to go back and fall down again in order to collect the second item.
- 62 items in the room "U-852 SECRET LOAD & KILL SCREEN" (unreachable).
I hope the above information is correct. It is the result of my analysis and recording of the game for the RZX Archive (you can download the walkthroughs at http://rzxarchive.co.uk/t.php#terrytheturtle). However, if you find any errors, please let me know!
The author of the game explains, "if you are good at these types of games and constantly use the emulator save state you can collect so many lives you can slow down or even crash the game!" Indeed, this is a serious problem and in order to eliminate it I deliberately killed Terry many times during each walkthrough, so as not to have more than 28 lives at any point in the game.
You start out with 7 lives which are visible on the screen as little turtles. As you gain extra lives, 4 more become visible, just like the original 7. The next 3 extra lives are not marked in any visible way, and then with the 15th life the leftmost little turtle at the bottom of the screen, symbolising a life, starts to flicker. Then, with the consecutive extra lives, the next turtles at the bottom of the screen start to flicker. When the number of lives exceeds 28, it affects the display of the room names (the letters disappear starting with the leftmost one; the effect is irreversible - even if the number of your lives goes down below 28 again, the affected letters in room names in new rooms you enter are not visible). With even more lives the game is slowed down or it can crash or become unplayable in some other way (e.g. because of "rogue" cells blocking your way).
This is why the elimination of the excessive number of lives had to take place, much as I dislike serial suicides.
My walkthroughs were recorded using the Rollback feature of the ZX Spin emulator. Since they are intended to be smooth and efficient solutions to the game, I did not enter the rooms which were not necessary to complete it, as is the case of "East Of Tower" in the Red version. An exception to this rule is the teleporter tour of the sequence of locations otherwise inaccessible during the gameplay at the end of the Yellow version walkthrough.
I spent a good several hours (more than a dozen, perhaps) exploring and then recording the various versions of "Terry the Turtle" (I had to re-record some portions due to having skipped some items), repeating little Terry's epic journey to the deep sea a few times. Although somewhat repetitive, it was a time spent very enjoyably, indeed - an atmospheric, refreshing stroll through a new JSW game.
Well done, Purple Unicorn - we want more from you! :-)
Daniel
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