[Darpey]

in reply to: First impressions #1528

Hey dosgameclub!

Darpey here – I currently have the “world record” on all four main categories on speedrun.com for this game… although to be fair, it’s not very optimized, and there aren’t many players on SRC (yet), but I’ve spent a little bit of time optimizing purchasing and level routing, as well as boss strategies. (Shout out to firefyte, the SRC supermod, who gave me many of the strategies I used for the speedruns)

I thought I’d reply on a few things mentioned above, with the obvious caveat that I probably am biased towards the game 🙂 – a childhood favorite.

First, a few things about the game, and the speedrunning.

1. The game originally had four episodes, and a fifth was later added
2. To complete all five episodes probably has a floor speedrunning time of slightly over an hour. Playing NG+ (new game plus, where you start with max weapons and the best equipment) will be closer to the hour mark, whereas the arcade mode, and normal full game, will be over that, because you won’t be able to kill enemies as fast, and you’ll have to spend time purchasing things (in full game) and going less-than-turbo speed in arcade mode (it gets hard). You’ll probably also die a few (or more) times.

My run times are:

Arcade (1 Player) 1h 23m
Arcade (2 Player) 1h 48m
New Game Plus 1h 07m
Full Game 1h 16m

All of those times could probably be improved by tens minutes, except NG+ which could maybe only be improved by 4 minutes or so

“The boss fights have been mostly boring to me so far.”
True – the majority are boring… or at least as simple as shoot until it dies. There are three actually difficult bosses which require a little bit of tactics, all at the end of episode 4.

“You suddenly get a 4-screen long text explaining to you how the beer of some space dude was stolen and that you have to recover it. ”
Tyrian definitely has many, MANY silly parts – they don’t take themselves too seriously. I don’t know if this falls in the territory of spoilers (oh well), but once you beat the game, you are given a banana ship (it’s just like it sounds) – if the computer date is near Christmas, it shifts into “Christmas Mode” and the textures are redrawn so that the bullets are some variants of candycanes and presents, and ships are Christmas themed. Many of the final bosses are facial body parts, with boogers floating around. And yes, many of the bonus levels require collecting “Ale” for… not really much of a reason.

“Also the music is quite repetetive, I think. I don’t remember thiking that when I last played Raptor, which has a much better sound theme overall.”
Once again, let me admit that I have a bias – but I LOVE Tyrian’s soundtrack. Do a YouTube search for Tyrian theme, and you’ll find a few people playing the music on electric guitars and such. But again, who doesn’t love the music from their childhood? even if it’s bad 🙂

The game definitely has its flaws though. It’s very unbalanced, particularly in the arcade mode. The First (of five) episodes is rich with the purple spheres, which upgrade your weapons and give you lives. However, after that, they’re pretty scarce, ironically as the enemies start to get more difficult. So, if you start to die, you’ll lose lives while your weapons get weaker… starting a vicious cycle. On the other hand, once you have maximum weapons, you become unbalancedly powerful.

To sum it up, I think Tyrian is a great game, especially since it’s completely free through Gog.com now – it runs great… crashing and game-ruining glitches are rare. It’s definitely worth a playthrough even for people that have never heard of it.

There are also a few hidden features in Tyrian – try typing “Destruct” in the main menu, and you’ll get into a minigame similar to scorched earth… which is really well done. There are several other “secret” things you can type as well to change difficulties or unlock various things.