just turbo applied to the spin button (the tg-16 had built-in turbo functions (with variable rate control!) on the controller)
i always found it difficult to use since you’ll rarely end up in the desired orientation
Oh yeah I usually just mash the regular bonk button like a weirdo because why not
Ys III: Wanderers from Ys
This deserves its own playthrough, its own diary of experiences and emotions. If you’ve played Ys Books I & II, you’ll recall a tower in Book II, where the sky does this gorgeous, stuttery, parallax scrolling effect. This whole game looks like that. It is beautiful in a very unique, Ysian way. Every interior has been filled with a cozy clutter. I love how we always start on a boat with seagulls flying overhead. There’s a great montage of all of Adol’s adventures to get to this new continent. When I get to the town, people are talking about how the mayor is missing in the local mine. I will save this town’s mayor.
Death comes very quickly in the beginning, but after a 10 minute trial by fire, it feels just as breezy and natural as the previous two. I can slash forward, stab up, crawl and stab, or jam my sword town as I’m falling. I can hold the II button so it still feels like a bump-em-up. I’ve got two rings now and I can tell magic is right around the corner. See La Valeur? This is how you should treat the player.
Columns
We are almost four years into the Mega Drive being a rival to the PC Engine and SEGA games are still being ported over. I was never drawn to it much when I played it on the 6-PAK, but Columns is alright. It feels like the real thing to shoot for are diagonal lines, but that might be totally wrong headed. Maybe the idea is just to keep as many two-of-a-kind together as pieces come down. That’s got to cause a chain reaction somewhere down the line, right?
Manhole
@daphaknee , they put the best game on the best console! It’s fitting, because the PC Engine had the first CD-ROM video games ever made and Manhole is the first CD-ROM game for computers.* Even though this only came out in Japan, all the text is in English. This is such an inspirational work. I enjoyed walking around this world again. There were many things I didn’t remember from before: an arcade machine, a beautiful song playing in the night sky, a book on esoteric philosophy. I’ve never been a font guy, but this game makes me see how you’d become one. There’s an option to change the background, so naturally I made an SB-theme.
*There’s a twist
Sangokushi: Eiketsu Tenka ni Nozomu
I am not going to figure out how to play this game. It is way too complicated and that’s saying something, as it is supposed to be Naxat’s simpler version of Romance of the Three Kingdoms. The default, top-of-the-list character I can choose is Liu Bei. I’ve been to his tomb. It’s in Chengdu and I remember it mostly for being inside of a nice park across the street from a Tibetan section of the city. The classical history novel about the Three Kingdoms makes Liu Bei its main protagonist, so it makes sense that he’d be at the front of the line here. It’s a shame I can’t play this to see how Zhuge Liang looks.
By the way! We have collectively mentioned over a third of 1991’s releases. I hope you’re having a TurboFun time!
Here is the list I’m working off of, in case anyone wants to just see what’s left.
OH I WAS SO EXCITED ABOUT MANHOLE THAT I FUCKING EDITED MINTYS POST INSTEAD OF MAKING A NEW ONE BUT ITS FIXED NOW
@Sykel actually gifted me manhole for the PC engine when i lived in oakland!! im so fucking stoked that people associate me with the best game ever. i had no idea it was japan only cuz everything was in english and i dont do any research on things beyond ‘i like this’ usually. im getting better about it
My hot take from 2019 is that you’re into colorful and cute–and challenging–action puzzle games with great music, you might dig Splash Lake. Here’s a 2004 screenshot:
And I recall Spriggan as being super-impressive, possibly one I would still be trying to play today–despite my having largely written off the shooter genre as ultimately coming down to memorization rather than twitch gameplay–if I wasn’t worried about my eyeballs.
I can potentially fill in some missing blanks with old impressions at the end of the month if such desperate measures would be helpful. Very useful to see that list.
Road Spirits
Really good smooth scrolling but the game is kind of nothing. The title screen inspires such wonders but really you’re driving around a convertible porsch (with the hood up!?) around two lane roads. The music is that perfect Japanese yacht rock that we all discovered in 2010. But after 4 5 minute courses I had only heard one song and could not figure out how to change it though the screen implies I could. Boring, but pleasant.
Hihou Densetsu - Chris no Bouken
Oh no I thought when the programmer voice immediately started describing an ancient something or another. Something about Incan civilization though they keep saying インド when it clearly looks like south America. Anyways your dad was an explorer and went missing and now you gotta fight oni in a haunted forest to find him. You use bad action platforming to beat a sick skull enemy. The second stage is a Incan’s Lava Temple but if you continue you lose your very important weapon powerups that make the game bareble. Smooth Jazz for stage 2 though.
The Adam’s Family
What is with these games giving 9 minutes of explanation? You are some Italian-American guy from the first movie and you’ve been challenged by the Adam’s Family to get to their vault. If successful you can have whatever is inside. Time for another bad platformer. One of the few American Exclusives!
Down Load 2
The art direction in this is so strong. With the first Down Load, I was surprised that they had fit so many screens of animation and detail onto a HuCard. Now, the team is working on a CD-ROM2 and they bring out the most luxurious colors and animations I’ve seen on the console. We’ve talked quite a bit about how many games on the PC Engine sexualize women, but this game flips the script and presents the male protagonist as exceedingly hot eye candy.
The first stage is a nice homage to the original game. We’re flying over a highway and the boss ship floats along in the background. By the third stage, the backgrounds are so ornate and abstract that the original looks bland in comparison. I particularly liked the boss on this stage. It’s a machine that shoots out discs. Pink discs destroy my ship, but the blue discs flip me around and invert my controls. It’s so weird, challenging but forgiving. I really want to see this one through to the end.
Populous
This game was ported by AlfaSystem and Hudson, so the best-of-the-best hand their hands on it. It’s a shame though because the game really shouldn’t be played without a mouse and keyboard. It just doesn’t make sense to navigate without hotkeys or the frenetic clicking action of speed-terraforming. In a very lonely period of my life, I was playing this game and learning its idiosyncrasies. It was strange to develop this understanding of something that nobody else I know would be interested in playing. Out of respect for that time, I played a full match. It took some relearning on my part.
Populous is a game about leveling the earth so your people can build houses. The more area is level, the more fortified the buildings become. However, settlers will only leave the building once they’ve reached maximum capacity, so it’s better not to turn the first settlements you have into fortresses. Control is very indirect. You cannot tell people where exactly they should go or pinpoint where they ought to construct their settlements. You can only bring about the conditions they require. While playing, a spell meter is slowly rising. You can cast a spell to create a knight. He will go on a killing spree and raze settlements to the ground. You can create a volcano on the visible area and effectively strand your enemy with busywork. Or you can give them the Minty special.
You see, once your meter gets high enough, you can flood the entire map. This will push everything down several meters into the water. If you’ve planned for this from the beginning, then all of your settlements are on a mountain. After flooding the map. The enemy ought to be decimated. Wait a little longer and you can cast a spell for world-ending combat. All settlements are eliminated and each player’s people join into a single fighting force. They meet in the middle of the map and try to kill one another. After the flood, the enemies’ strongest warriors have already drowned. It is an easy victory.
Silent Debuggers
This game stands out among its peers for being really different. With that difference, comes an exchange in how comprehensible it all is. This is a first-person, corridor, survival shooter, essentially a 90’s update on Hunt the Wumpus. My buddy and I have come across a derelict space station and find that it has been overrun by murderous aliens. My job is to stalk the labyrinthine tunnels and exterminate them. This is easier said than done because they’re incredibly fast and the tunnels don’t give me much with which I can orient myself. I’ve got a map, sure, but it does little to guide me around the monotonous halls.
The station is split into six floors. Each floor has a core section and an outer edge. The monsters are usually in this outer area, but then the game introduces a twist where the ugly creatures will infiltrate the core and shut down key areas. I don’t know if I’ll have the chutzpah to make it through this whole game, but I want to try.
Glad you wrote about Silent Debugger. I find it really interesting but absolutely not a game I want to put time into. I have…much worse things to put my time into:
Astralius
By IGS (not that one) and MIT (Not that one). A Music Based RPG which immediately reminded me of RPG Maker games. After fumbling around on a boat for 20 minutes I got isekai’d to Astralius and they liked my flute playing so much they made me a hero. I promptly walked out of the temple and got murdered by the first enemy I encountered. Going back to Tenshi no Uta.
I’ll note that in the mook they mention the encounter rate is unusually high and the enemies are startingly powerful so I assume they got as far as I did.
Pachio-kun Maboroshi no Densetsu
No idea what the hidden legend of this long running Pachinko game series is. There was no story what so ever. I got dropped on a worldmap with one location which I went into and played pachinko by positioning the nob until I was making infinite money on the 3rd table I played. I declared myself the winner and quit. We got two more of these to look forward to. Thank Cania I was such a warrior of Salaryman Corner.
Spriggan
(From across the street) SPRIGGAN! Is that you SPRIGGAN. Spriggan fucking owns. Okay it has the Compile (Blazing Lazers, Musha) problem that the stages are too long for it’s own good. But everything else hell yes. The bosses surprised me. The continue system is fair. If I had two hours (this week?) I could continue feed to the credits. The colored orbs changing your weapons lay out is fresh and interesting. Sometimes I can eat bullets or I have a little shield that will block them. I think? There are so many GREAT shooters in 1991. SPRIGGAN! It is the most Megadrive-y PC Engine game. The color pallette. The anime cutscenes are much more on the Mega CD level than the full screen stuff I know the PCE is capable of. Good thing it owns. Think it is my favorite of the year so far. I want to play more of it right now!!
2minute first time score: 336450
Was trying to find the manual for Road Spirits to find out if you could change the soundtrack (couldn’t find it) but did find this website with a nice collection of screenshots:
https://www.chrismcovell.com/games_illustrated/arc-road_spirits.html
And I didn’t post the screen that announces every race.
Well blow me down Chris no Bouken was by the same developer and composer:
https://www.chrismcovell.com/games_illustrated/arc-hihou_densetsu.html
i always wondered what those switches did! are there emulators that support them? i’m using bizhawk (fuck you, retroarch) atm and i can’t seem to find anything other than “true” (every frame) turbo, which is completely independent of any hardware emulation.
I simulate the effect with an 8bitdo and activating turbo with the controller itself.
it seems like such a good forward-thinking design decision for a console with so many shumps on it
it was a later decision to add the turbo switches to the controller. my pc engine is an early model, with a switchless controller.
also, in road spirits, if you answer “no” when the game asks if you’re ready before a race, it’ll take you to the menu, which includes the music selection screen. if you were a kid in the early 90s, this screen would probably have looked very sophisticated and grown up to you
TXOE NAY! RDRT
There are a surprising amount of non shmups that benefit from it too. Like the humble JRPG that only let’s you attack for the first hour, or the action platformer that let’s you wall while attacking.
Coryoon
Had a fantastic time with this game. Great music, beautiful sprites, fruit. Who cares you can barely tell what is going on in the levels. The bosses are actually hard. This was proven true at the end game boss rush. I almost felt insulted after how generous the game was up to that point with lives. I also got mad at how many of the bosses “attacks” was just trap you in a corner. I guess I should have played better! Great beginner shooter that is probably extremely hard to 1-life. I bet a 1cc (no continues!) would be possible with just a little practice.
Magical Chase
Well made. I got annoyed at some of the sound effects. I think I had a better time playing on mute on the train then here at home. I played on easy tonight and was surprised when the game ended after stage 3. It had been so long since I’d seen that.
NHK Okaasan to Isshou Niko Niko Pun
As a Parent in Japan I can tell you Okaasan to Isshou (With Mom!) is a long long running series that I definitely do not watch every day. It is kind, simple, and vapid. It has 4 hosts and then 3 animal friends that go on a seperate “adventure”. And the adventure might be someone can’t find a hat, or they can’t eat enough donuts.
This is the first group I saw.
The second/current group featuring the Non-Binary Gourd.
In this game we’re dealing with these chuckle-heads:
As far as a game for BABIES, it’s fine. You have to collect the right fruit to feed to dinosaur. Some of the fruit was way too high up and I, and adult man, couldn’t figure out how to get it. Eventually you feed all the fruit to the dinosaur and go home. If you at all had your wits about you you can beat this game. Surprised that they had an ice level with slopes and ice physics. It’s for 3 year olds!
Doraemon: Nobimaru no Doraibian Nights
This game has a lengthy sprite based opening story. Nobimaru and his stupid friends trapped themselves in picture books and Doraemon has to rescue them. Despite the name the first level has you in Dinosaur Land and the Dinosaurs got some tail.
I was shocked Doraemon has a gun. He also gets some gadgets. I know from playing the N64 game that Doraemon has tons of gadgets in his belly pocket and you gotta use them in these games. I stopped because this is a game for 4 year olds. I don’t know if Doraemon is still on TV or just exists to have a spring break movie to take your small child too every year.
Cosmic Fantasy 2
I have no idea why I played this for so long. It is worse than the first Cosmic Fantasy. I am using the Un-Worked Designs patch and the beginning is still all sorts of messed up.
When I start out the game, I’m a young man in a small village. I meet my childhood crush at a big tree and we spot an explosion in the next town over. I check it out and almost every building has been reduced to ash. It’s striking to see a full JRPG town layout burned down. The shopkeepers stand next to their stalls and lament their lack of goods to sell. The innkeeper shrugs. Apparently a mean group was looking for the princess who has been hiding since birth. I go back to my hometown, and wouldn’t you know it, my childhood crush has been kidnapped. This is where the adventure, and the relentless encounter rate, begins.
As soon as I step out of the village, I encounter a lineup of four enemies. It’s only me and I don’t have a single exp to my name. I die very easily. The next matchup is similar. Then I start using my herbs. I win my first match by using three herbs in one battle. I instantly level up, go to town to buy more herbs, and the process repeats.
Eventually, I pick up another party member and the game flips completely to one that is embarrassingly easy. My second party member has a cure spell and she can use it over 10 times before needing to recover. Leveling up automatically replenishes health and magic, so I can wander around in a dungeon forever. I almost do. I keep playing and I have no way of rationalizing it. This game is so bland. Tenshi no Uta must be better.
Oh, but Tenshi no Uta was not localized by Working Designs, so I don’t get poetic excerpts like these:
Circus Lido
This is a puzzle platformer designed by and for aliens. I looked up Uni Post Company because I had never heard of them and this is their only game. The only staff with multiple credits to his name worked on only two other games: Cowboy Kid and a “humorous RPG with erotic content.”
In this game, I puppeteer a chameleon. The little guy can lick up bugs or climb vines with his tongue. My job is to lick up bugs and spit them out to feed venus fly traps. This task becomes very convoluted, very early. I’m pretty much stumped on stage 7, where the bugs will fall down a deep well that I cannot climb back out of. Trapped there, they have no hope of escaping and I have no hope of feeding them to my venus fly traps.
Exile
That’s right, it’s a two-Working-Designs-for-one special today. The concept and plot is very far afield from what video games typically tried to do. It takes place in an alternate version of the Crusades. There are Knights Templar and Seljuk Turks. The translation is very Working Designs. For example, the local lord’s name is Yuug D’Payne.
The game plays similar to Ys III, but jankier. Enemies and projectiles come on screen faster than I can react to them. There are a ton of “tonics” to buy in the shop and they all seem to heal me to varying degrees. There’s an attack gauge and an armor gauge that bounce up like a heart beat, meaning my stats vary slightly every moment. Because I go back to full health when I level up, I often deal with low health by walking back and forth and spawning easy enemies. I’m hoping magic will open things up more.
I walk around the town with a party of four people, each with their own background that I know nothing about. One of the characters only talks by groaning. I had hoped that these characters would help me out at some point, but they always wait outside of the action. I guess they’re only there to provide “flavor.” I start the game equipped with a shield and sword, but they also give me enough money to buy the next best shield and sword. The first thing I do is buy all the armor in the shop and sell my starting armor. I don’t know why they didn’t just start me with decent equipment and raised the prices in the shop. I don’t know their reasons for a lot of things with this game.
you probably already know, but in the jp version of exile, all the items were real world drugs.
i’m surprised there are still baby games coming out in 1991. i thought by now, the pc engine would have solidified its place as the console for smelly anime nerds. (like how the mega drive was for smelly arcade nerds)
this is slightly interesting, from the okaasan to isshou wiki page:
NHK programming is shockingly progressive. The kids shows are really good about non-traditional Japanese representation. They had a documentary last month about LGBTQ deaf people. Which included a deaf trans-woman who went to schools to “talk” with deaf kids about gender identity. And it just being on TV was showing anyone watching a conversation about gender identity. It was shockingly thoughtful. This is what you get with no advertising I guess! Almost makes me want to pay the license fee.
So glad you got that last screenshot of Exile I clocked it immediately. I got a bit further than you did, and had to check a guide and the solution was obtuse. It involved sheep.
One more game for today:
Mesopotamia
If I am reading this intro right you’re a slinky sent by Zeus to murder the 12 zodiac signs by shooting a little pea-shooter while hanging on walls. This is Atlus’s introduction to the PCEngine and what an absurd, PC-Engine style concept for a game. I found it more frustrating than fun, but I appreciated the mook for making me have to play till I fought taurus:
Another giant enemy cow for the PC Engine.
