27th April 2010, 8:07 PM
[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. :(
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. :(