It’s not often you see PC assets getting scrapped for those that were compressed to fit on a cartridge with a mammoth storage size of 8 megabytes, but that’s precisely what’s just happened to the Turok remaster.
In a patch issued earlier today, Night Dive Studios — which recently remastered the original System Shock, and is working on a remaster of the second Turok game — revealed that all the original PC sounds in the re-release of Turok: Dinosaur Hunter have been replaced with their Nintendo 64 compatriots.
“Replaced all sounds of the game with the N64 version of the game. Quality is actually significantly better than the original 1997 PC port,” the notes read. It’s interesting given that the soundtrack on the N64 version had to be heavily compressed so the game could fit on Nintendo’s cartridge. David Dinstbier, the project manager on Turok, told IGN back in 1997 that the studio had compressed everything and that they had to “create texture maps that use less memory than large texture maps”.
“We found that initially we were a little bit greedy, and we made every model more detailed than we needed it to be, every texture map more detailed than we needed it to be, but as we started burning cartridges, we went through a learning curve during the course of the project.”
Returning to the remaster, other fixes today include optimisations to GPU memory usage, cleaner implementation of the bloom post-processing effect, as well as the neat ability to blow enemies away while in their death state. I’ve discovered in my time with the game — which you can read more about tomorrow — that some enemies will respawn, and blowing them off a cliff helps to prevent that.
The second update hadn’t been released through Good Old Games at the time of writing, although it should be released within the next 24-48 hours (if not already). Turok’s available now through Steam and GOG for $28.37, or approximately 2.57% of the cost of an Oculus Rift.
Comments
10 responses to “Turok Remaster Dumps Original PC Sounds With N64 Versions Because They’re Better”
30 bucks for Turok is a bit of an ask, even in.light of the oculus price.
It’s the same price that I got a second hand version of it for back in 1999, haha.
Are we really going to quote game prices as a percentage of how much the Rift costs?
If you were aiming for funny, you missed.
What a weird thing to criticise? It’s a topical comment. Perhaps Kotaku could hire you as the grand wizard of humour moderation?
Fair point. I guess I’m just over Oculus references today. Just hope it doesn’t become a running gag.
It won’t, but the Oculus prices only came out today. And I’ve only gone for the one gag today 🙁 surely I’m allowed one!
Yeah, sorry for the “hot take.” I’ve kinda sucked at that lately.
I would like to see this as the standard price comparison in the future. Just like bananas for size comparisons and gauging whether a PC is good by if it can run Crysis.
Looks like @alexwalkers attempt at comedy has created a bit of a…rift.
Great Dad joke.