What can we say about the TG-16? Well, it was originally released in Japan as the PC Engine on October 30, 1987, by NEC and Hudson Soft, almost exactly one year before the launch of the Sega Genesis. It launched in North America about two years later and was readily available in Europe through imports. It sold very well in Japan, outselling the Genesis, but was crushed in the rest of the world by both Nintendo and Sega. There was even a CD attachment, called the TurboGrafx-CD, the first for any home console.
But, in the end, it dropped to fourth place behind the Genesis, NES, and SNES in the worldwide charts, dooming it to obscurity with general public. Still, the system was not without its quality titles, which we will look back on in this series.
Here is a list of titles that I will take a closer look at:
Super Air Zonk, Gate of Thunder, Soldier Blade, Super Star Soldier, Blazing Lasers, Bonk's Adventure, Bomberman '93, Military Madness, Ninja Spirit, R-Type, Splatterhouse, Alien Crush, Devil Crush, Legendary Axe, Chew Man Fu, Parasol Stars, Ys I & II, Ys III, Lords of Thunder, Dracula X: Rondo of Blood, Dead Moon, Aero Blasters, Magical Chase, Neutopia, Time Cruise, and maybe a few others.
After I play through these games, I'll probably end with a discussion on how these titles hold up to similar games on the SNES and the Genesis. Maybe a little bit of discussion on graphics and sound as well, probably just gameplay for the most part though.
>What can we say about the TG-16?
That it's spelled TurboGrafx16?
o_-
I really have little experience with the console and its games. I've played only a handful.
Weltall Wrote:That it's spelled TurboGrafx16?
That's just wrong on so many levels.
But not nearly as many levels as the TurboDuo's infamous
Johnny Turbo advertising campaign!
You want suggestions, right? Should I assume that you can find Turbo CD games? I've managed to find a lot of them online, but they're not the most common games. Try whichever of these you can find. :)
Many of the better, and more technically impressive, games are on CD. This is not a comprehensive list, I could mention dozens more if you're interested. :)
(JP) means an import only title. Others have US versions. TG16 games were not officially released in Europe.
I'd consider the Castlevania games platformers, not action, so that's where I'm putting them.
HuCard Games
--
Pinball: Alien Crush, Devil Crush, Necromancer (JP)
Arcade: Parasol Stars: The Story Of Bubble Bobble III
Platformers: J.J & Jeff (US)/ Kato & Ken (JP), Tiger Road, Bonk's Adventure, Bonk's Revenge, Bonk III: Bonk's Big Adventure, Keith Courage in Alpha Zones, Impossamole, Fushigi ni Yume no Alice (JP), Jackie Chan's Action Kung-Fu, New Adventure Island, Ninja Ryukenden (Ninja Gaiden) (JP), Samurai Ghost, Shinobi (JP), Son Son II (JP, but has English patch)
Action: Operation Wolf (JP), Bloody Wolf, Shockman, Kaizou Choujin Shubibinman I (JP) (Shockman is the second game in this series, and the only one released in the US), China Warrior, Battle Lode Runner (JP), Dragon Egg! (JP), Pac-Land, Ghost Manor, The Legendary Axe, Legendary Axe II, Maerchen Maze (JP), Photograph Boy (JP, but has translation patch; unique game, play it (translated only)!), Splatterhouse
Action-RPG: Dungeon Explorer, Cadash, Dragon's Curse (aka Wonder Boy in Monster Land (Monster World 2) on the SMS), Neutopia, Neutopia II, Valkyrie no Densetsu (JP) (great arcade port, play this!), The Tower of Druaga (JP, but has translation patch)
Shmups: R-Type (also has JP only CD version), Raiden (also has JP only CD version), Gradius (JP), Down Load (JP), Cyber Core, Side Arms (also has JP only CD version), Blazing Lazers, Super Star Soldier, Final Soldier (JP), Soldier Blade, Air Zonk, Aero Blasters, Magical Chase (US version is better), W-Ring: The Double Rings (JP), Rabio Lepus Special (JP), Atomic Robo Kid Special (JP), Galaga '90
Other Action and Puzzle: Bomberman, Bomberman '93, Bomberman '94 (JP) (Mega Bomberman on the Genesis is a port of this game), Cratermaze, Chu Man Fu, Skweek (JP), Somer Assault
Racing/Racing Action: Victory Run, Special Criminal Investigation (JP), Out Run (JP), Moto Roader, Moto Roader II (JP), Power Drift (JP), Super Chase H.Q., Final Lap Twin
Fighting: Street Fighter II': Champion Edition (JP)
Strategy: Military Madness
Rail Shooter: Space Harrier, After Burner (JP)
CD Games
--
Platform: Akamajou Dracula X: Chi no Rondo (JP) (Castlevania Dracula X: Rondo of Blood), Fausette Amour, Ninja Action Kaze Kiri (JP) (great game), Shape Shifter (the TCD's Metroidvania pretty much), Renny Blaster (JP), Valis II, Valis III, Valis (JP), Valis IV (JP), Kaizou Choujin Shubibinman III-Ikai (JP), Jim Power in Mutant Planet (JP but all in English)
Action-RPG or Action-Adventure: The Dynastic Hero, Dungeon Explorer II, Ys Books I & II, Ys Book III, Xak III (JP, but has translation patch), Ys IV (JP, but has translation patch), Exile, Exile: Wicked Phenomenon, Gotzendeiner (JP) (untranslated, but it's not no script or anything, ingame, and no menus either really, so it's fully playable. Unique game too, worth playing.). If untranslated games are okay also try Basted!, Efera & Jiliora, maybe Magicoal
Adventure: Beyond Shadowgate
RPG: Dragon Slayer, Cosmic Fantasy 2
Shmup: Nexzr (JP) (note that this game has two versions, Nexzr and Nexzr Special. Special adds timed modes for score competition, but removes the intro and ending cutscenes from the main story mode, so there's no plot. Either way though it's one of the system's two or three best shmups.), Image Fight II (JP) (has issues in Ootake, maybe don't bother unless you use Magic Engine), Forgotten Worlds, Monster Lair, Syd Mead's Terraforming, Super Darius (JP), Super Darius II (JP), Spriggan (JP), Lords of Thunder, Gate of Thunder, Star Parodier (JP), Sylphia (JP), Summer Carnival '91: Alzadick (competition modes only, there's no 1p game here... but I love the game anyway), Ginga Fukei Densetsu Sapphire (JP) (the most visually impressive shmup on the system), Cotton: Fantastic Night Dreams, Cho Aniki (JP), Ai Cho Aniki (JP),
Arcade: Buster Bros.
Shmuplike: Fray In Magical Adventure (JP) (non-autoscrolling shmup pretty much, fun apart from figuring out what to do in the towns)
Beat 'em Up: Ane-San (JP), Double Dragon II (JP),
Fighting: Asuka 120% Maxima Burning Fest (JP), Fighting Street, Ryuuko no Ken (Art of Fighting), Garou Densetsu 2 (Fatal Fury 2), Garou Densetsu Special (Fatal Fury Special), World Heroes 2
Other Action/Puzzle: Bomberman: Panic Bomber (JP), Motteke Tamago (JP, but has translation patch), Pop'n Magic (JP), Splash Lake, Builder Land (JP, but in English),
Rail Shooter: Space Fantasy Zone (JP) (unreleased game, but the leaked version is complete)
Racing: Moto Roader MC (JP)
If you want to also play the massive SuperGrafx collection, play these. They'll probably be mixed in with the normal HuCard games in a romset.
Aldynes (shmup) - pretty good game
Battle Ace (rail shooter)
1941: Counter Attack (shmup) - also pretty good
Madou-Ou Granzort (action-platformer, sort of a spiritual sequel to Keith Courage)
Dai Makai-Mura (action-platformer, aka Ghouls & Ghosts on the Genesis)
Plus Darius Plus and Darius Alpha are SuperGrafx compatible for less flicker.
If you want to play more, I don't think I even listed half of the TG16's shmups. It's known as the 16-bit shooter king for a reason, after all! :D
Quote:You want suggestions, right?
Actually, I want you to play these games and write about them, but since you didn't seem to want to do that I suppose I'll have to do it myself.
Quote:Should I assume that you can find Turbo CD games?
Yeah, I know a site, but I can't find a good TG emulator that runs isos. I'll either have to mount the files with Daemontools or burn them to a disc and I rather not do either if there's an easier way.
Quote:Actually, I want you to play these games and write about them, but since you didn't seem to want to do that I suppose I'll have to do it myself.
I wouldn't really mind, actually... I meant to reply to that. I think that you should play some too.
As for me though, I guess my issue would be writing for your blog... I mean, I could do it, but that post made me think of an idea we had a while back but no one followed up on, setting up a blog on Tendo City as one of our ideas for how to improve the site/make it slightly more relevant. If you want to do a blog, maybe those ideas could merge... that is, if you're interested. It's up to you. Otherwise I could do somethign for that blog, but somehow it does feel like it might be something of a lost opportunity... though the idea that TC might actually make something more of itself is probably pretty unrealistic, so it probably doesn't matter that much. It's just what I was thinking.
I am interested in doing some stuff either way, probably, but of course the other issue is that would be my opinions, not yours, and we don't agree on plenty of games so you couldn't directly compare those to your opinions on console games. If you don't mind that though, that isn't really a problem I guess.
Quote:Yeah, I know a site, but I can't find a good TG emulator that runs isos. I'll either have to mount the files with Daemontools or burn them to a disc and I rather not do either if there's an easier way.
That's one reason I like the Sega CD better than the Turbo CD, Kega will play ISO+MP3 cuefiles, so you can have an entire game often be like 70MB, while on the Turbo CD you need to use Alchohol or Daemon Tools (I use Daemon Tools) to mount the images, which means ISO+WAV files, and of course wave files are ten times larger than MP3s. It's annoying, and the result is that the games take up a lot of space and a bit more of a hassle to use than Sega CD games are.
Also, it's also true that neither MagicEngine or Ootake support ISO loading, so you do need to mount. At least with ePSXe you can load ISOs... they aren't alone, though -- for instance, the one good Sega Saturn emulator, SSF, also requires mounted images and doesn't support ISO loading or MP3 cuetables. It is a negative for that too.
But hey, at least we have Ootake now, a few years ago the only good TG16 emulator was MagicEngine, and it requires you to pay to get a version of it that actually works for more than five minutes... the timer resets when you hit quickload, making it semi-functional, but unless you find a cracked version it's a massive hassle. I'd also tried a few other emulators, but really they were even worse. I think that Ootake is by far the best.
Quote:I am interested in doing some stuff either way, probably, but of course the other issue is that would be my opinions, not yours, and we don't agree on plenty of games so you couldn't directly compare those to your opinions on console games. If you don't mind that though, that isn't really a problem I guess.
It'll show up as being written by you, so it's not like I'm worried about confusing people. And I can always play some of these game myself and offer counter opinions or reply to your entry with some comments of my own. So, no, this isn't an issue that I'm concerned with.
As for linking with TC, there ways to do that without going out and creating a whole new blog. We can end each entry with a link to TC for further discussion and have links to the TC on the info page. I certainly wouldn't be against that idea.
Quote:I think that you should play some too.
I will.
As for the TG16, right now I'm using Turbo Engine. From what I've seen of it so far, it works pretty well, but no running files from an iso unfortunately.
[QUOTE=Great Rumbler]It'll show up as being written by you, so it's not like I'm worried about confusing people. And I can always play some of these game myself and offer counter opinions or reply to your entry with some comments of my own. So, no, this isn't an issue that I'm concerned with.
As for linking with TC, there ways to do that without going out and creating a whole new blog. We can end each entry with a link to TC for further discussion and have links to the TC on the info page. I certainly wouldn't be against that idea.
[quote]I will.[/quote]
Good. :)
Think of it as what it is, though, an in-between system -- remember that the PC Engine was released in Japan in 1987, four years after the Famicom and three years before the Super Famicom. It has an 8-bit CPU with 16-bit graphics chips. Graphics sometimes look NESlike, other times more like SNES or Genesis stuff... though it really never matches the beauty of SNES graphics. It just can't do it. It can put a lot of colors on screen, though; while the color palette is the same as the Genesis, 512 colors, the TG16 can put 480-something colors on screen at once, while the Genesis can only do 64. As a result the games are often bright and colorful, but with small sprites and somewhat archaic graphics. The system does not have any hardware parallax scrolling support, so few games have any and it usually looks primitive, just bars moving at different speed pretty much.
In the US it bombed hard, for various reasons (that it took a year and a half to come out here after Japan, that NEC utterly bungled the marketing, that the Genesis launched first here versus a year after NEC in Japan, etc, etc), but in Japan, thanks to the numerous addons, it did last much longer, particularly on CD; while HuCard games were made from 1987-1994, CD games lasted from 1988-1999, though after 1997 things dropped off fast. Even so though, it crushed the Genesis there. While some games like the platformers, puzzle games, and shmups are approachable without translation, that's not true for the RPGs and action-RPGs we didn't get, of course, and there are a lot of them. Most of them are very poorly known in the US and are not available in English.
It really is amazing, if you go from, say, Strip Fighter or something to Art of Fighting or one of the other Arcade Card CD fighting games, that they're running on the same hardware... or from some of those early HuCard shmups to Sapphire... huge difference! They made use of the extra ram in the Super and Arcade Cards for sure. Non-Super CD games pretty much died out by 1993 or 1994, so the PC Engine is one of the very few examples where an addon eventually became the system standard... even on the N64, where the expansion pak was pretty successful, in the last year you saw some games dropping it "in order to hit the wider market which doesn't have them". On PC Engine, though, the Super CD was the standard for the last five years or so, and regular CD systems would just need to be upgraded with a Super CD-ROM2 System Card 3.0.
Of course, it did help that they sold systems which actually had the Super System Card built in, including all Super CD-ROM2 units and all models of the Duo. Nintendo never did that with the Expansion Pak, they just packed it in with certain copies of the two games that required it. That doesn't spread it quite as much... what NEC did would be more like Sega discontinuing the Genesis in favor of the CDX or something, they just stopped making anything other than Duos.
It's interesting that NEC was successful despite deluging its fans in new hardware, addons, and the like, normally that kind of thing gets you somewhat hated... but for a while at least, it did work for them. Of course, it all fell apart the next generation, when the PC-FX utterly failed among all but the hardest-core anime fans, but when they focused so much on FMV, and anime FMV in particular, and released a system at the same time as the Playstation and Saturn in Japan which had no 3d power and a release strategy that marginalized many of the things that had made the PC Engine so successful, such as the large number of great shmups, the preponderance of simple, more 8-bit style pick up and play games, etc, in favor of lots of games full of anime FMVs and nothing else... well, it's no surprise that they failed really.
Really, it should have come out several years earlier, that's when it was designed. They weren't ready for the next generation yet then though, and they didn't update the system in 1994 when preparing it for its later release. And NEC liked anime games, and developed a lot of them themselves for both the PCECD and PC-FX, so the focus was natural, particularly after Hudson (the designer of the PCE and PC-FX and the other first party on the platforms) gave up on the PC-FX after a year and a half or so. It just wasn't something that was going to win the wide market, even in Japan, in the mid '90s.
[quote]As for the TG16, right now I'm using Turbo Engine. From what I've seen of it so far, it works pretty well, but no running files from an iso unfortunately.[/QUOTE]
(See new thread)
Nothing can be done about the iso issue though, I think. :(
Whenever you want to start writing stuff, just let me know and I'll add you to my blog as an author.
Quote:Nothing can be done about the iso issue though, I think.
That stinks. Well, I'll probably just play some of the better CD games then.
Great Rumbler Wrote:Whenever you want to start writing stuff, just let me know and I'll add you to my blog as an author.
Alright.
Quote:As for linking with TC, there ways to do that without going out and creating a whole new blog. We can end each entry with a link to TC for further discussion and have links to the TC on the info page. I certainly wouldn't be against that idea.
That sounds like a good idea, I agree.
Quote:That stinks. Well, I'll probably just play some of the better CD games then.
As I just described, pretty much the second half of the system's life was mostly focused CD games... a large percentage of the good games are on CD. And that's why I have 55GBs of Turbo CD games on my system... they all need WAV audio, etc. That's what annoys me, I don't see the big deal about just having to mount an image... it's not difficult, just have Daemon Tools or whatever boot with the system.
Quote:As I just described, pretty much the second half of the system's life was mostly focused CD games... a large percentage of the good games are on CD. And that's why I have 55GBs of Turbo CD games on my system... they all need WAV audio, etc. That's what annoys me, I don't see the big deal about just having to mount an image... it's not difficult, just have Daemon Tools or whatever boot with the system.
Well, I mainly looking for an excuse so I don't have to download and then attempt to play another few hundred games.
Great Rumbler Wrote:Well, I mainly looking for an excuse so I don't have to download and then attempt to play another few hundred games.
Hah... :)
Start with the HuCards anyway, there are a bunch of them and some are good. But it is true that most of the better technical achievements are on CD, as are a lot of the games overall; the Turbo CD is a much more important addon to have than the Sega CD. It's one of the most successful addons ever.. well, in Japan at least. In the US the CD drive, and Duo, bombed even harder than the base system did... sales of Turbo CDs and Duos were likely only in the tens of thousands.
Oh, and comparisons to the NES really are just as far as the Genesis and SNES, particularly technologically. Small sprites, etc... Turbografx games just don't have the visual flash of SNES games, even if they are colorful. As I said the games also often feel NESlike, except faster and more colorful (it does have a 7Mhz CPU, twice that of the SNES). The NES-style controller also helps create that feeling. I, II, Run, Select, and turbo switches for I and II... that's all you've got on the pad. Later CD titles can stand up pretty well (stuff like the Arcade Card exclusives mostly look pretty impressive... too bad there are so few of them), though, so as I said there definitely is a significant change over time.
Whatever the case with that though, it's certainly a very under-rated console here. Sure, I probably do like the SNES and Genesis more, but the TG16 is great too, and more people should play it.
Basically, I want RPGs [preferably one's that are translated, I really don't want a bunch of untranslated RPGs when I've already got a bunch that are in English that I haven't played yet] and maybe some platformers or puzzle games. No top-down shooters, I've already got more than enough of those from the arcade section downloaded already, maybe one or two really, REALLY good ones. Uh...maybe some quirky stuff that hasn't been translated, I'll take a few of those.
... You did read how I've said repeatedly that shmups are the best genre on the platform, right? There's a good reason why the shmup lists in my list above are so long, the system has a lot of good shooters.
I guess you don't really like shmups, then... that's too bad, if you don't it will definitely affect your opinion of the system downwards. Honestly, what you just said there would be like saying "I want to play the SNES, but don't want to play any platfomers. No sidescrollers. What are the good games then?" I think that that's a good comparison.
People could come up with lists, sure, but they'd be missing a whole lot of the system's best games.
Oh, on a related note, I prefer to play console games than arcade ones, even in emulation. I'd rather play shmups in SNES and Genesis and TG16 emulators than the original arcade versions in MAME. I'm not entirely sure why it is (it's probably partially because of how I don't love MAME), but I just have more fun with the console versions for some reason... I like shmups, but don't play them in MAME very often. I'd rather play console (or PC) ones, either on actual systems or in emulation.
But anyway, I already did a pretty nice list above, all separated by genre and format (CD or card) so just refer to that. Do you want me to say which ones I like more and which I like less, or something like that, or do reviews of stuff before you attempt anything, and only play ones I like or something?
There are a good number of action-RPGs, as you can see from the list above, but there are only about three traditional RPGs in English, the two I listed and one with a fan translation, Startling Odyssey II (go to the link in the TG16 links thread, the translated download is available there). The PC Engine CD actually had a lot of RPGs, but very, very few were released here, and only the one has a translation (compared to the action-RPGs, where we got more titles, and two have translations).
No, I like shmups. I've just got a huge number of shmup arcade roms, probably more than I'll ever want to play. And I don't even have nearly all of what there are available. So, unless it's like so really awesome shmup, then I'll have to pass on it unfortunately.