Bossmonsters and BPMs

January 8, 2011 1:13 AM

Open Tyrian OpenTyrian is a port of the DOS shoot-em-up Tyrian (previously). The port uses SDL, making it easily cross-platform. Builds are available for Windows and Mac OS X [... and] for Android, Amiga, Dingoo, Dreamcast, DS, GameCube, Gizmondo, GP2X, GP32, Nokia Internet Tablets, PSP, PS3 Linux, Symbian, Wii, and Wiz
posted by kid ichorous (21 comments total)

The soundtrack alone (warning: autoplay) could make a decent FPP. What a great game.

Fun fact: the Tyrian logo is an ambigram!

Tyrian 2000, plus the soundtrack, is available for free (along with a few other games, including Beneath a Steel Sky) for new users at GoG.com.
posted by lumensimus at 1:54 AM on January 8, 2011 [2 favorites]

Hardcore Gaming 101 has a lovely writeup on the game, the abandoned Game Boy Color port, and its debt to Zanac.
posted by lumensimus at 2:03 AM on January 8, 2011 [2 favorites]

I was literally washing dishes a few days ago, thinking to myself "Someone should really do a port of Tyrian to modern OSes. It's one of the best shooters, if not game of any kind. Man do I love some Tyrian."

Can't wait to try this out.
posted by arcolz at 2:06 AM on January 8, 2011 [1 favorite]

There was a place in one of the asteroid levels where you could sit behind a rock and shoot all the projectiles coming out of a turret – one of the moments where your ship stops flying to fight a short set piece. Each projectile was worth about ten credits or similar; whatever the actual figure, it was a tiny amount in the game's economy. My young self found a sweet spot behind a rock where your weaponry could destroy the projectiles but not the turret itself, so you could sit there and oh-so-slowly rack up credits to spend on your ship, ten credits at a time. When I found this I rested a book on the spacebar and then left the game alone while I had dinner and did my homework. I came back to an astronomical amount of money, and felt like I had earned every penny through space cunning or something.

I hope that exploit is in the new version.
posted by Cantdosleepy at 2:27 AM on January 8, 2011 [4 favorites]

The original also works perfectly with DOSBox on quite modest Windows machines, emulating whichever sound card (and thus instrument set) you please.
posted by lumensimus at 2:42 AM on January 8, 2011

Long ago Tyrian's creator hung around the Compuserve video game forums, where he was very accessible. I wonder what he's up to these days.
posted by JHarris at 3:10 AM on January 8, 2011

Cool, thanks for posting this! I used to play Tyrian for hours and hours. It was one of the first games I actually paid money for, IIRC.

One odd thing: On my copy of Win7/32, the keyboard options wouldn't let me choose S for anything. After I edited tyrian.cfg and put it in, the keystroke would register each time I hit the key, but it didn't repeat when held down.

It's not a big deal and I'm sure I'll get many hours of fun out of the game, but I thought I'd mention it in case anybody else was seeing it.
posted by Zimboe Metamonkey at 3:31 AM on January 8, 2011

Works great on Android, but can't for the life of me figure out how to install it on Linux. :\
posted by cthuljew at 3:34 AM on January 8, 2011

Funnily enough, GOG.com released Turian 2000 a week or two back on their site for free.
posted by flatluigi at 4:20 AM on January 8, 2011

Gizmondo? Did I read that right?
posted by LSK at 6:19 AM on January 8, 2011

that is a pretty great soundtrack! maybe I will try out the game. Thanks, Kid Ichorous! Thachorous!
posted by rebent at 7:12 AM on January 8, 2011

Um, ok. I used to play this game as a child, on my dad's PC.
posted by rebent at 7:13 AM on January 8, 2011

Works great on Android, but can't for the life of me figure out how to install it on Linux. :\

Package names will depend on your distribution, but for Ubuntu:
sudo apt-get mercurial libsdl-net1.2-dev
hg clone https://opentyrian.googlecode.com/hg/ opentyrian
cd opentyrian
make release

Move the resulting opentyrian binary to where you downloaded and unzipped the data files, then run ./opentyrian.
posted by kmz at 7:43 AM on January 8, 2011

For those of us not hip to the nuances of schmup evolution, why is Tyrian particularly loved? The actual gameplay feels about like Xevious, but Tyrian is some 12 years later. Is the ship configuration and upgrades what makes it compelling? The story mode?

(If you can't figure out how to quickly run it in Windows: get the exe, get the data files, unpack the datafiles in the same directory as the .exe, and run. No subdirs. Also configure the scaler to hq4x to play at a reasonable screen size.)
posted by Nelson at 8:03 AM on January 8, 2011

A bit back I was having a nostalgia moment of playing this game on my grandmother's terrible old PC. Thanks to Ask, I actually found out it was Tyrian, too.
posted by Askiba at 9:53 AM on January 8, 2011

My favorite part of the game was the Scorched Earth clone that was available as a minigame. To try it out, type destruct at the main screen... works on the OS X build, at least.
posted by RyanAdams at 10:52 AM on January 8, 2011

For those of us not hip to the nuances of schmup evolution, why is Tyrian particularly loved? The actual gameplay feels about like Xevious, but Tyrian is some 12 years later. Is the ship configuration and upgrades what makes it compelling? The story mode?

I remember playing the shareware version soon after it first came out (mid-'90s) and loving it. From memory it had the highest production standards by far of any shmup available on the PC at the time. It was a lot of fun to mess around with the ship configuration and there was a huge range of unlockable stuff, like a mode where your ship turns into a carrot and fires fruit and vegetables and the scorched earth clone RyanAdams mentioned.

These days hardcore shmup fans would probably deride it as a "euroshmup" because of things like the shop and the player shield, which are regarded as gameplay crutches used to hide defects like poor level design and undodgeable bullet patterns, but back then euroshmups were all the Western PC gamer had.
posted by A Thousand Baited Hooks at 5:20 PM on January 8, 2011 [1 favorite]

Hell yes. Tyrian is easily my favorite shooter. I've played through the full campaign at least seven or eight times, and it's great fun every time, especially if (on the old version, in DOSbox) you could get the settings just right for a buttery-smooth framerate.

To Nelson: I'd say that the huge amount of variation in both level design and weapons makes this the standout. Plot, meh (though there is a ton of it) - it's all about dozens of different weapons and ships, multiple paths, secret levels, secret abilities... it's not so much about the twitch skill as, like an RPG, picking the right tools for the job, budgeting your money, playing smart. Japanese shmup fans will always prefer the Ikaruga/Dodonpachi school of manic bullet patterns and tiny hitboxes - this was about building and powering up to lay waste to every new planet, fleet, or orbital city that got in your way.
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 12:13 AM on January 9, 2011 [1 favorite]

Oh yeah, I posted on this stuff hell of years ago. Good times.
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 12:23 AM on January 9, 2011

OMG can't wait to try this! I totally missed handing in a grade 11 science report because of this game.
posted by Theta States at 9:48 AM on January 10, 2011

Yep I suck at these kinds of games as much as I ever did. Good use of several hours though.
posted by Mitheral at 12:40 PM on January 16, 2011