Triple Post
The eternally guiding mook tells me you are playing the series for Anime Titulation. I guess in 1991 that was enough to make you play a RPG. I should play more Tenshi no Uta. Or that Necurosu one you said was at least Okay.
3 Likes
I had insomnia last night after taking a three hour nap in the afternoon. I watched a Cosmic Fantasy retrospective that lamented how so much of the series was left in Japan and how it ushered in the anime RPG. I said out loud, “So we’re just pretending that Tengai Makyou doesn’t exist?!” My wife told me to go to bed.
12 Likes
Adventure Island
Do you know Weststone had to have yearly meetings to explain the Wonderboy series. I say that to say the following sentence:
Adventure Island for the PC Engine is a port of Wonder Boy and The Dragon’s Trap.
Super Schwarzschild
Another SRPG that starts with 15 minutes of political talk and history? Glad this is a second language and my brain instantly rejects it. It is extremely important I never remember this. This is a space war so it was weird to see Zentradi ships (It Is Always Zentradi Ships) destroying a human outpost while positive and empowering music plays? I heard the word “assassinate” at least once.
The amazing thing is every time these dialogs keep going and going. This one even has a walk and talk. Then they get in an elevator And Keep Talking. It is all beautiful full screen PC Engine animation. During the 4th or 5th cutscene of Just Talking there was a cutscene someone else is going to post the gif of that I cried laughing at. I quit when we finally got SRPG section and a bunch of people I had not seen in the before started talking. Is this what that Legends of the Galactic Galaxy or whatever anime people talk about is good? Just people talking about fake politics and fake government? Whenever I encounter this I just think about how I still haven’t read a book about the Balken States.
7 Likes
Hellfire S: The Another Story
This is licensed by Toaplan, so you’d think it’d be real tough, but it really isn’t. I played the Mega Drive version years back and I swear NEC Avenue tuned this way down. There are stretches where no enemy ships attack me and I just float across the screen.
The mechanic here is that you can freely change the direction of fire with the tap of a button. The stages and bosses are designed around this, with walls and barriers often preventing you from shooting things head-on. The first boss is really neat actually. It’s a windowed box with a marble inside. The marble is sitting on a circular track. Whenever you shoot the marble, it rolls around the track so that you can’t reach it from the same window. It’s such a graceful design, I wish things were measured just a little better.
Eternal City: Toshi Tensou Keikaku
Hey, this girl has the same name as me!
I was not expecting a Metroid-like on the PC Engine, not in 1991. The search action is high on the search, low on the action. The world is merely a series of tubes. Some go up and down, others stretch left to right. I can enter stations to get my shields refueled and sometimes pick up items, but usually they just tell me things.
I could not believe how boring the first boss was. The design of the robot was very cool, but it just stood there and went through a pattern of firing five slow shots. Then it would jump and launch three slow missiles. It would be better if it didn’t take so many shots to destroy. Maybe it wouldn’t take so many if I was at a higher level. Yes, this is a search action with experience points and levels. No, I don’t know how my stats are impacted by this.
Shockman
I had high hopes for this one. Masaya has really started to get their act together and this is significantly better than the first game. It’s still not quite a good game. I’d peg it on a rung right below Bravoman.
The game throws away the goofy map from before for a cinematically-paced adventure. Walking along as a civilian, I get bullied by construction robots who then try to kill me. Unlucky for them, I am a superhuman murder machine. Then, I’m pursued by more robots before I meet up with my doctor friend. He gives me a submarine and helps me get closer to the enemy. See, with the PCE, even when it’s not a shooting game, it’s still a shooting game.
The backgrounds look really nice and the music is pretty catchy, but there’s just no the right level of crunch or friction when fighting with waves of dudes. It feels messy and graceless. It also hurts to start a stage over after losing my last bit of life against the end-level boss. That happened constantly. This would probably be more fun playing with somebody else; two people have access to special coordinated attacks. I’m crossing my fingers and hoping third times a charm!
9 Likes
Exile is the video game where you can die from taking too much hashish
that’s all I got
5 Likes
PC Genjin 2 (PS3)
(Not the version I’m playing, like the label design though : )
The colors are vibrant and the sprite work delectable.
Eat a small piece of meat–not a big one–and you transform into…
Cute baby girl Bonk (“PC Beauty”) was replaced in the US release by Crackhead Bonk! ; P
Three years ago I played about halfway through the US version, Bonk’s Revenge, and had forgotten about cute Bonk! It was the version on the Turbo Duo’s “3-in-1” Gate of Thunder pack-in disc, although actually it was 4-in-1 because it has Bomber Man as a hidden game! The collection has a special Bonk game select menu!
“Attack power is doubled,” according to Google Translate of the JP PS3 version’s in-game manual on PC Beauty!
Her kiss–close-up or at a distance–stuns!
Her dive-bonk blows the enemies away!
If she dive-bonks the ground, it paralyzes even midair enemies!
You only get to be PC Beauty for about 14 seconds at a time! I want to be her all the time! Why doesn’t she have her own game??
Even in the early going here there’s been a fair amount of precision platforming, and dive-bonking the small/moving enemies is a bit tricky and kind of a pain to have to do all the time.
The second boss encounter, though, is delightful: big, weird, well-animated, and sporting a fun cycle of creative transformations and attacks–and a big hit area that even a clunky junker like me can chain-dive-bonk and feel cool!
(“Boohoo!”)
I want a Bonk Boss Rush game!
This Japanese “PC Engine Archives” PSN Store version has separate regular and turbo buttons.
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I think I recall reading somewhere that you can burn a cdr of the 4 in 1 and replace Bomberman with the PC Engine/TG16 rom of your choice.
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I had no idea about pretty Bonk…
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Hatris
Here it is, the second sequel to Tetris. Welltris made sense as a follow-up, it gives one of many possible answers to the question, “What if Tetris was 3-dimensional?” Hatris, on the other hand, is a sideways concept. It answers the question “What if everything were hats?” It’s odd in the falling block genre, because the junk that falls is not uniformly sized. In fact, that’s the whole problem-solving conundrum. Is it better to ruin one stack so that a tall hat can have more room? Is it better to consolidate my wizard hats if it means ruining the stack next to it again? After thirty minutes, I don’t have any definite answers to those questions, but I can say that you don’t really need to play Tetris with hats.
Rayxanber II
Data West again! Remember them? They made that terrible strategy game, Gulclight. Now they’re at it again, so soon after that one. I looked into them more. They were a FM Towns developer who saw the PC Engine as an exciting opportunity. The first Rayxanber was an FM Towns exclusive. What we get here would be incredibly cool if it weren’t impossibly hard.
So much of this game feels like a flex. The CD soundtrack is exceptional, there are multiple layers of scrolling, and everything is so fast. Trouble is, any time I die, I go back to the beginning of the stage, and I die a lot. The game is so fast and my ship never powers up much past the pea shooter. When enemies fly on screen, they often come in so fast that I can’t even react. I just have to remember which side they’ll enter from. The bosses are huge and great, but they take so many shots before they go down. Luckily there’s checkpoints before fighting them.
I started to rewind liberally 10 minutes into trying this. I wanted to see more. I was rewarded when I got to the third stage. There is a colossal walking ship and it’s covered by moving artillery. This stage feels more impossible than any shooter on the PC Engine has. I’m just constantly getting my ears flicked, legs tripped, and teeth kicked in. It’s no fun at all!
Space Adventure Cobra II: Densetsu no Otoko
Here’s the sequel to one of my favorites from 1989. This was localized in the West for the SEGA CD, so I feel conflicted about playing it here. I played through the first twenty minutes and all the written language was very crisp, but I can’t translate the spoken words. I watched the same section in the SEGA CD version and I noticed the music was worse, the dub was spotty, but the translation was pretty good. The first scene is executed well, hitting a bunch of tropes from Westerns, but it feels a bit like an interactive cutscene. I’m hoping that the game transitions to an open, hub-and-spoke design like the first did.
12 Likes
Nanitore - NARIAGARI TRENDY
There’s a lot of confusing words in this title but this Game of Life with Lasersoft/Telenet characters including Yuuko from Valis. It defaults to 200 turns and can go up to 1000. I did 10 and still wanted to quit before the end. It’s boring.
Ultra Box 4
I’d need to be paid to stare at these. This one had an adventure game, a DQ clone among other stuff. I should just translate the blurbs from the mook for each of these. One of them introduced original Ultra Box Idols. Speaking of that in Tenshi no Uta I got further. It’s just a simple Dragon Quest style game at heart. The save point is literally a girl you talk to in town. In one of the towns, next to Save Point Girl, one of men goes “isn’t save point girl hot? I wish she’d crush me with her thighs!”
TV Sports Hockey
This is supposedly the good one of the TV Sports games. I think I played it for about 5 months, and no matter what the first period wouldn’t end. I never won a face-off despite hitting the puck multiple times while the computer stood there. I got into fights and couldn’t figure out how to punch. The puck was not locked to who “had it” which was neat.
Hit the Ice
Taito’s hockey game fairs much better. Filled with Street Fighter Styled Racism against Americans and Canadians you pick a goalie and two players. Then fumble around for 5 minutes. But any game you can kick a guy in the nuts and then he crumples on the ground is cool. This is before NBA Jam or Street Fighter 2! That’s neat. I never want to play it again, but neat.
World Circuit
Is this the last F1 game for the system? We can hope. This time, top down always going up, by Namco. Fun music. Tempted to give it top marks till I spun out and getting back on track took a heartbreaking amount of time.
8 Likes
PC Genjin 2 (PS3 JP)
SESSION 2
The game lists only “Red” beside Hudson Soft, the publisher; GameFAQs, though, lists “Mutech,” not Red Company, as the name of the developer of the game (they credit Hudson on Bonk 1 and 3).
I didn’t find a whole lot on Mutech. Mobygames Bonk's Revenge (TurboGrafx-16, 1991) credits - MobyGames lists Yoshihiro Itami as one of four programmers in the credits of the game, and Giant Bomb https://www.giantbomb.com/mutech/3010-10685/ says of Mutech:
"Mutech was founded in 1986 by Yoshihiro Itami and would go on to provide programming support for a number of PC Engine (TurboGrafx-16) games, as well as those for the PC Engine CD-ROM (TurboGrafx-CD). They worked frequently with Hudson, contributing to games such as Bonk’s Revenge and Battle Lode Runner.
The name reflected the fact that it was a small and unassuming company, as mu (or μ) is a symbol used as a metric prefix to denote very small quantities."
Anyway it was on to a jumpy sky stage that was a bit tricky to get through; took plenty of hits and burgers don’t heal you?? UNREALISTIC.
And a boss who paralyzes you, then runs you over. ; |
Gummy train-riding dino friends turn into health items between stages for you, though! Don’t trust beef, trust GUMMI
Unfortunately then it was on to a slippy slidey snow stage with stuff spawning and flinging and rampaging all over you, followed by a slippy slidey ice stage with moving platforms that ram into you when triggered.
UGH. WAY TO RUIN THE GAME MUTECH. Oh another thing that makes it tough is that Bonk hesitates a bit before actually jumping after you press the Jump button; it didn’t feel like a general input delay thing with the PS3 port but I didn’t go and do any comparison testing because those stages are going to suck anyway–but it does mean lots of times you think you can leap to safety with a reaction jump but no you just get hit or slide off into spikes or whatever.
Now I remembered why I’d stopped playing through in 2019–well that and I don’t think I had a save option on the Duo. Which reminds me though, when I left off on the US 3-in-1 version, it showed me having 3 continues remaining–but when I continued in this JP version, no continue number was shown–so maybe they’re unlimited? U.S. got hard-mode-ed again, har!
FORTUNATELY things suddenly look up because you get to go glam and sparkle it up on the beach! No more cold!
Although after a bit it’s into the water to swim, oh no is it an awful water stage? Wait, look at those guys snoozing in that ship, it looks so comfy in there!
I wish I was in there instead of out here in this dumb water sta-- Wait, I can go in the ship? OH
The ship rules! You can bounce on the beds! Maybe there are a few too many crates for an obsessive item hunter to deal with without getting a little grouchy but still, lookit this stuff! Portholes! Semaphore!
Bonking green flowers (I bonked a flower to change its color a number of times and eventually it went green!) gives a blue heart! A FAQ says these “add one more heart to your health meter,” wow! But it went right through me and off the screen! = oooo
The FAQ also says “You can get them from the bonus elevator by getting 30-50 smiles in a round,” so I guess that’s what the smiles are for! OH also if you get 50 smiles in a round, it says you skip to the next round! https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/tg16/588911-bonks-revenge/faqs/47728
But lots more cool ship to explore! Lower parts are flooding, looks rough for those pirates, hah!
The bosses are definitely getting tough at this point though, and it can be hard to tell how to hit them without taking a hit yourself. D-arr!
Hey why isn’t there a Pirate Bonk game?!? GOSH DANG IT
Well, after 2.5 horrible stages, it was nice to have a couple neat stages. What will the rest of the game hold? Will it still be nice and sunny? Haha what if it got too sunny like global warming, haha, oh well that’ll never happen.
8 Likes
PC Engine Perfect Catalog Mook descriptions of the later Ultra Box collections. Translation By Me
Ultra Box 3
The Mini Game corner has been greatly expanded. This time “Ultra Box Girls” an orginal 3 girl idol unit makes it’s debut. One of the girls, Mizuda Chinatsu stars in a game, “searching for love.”
Ultra Box 4
While the other UB games were released 3 months apart, it was almost six months before the release of 4. This time we have the continuation of the serial game “Kusuto” more of the PC Engine Illustrated and an original RPG, “FONE.”
Ultra Box 5
Features the finale of the serial game “Kusuto”. The gameplay has been greatly expanded lasting over a full hour. Also features the last apperance of the UB Girls’ “Club UB”. PC Soft Illustrated features a hidden mode. (The screenshot shows off a “you can’t help but laugh” shooter)
6 Likes
I have more to add about Ultra Box 4
Yes, we have another one of these! I don’t think I made a point last time about how the game catalog includes highly distorted screenshots from the games. These are like works of art, to me. We also have the reader-submitted fan art, which get ranked by Rusher Kimura.
There are three medium-sized games here: a JRPG, a digital comic adventure, and what looks like a dating adventure (not quite at the simulation level in video game history yet). The JRPG had really funny character designs and I wanted to keeping going with it, but the encounter rate is brutal and I did not know how to heal my people. Oh yeah, the RPG was introduced by Portuguese narration, and another game was introduced with French. très distingué
Last but not least, there are two small stripping games. In one, you are in a shooting gallery. It seems like you should be shooting the wild animals, but you’re actually meant to shoot the girl who runs across the screen. The other is a jump rope game where a bird periodically poops and you can pick up the poop to score points faster. The mix of absurd comedy with softcore nudity is something of a trademark with these Ultra Box volumes. It is…certainly something.
Buster Bros.
I don’t understand why this is on CD. This would have been a delightful Hu-Card, but I guess they really wanted to have the digitized photographs of travel destinations. I was really surprised to see Guilin get representation. I hope the development team visited at some point and got to bike around.
I guess I’m playing as some big game hunter, and the most dangerous game of all is bubbles. I find it very hard not to walk straight into a bouncing bubble. Bubbles are constantly dropping new weapons and some of them aren’t nearly as good as others. There’s a gun that I can just rapid fire up the screen, but there are also harpoons, which can only be fired one at a time. If one of them gets stuck to the ceiling, I have to wait for a balloon to pop on it. It’s not easy!
Power Eleven
Hudson made a soccer game! It’s better than the first Formation Soccer, mainly because so much of the field is visible. I love this sports game. It’s up there with Final Match Tennis as one of the best for the system. It is crazy to me that it was not localized in the US, but I guess that goes to show how unpopular soccer was in America.
The mechanics are very simple. There is a button for kicking the ball. This gives you short passes, for cuts and the like. If you hold the other button before you kick, you spend some meter to make the kick really powerful. This is for sending the ball to the other side or making goal. That’s it! I didn’t notice any yellow cards or red cards, so slide tackles just work. The penalty is that the person sliding takes a moment to get back up.
I was playing in the world championship mode, and I noticed that the first match was fairly easy. I love that. The first match in every sports game should be easy. I should always win that first match. I’m guessing the game will get much harder. When I played, I got 5 goals before half time. This was because I chose an offense heavy formation. In the second half, the opposing team kept getting over to my side of the field, and I struggled the whole time trying to keep them away from the goalie box. It felt super fun and kinetic. The ball almost always went where I wanted it to and when it didn’t, I could tell why. Beautiful game right here.
8 Likes
I had a Pang (the bubble popping game) story to tell. Way back in 2003 after I joined the insert credit forums I tried to corral a few of the posters into writing a top 100 games list, as the EGM Issue 100 List (which included Military Madness) is a fundamental part of my personality to this day. One of the forumites was named Dr. Indy who drew MS Paint comics of Indiana Jones getting his dick crushed on livejournal.
I don’t remember a lot about the failed to finish list, but I remember he suggested Pang 3 (Arcade). I always play a Pang when I see it because of that and I always think about why he chose Pang, and whether it was a troll or not.
I also played Pang or here in Japan on the PC Engine called Pompin’ World last night. I got relatively far on my first credit but ultimately thing it is kind of a limited game. Not related, but it did make me yearn for a Qix (100 on the EGM list) like.
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i think voldied is the only pc engine qix-like, which is surprising, considering what a horny console it is
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I didn’t even mean to click post for the Ultrabox post earlier.
Ultrabox 6
The Last Volume. The Price had increased as had the distance between this and volume 5. Keinojou Mizutama drew the cover art for PC Engine Soft Illustrated, which also featured frank words from 12 different publishers. “UB Information” explained why the magazine was ending. (Kusuto was collected all on this volume, and saving was added along with cut scenes.)
Ultra Box 2
“Kusuto” starts it’s serialized run. This time’s “For Real Date Spots” focuses on Yokohama. PC Engine Soft Illustrated shows up some upcoming games.
Ultra Box
“For Real Date Spots” shows up actual places in Harajuku. “Rasha Kimura no Hoshii ni Onegai oh” provides horoscopes and other novelty acts like a variety show. “Kamen Victor” is an action game and “UB64” is a puzzle games rounding out this collection.
Honestly feel like a schmuck since I couldn’t find the smut whenever I’ve dipped into these.
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High Grenader
I wanted to give this a try. I really did. It didn’t even have an opening scroll. It just dropped me knee deep in War Game. I barely parsed the kanji for “deploy troops” then I had 3 battalions and then I was selecting or deselecting individual units and at that point it was over.
Ranma 1/2 Toware no Hanayome
Here we go another Rumiko Takahashi adventure game. That’s 3? On this console so far? I’ve seen like 3 episodes of Ranma in my life but I have read every strip of PVPOnline. There’s a Panda. This is worse structured as a game than the Urusei Yatsura game. You run circles talking to everyone in the massive cast. It does do a good job of giving me a primer on who everyone is. There is a running theme from my PC Engine exposure that in Rumiko’s work that A. Everyone is completely nuts but B. People that really follow Japanese Traditional Culture are particularly nuts.
I know the nerds 5 years older than me really locked on to Ranma as Woah Wacky Japan Anime Woah. Which again serves as usually Wacky Japan is also Wacky to normal Japanese. I of course immediately locked into Immigrant Representation. Shampoo seems cute and good. The amount of wordplay in Ranma is frightening.
I only beat Act 1 and didn’t even get to the Runaway Bride in the title. That is apparently Act 2. It also overall looks worse than UY? Beginning to think UY was a high point for PC Engine Anime Animation.
Hellfire S
Anime cutscenes. Wow this is slow. This is really slow.
Hanataakadaka?
Bright. Colorful. Kind of gets lost next to Coryoon and Magical Chase. It is also quite slow and felt like the powerups don’t fully match the challenge. I liked getting caught in traps. That was funny.
Prince of Persia
I’ve never really sat down with or beaten PoP. This seems like a good enough version to beat my head against for a week. I didn’t even finish the first level tonight because of input lag or my incompetence at pressing a button early or dropped inputs.
Will I actually focus on something or will I keep trying to play everything that is not a extremely heavy war simualtion? Because there’s like 6 of those for 1991. Want to give Exhile at least another 20 minutes.
8 Likes
In case anyone wasn’t clear, on the TG16 / PC Engine, Buster Bros. (US) = Pomping World (JP)–whereas usually in Japan the series was Pang something or other. I think I like that one. Maybe one reason for the harpoon thing is to catch the crabs and crawly things this version throws in coming at you across the ground, because they take a hit running into its attached steel line. I found that weapon pretty handy, I think, when I last played this four years ago.
Possibly a reason for putting it on CD-ROM-ROM was for the music, which is pleasant:
Also four years ago, I couldn’t beat the first boss in the hit-flash-fx-y Hana Taka Daka?! [_[. He would just run and jump across the screen, spraying shots, and smash into me. I did like his kooky look, though:
7 Likes
PC Genjin 2 (PS3)
SESSION 3
Fun time is over, now it’s time to kill the player so they can’t go tell their friends not to bother with the game because it’s too easy.
There’s collapsing platforms over lava and bosses in the lava
and falling volcanic rocks and piranha-filled pools but that’s just the baby stuff for beginners, because then you get to a long vertical climbing section
with what feels like a half-dozen enemies per screen, most of whom float or jump while spraying shots at you and taking multiple hits to knock out.
What’s with these vertical climbing sections, Bonk and Castlevania?!? ARGH.
This is where I started abusing save states 'cause otherwise I never would’a got through it–or at least, not for weeks I suppose, baking my Duo by just leaving it on the whole time or something(?). Particularly with Bonk’s tragically delayed jump take-off, which effectively prevents him from chain jumping, you actually have to be patient and take the enemies on one-at-a-time which uh well I don’t have that kind of discipline normally.
There’s some kind of story about the Moon getting messed with, I dunno. Fun visuals though.
Then a rather lovely section with LOADS of powerups and healing stuff
and rooftops to jump across and laundry lines with bonus items.
Maybe they were just buttering you back up for another tower climb, but this second one is more mystical and obstacle-y
and doesn’t throw too many enemies at you and has lots of bonus stuff
and isn’t actually that tough. It was really just that middle climbing section that wanted to kill everyone hard! UGH.
Now I’ve reached a branching
boss rush bit
so probably?? near the end boss.
This PS3 version limits you to five save states.
10 Likes
Abdullah the Butcher!
4 Likes