Amstrad - Pretty good, lots of shading, everything is quite clear

C64 - very high quality, great shading, brilliant floor textures

Spectrum - inconsistent, many floor textures are blocky and un-detailed, not much shading to speak of, some pretty good work for all the bosses though.

Amstrad - Amazing work, must be some of the best use of colour in any Amstrad game, It's a pity so few programmers took the time to make games specificaly for the CPC instead of just porting the Spectrum version, just looking at Turrican is a testament to what the machine was capable of

C64 - Colour is a bit inconsistent, some later levels can look a bit washed-out and bland whilst others look extremely good, the ground on the first few levels is particularly noteworthy for it's excellence

Spectrum - Colours are quite garish, but for the most part do the job quite nicely, there seems to be next to no colour clash! the programmers must have put a hell of a lot of work making the graphics work well with the Spectrums limitations

Amstrad - animation doesn't look too bad, though is very crude in comparison the the C64 version

C64 - very well animated, lots of frames, very smooth

Spectrum - animation is passable, not bad but nothing special

Amstrad - good speed, pretty smooth too, though not as fast or smooth as the C64 version, still very impressive

C64 - Amazingly fast and smooth for a game with multi-directional scrolling, extremely impressive

Spectrum - not quite as fast or smooth as the Amstrad version

Amstrad - The Amstrad has no music, only sound fx

C64 - really, really good menu screen music (taken from the Transformers movie soundtrack) most levels are sound fx only, excluding the shoot-em-up style levels which also have pretty high quality music.

Spectrum - no music, only sound fx

Amstrad - alright, they do a pretty good job

C64 - very good, the guns sound stronger and the sound fx generally fit better than any of the other versions

Spectrum - bad, weapons sound unnatural and weak

Amstrad - runs at a pretty good speed, though nowhere near the level of the C64 version, the controls aren't as responsive either, the level designs seem to be complete for the most part

C64 - fast fluid, Action packed, lots of stuff on screen at once, very responsive controls

Spectrum - slower paced, deliberately controled, seems to still work at this speed due to the explorative nature of the levels, the level designs seem complete

Turrican was made and designed for the Commodore and it really shows, without hardware scrolling the other machines struggle to keep the game running at a respectable pace, they lose a lot of the adrenaline fueled gameplay of the original, and a lot of the level bosses look small and weak in comparison, not to say the other versions are without merit, in fact the opposite is the truth, both the Amstrad and Spectrum versions are still amazingly good games, which goes to show how great the source material must have been in the first place.

I don't know whats more impressive the fact that the C64 programmers made a game so fast and slick or the fact that the Amstrad and Spectrum programmers got the game running as well as they did without hardware scrolling, the spectrum programmers also had to deal with working around colour clash on top of getting the game running at an adequake speed.

all versions of Turrican are amazing technical achievements for their respective machines.