PC Engine: WELCOME TO THE IDEAL WORLD!

TV Sports Basketball

This sucks so much. It commits the cardinal sin of sports games: the computer is too good. They make every shot from the free throw line, constantly steal the ball from me, and orchestrate actual plays in the paint. Meanwhile, I’m just trying my best. I try to make a simple layup out of laziness or a three pointer out of cowardice. The team fouls me a bunch, too, but it doesn’t matter because I’m bad at free throws. It looks like there’s a way to decide plays while running down midcourt, but I don’t care enough to try. It just feels awful to play.

There’s another big problem: no music. There’s just the sound of the ball dribbling or hitting the rim and scratchy voice samples from the ref. It feels weird to say that Takin’ it to the Hoop is the better basketball game. I don’t think there are any more for the rest of the console’s lifespan.


F1 Circus ‘91

Sorry, Rudie. There are many more F1 games. It turns out that F1 Circus from 1990 was a big hit and Nichibutsu made three more of them. This is only marginally different than the previous game. One change I’ve noticed is that it is much harder. I tried the first track for thirty minutes, and I still could not qualify for the race. These games are just too fast and give too little runahead. There’s almost always a warning when a turn is coming up, but there are also times when it will snake without any indication. I got very used to seeing the game over screen.

10 Likes

Quiz Marugoto The World
I set up a discord stream to try this one. I immediately started crying as the questions were read out loud with no text and the answer selection was evil. I eventually found out A was Dpad, B was I and C was II…I think. It never highlighted a correct or wrong answer either. Someone said abuse save states so you could listen to the question multiple times. I did. I got to the second round and gave up in tears at my 3rd question about some early 20th century Japanese author I didn’t know. It’s got babes at least.

And literally just Bingo. Just slow, slow Bingo. Cania reminded me we played that SNES Bingo game for SNEX that was great. That was fun. @VastleCania link the episode I can’t find it.

Quiz Avenue 2
I told you we’d get to this one as well. This game has two modes, Quest and…F1. Fuck! I yelled. I started up F1 which was the party mode, if all particpates (which was just me) got any question collectively wrong, the round ended and the location changed. I got to see different F1 tracks with pretty girls.


The best I can tell is that question is “Which Kyoto Temple houses a traditional Chinese style toilet?” You move your f1 car up and down to select your answer, cute!

Quest Mode has a sick ass title screen

Quest mode is like before except we all started hooting and howlering at the hot anime chicks and then the adorable monsters. And yes she does lift up her dress to show even more thigh.






This had more reasonable questions including more questions about Robert Deniro. In fact I think every single one of these Quiz games has had questions about Robert DeNiro. Did you know he just had his 7th kid? It was on the fucking news here. Robert DeNiro is huge in Japan!

Look how happy our hero is he answered the sexy woman’s questions right.

Raiden
I like every hardcore under-10 gamer covetted Raiden. I didn’t know it was on the Genesis as Raiden Trad! I wasn’t allowed to rent video games okay! I wanted a god damn Atari Jaguar so I could play Raiden. I’m not sure how I even know about Raiden. I must have seen it at an arcade or grocery store entrance at some point. It definitely made an eternal impression on me.

But I am older. Trying the PC Engine today I wanted to play other simple shooters than this. Shmup Junkie mentions it is notoriously difficult and the CD version (next year?) is easier. I was admittedly playing very casually as friends yelled in my ear about bodily fluids, but isn’t that just the 1990s Arcade experience? I have moved passed being impressed with the toothpaste laser. Give me Image Fight baby. Also Viper Phase One is the best Raiden.

11 Likes

Why is the character and monster design better in the gosh dang Quiz game than the actual RPGs?

9 Likes

It was just me and @AutomaticTiger because nobody wanted to play battle dodgeball (understandable) but the salaryman game Bing Bing Bingo was amazing.

5 Likes

A manga artist did the character designs. They also make a game based of his manga for the PCE-CD Dragon Half - MobyGames

3 Likes

i’ve been reading the omnibus editions of dragon half, and i’ve never seen a professional comic creator who’s so negative about his own art! all the commentary is about how he doesn’t like the art, what mistakes he made, and so on.

6 Likes

Micro Cabin Corp huh?

1 Like

Exactly my reaction. Of course this Japanese computer team would publish for the PCE. Obviously!

2 Likes

I never posted these stats for the games of 1991:

Rpg 10
Simulation/Strategy 13
Shooting 21
Sports 7
Racing 6
Quiz 3
Puzzle 8
Horse 1
Pachiokun 1

Adventure 6
Table 5
Mahjong 1
Games that are other things but now there are Monsters: 2

5 Likes

That’s pretty much exactly the blog I’m tempted to write each time I’ve just posted a new page. Sometimes it helps to get that stuff out. Possibly he doesn’t have people in the RL to dump it on, so, throw it in the blog and feel a little better.

2 Likes

PC Genjin 2 (PS3)

SESSION 4 Final

I don’t want to play a Mario game because Mario post-NES has always felt creepy to me and I just don’t want to get into the whole thing. [For the sake of completeness I went back and tried SMB 1 through 3 again and yeah I don’t need to do more coin and mushroom collecting. The jump is nice though.] But the boss rush end of Bonk 2 had me wishing I was playing a Mario game because at least Mario games have a good jump. Bonk is horrible at jumping and his laggy jump kept getting me punished in these little dungeon tunnels with alternating conveyor belts and fireballs that teleport in right next to you and other nonsense.

There’s a point where the game gives you some health (in some of the branches there is no health at all), makes you take a hit–getting stuck between alternate direction conveyor belts, and it’s of course unclear how to get out really as you desperately mash buttons for a while–and then gives you a little health back, like okay now everything’s okay, right?

Why? Why do any of that?

Oh, right–it’s because they might have squished you into a crab, and the only way to revert back, as far as I could find, is to take damage. It isn’t clear that being a crab is particularly advantageous or necessary, and it is used only in a few very limited brief areas very late in the game; it feels like they made it to impress viewers with a character transformation–but nobody seeing it in the death horror house of the late game is likely to care all that much.

49_crabby

Two of the bosses in the boss rush, I have no idea how to hit without also taking a hit. It’s completely unclear. With a third one, I did figure it out after abusing save states for quite some time; it’s a fairly ridiculous, rather unintuitive, extremely unforgiving sequence and as usual the hurt boxes are punishing and not possible to understand until they’ve hit you a lot. And it’s entirely possible to hit something and immediately get hit for being there hitting it because why would they like build in a grace period or anything thoughtful to make the action feel less horrible.

It’s bad design and the dungeons connecting the bosses feel like either they weren’t really play tested, or they just didn’t care. Because of his delay between moves, Bonk can’t really handle more than one enemy at a time unless they’re intentionally spaced so that he can chain-dive-bonk them, which is rare after the early stages. He cannot run, and if he tries to move past enemies, they will catch up to him and gun him down from behind.

50_followed

There is no time limit, and Bonk must stop, carefully trigger a single enemy at a time, and defeat them–and sometimes then carefully headbutt their tracking bullet spray swarm piece by piece–before continuing to the next. His sluggish jumping is abused repeatedly to make you take hits until you’ve memorized the layout and can execute the correct sequence in anticipation of what you remember he will need to do next.

With the basic mechanics a muddled mess, the game’s developers still didn’t seem to know how to make the game hard without resorting to cheap tactics. A lot of enemies are made just tall enough that your jump has to be almost perfect in order to dive-bonk them without hurting yourself. Random bullet sprays become common.

In one of the buss rush connecting dungeon tunnels–oh, yes, it is a water level–they hide a crab behind a pillar.

47_hidden_crab

The crabs shoot at you, in any direction and through any obstacle.

48_crab_through

It’s the opposite of what I recall from the NES Mario games where they show you very clearly what you need to do, aren’t designed in such a way as to feel punishing–possibly excepting those darned Mario 3 airships–and the controls for executing what you need to do are crisp and clean. Bonk is muddled and vindictive. By the end I felt like I couldn’t trust the game’s physics at all, and every time I had to do anything I felt queasy, and surprised if it somehow ended without me taking a hit. I didn’t trust the designers to distribute danger or healing items in any sort of sane way, so I reloaded nearly every time I took a hit. Which was a lot. But I was sick of the game and did not want to have continue and replay any stage from the beginning again, ever.

The first hit I took from the final boss was while I was jumping happily through the air after having beaten the prior boss: the final boss suddenly teleported in right there, on top of me, without warning, probably unhittable, hurt box immediately in effect.

Other than that, he’s actually kind of a pushover. The game feels severely lacking in gameplay balancing.

Nobody should play this game, the ship level isn’t worth it. At least, quit when you reach the ship stage’s boss. Not a whole lot that’s good happens after that point.

45_moon_rise

After you beat the final boss and see the little ending which is cute but involves a character I hadn’t even really seen to this point so didn’t care much about, you’re stuck in a credits loop.

“To be continued… Maybe…” it says.

51_to_be_maybe

7 Likes

You’re not the only one whose felt the pain of Bonk’s poor responsiveness. Witness my personal Google search history. I wanted to know if it was just me.
image

It’s not just you; there’s a whole community of us out here.

I like that you can choose to play a shortened version with more health. That seems like the better way to enjoy it than going all in.

5 Likes

More health? = o

I can’t seem to do that, it just makes me feel like I wasted my time. Dang what were the…there were like two games I played semi-recently where I picked a lower difficulty level and then got kicked out before the actual last stage. Oh yeah, Water Margin and uh…shoot, I forget. OH Double Dragon II: The Revenge for NES. Anyway I hate it because then I just feel obligated to start over on whatever difficulty actually lets you see the ending maybe.

It’s different now with save states though I guess.

Good to know it isn’t just me having trouble makin’ Bonk move! It’s like it’s been a massive cover-up all this time. Er well I guess I can’t think of anyone I’ve really heard talking about Bonk aside from @exodus and that’s mostly just responding to people teasing him about it. But I guess now I know why Bonk didn’t get played and the PC Engine failed. I mean aside from being pretty popular for a while there in Japan or whatever they say.

I can’t blame him for preferring Bonk to Mario, though. I mean I did like the Mario games back in the NES days but I found going back to them just now to compare with Bonk that no I just don’t want the Mario jumping on heads and coins and digging up vegetables or clumsily lobbing fireballs if I’m lucky while off my tits on mushrooms thing.

Tragically I may have another Bonk game on its way to me that I may have ordered before the worm had turned in my playthrough. ]_] Maybe it’ll be good though!? And it isn’t by Mutech. Or even Hudson! Anyway it isn’t on PC Engine so–off topic. : P

On topic:

Bonk is bunk!

3 Likes

Hate the way Bonk takes time to jump, but it doesn’t pause your actual movement to jump so it’s entirely possible to walk off a ledge after pressing the button in a sort of reverse coyote physics. Am convinced the first one exists as a graphical showpiece and the rest exist just because the first one was impressive, even though they fail to impress after the initial wow.

4 Likes

I had a friend who loved TV Sports Basketball on Amiga because there was one guy on one team who was 7’10" or something and basically unstoppable and he would just use him all the time and score like all the points.

Oddly there seems to be no FAQ for this game so I can’t find which player that was. : P

2 Likes

Metal Stoker

FACE is back and they’ve brought in an open arena shooter. There is a surprising amount of stage variety. The first few rooms were heavily sentried corridors, complete with traps, turrets, and wall-encompassing gun machines. The second stage opened up in a desert and I was pointed in every direction while waves of new enemies appeared to give me trouble.

It can be tedious at times, especially when the game wants you to destroy every enemy on a floor. That just means scrolling around and inevitably backtracking after you’ve missed something. I only noticed at the end of my session that it’s possible to change your ship between five different models. Each has their own primary weapon and special ability. Overall, it’s a bit mediocre, but I’m drawn to it because FACE.


Daisenpuu Custom

I wasn’t in love with this. Wow, a year with two mediocre Toaplan conversions. This is pretty sad. I mean, I’m sad. I don’t know, is it better than the HuCard version from last year? Rudie didn’t like that one very much, either. At first glance, it looks like it might be as good as Kyukyoku Tiger, same aesthetic and all. However, what we get is a really dull flythrough. All the enemies are tanks or boats, which means they slowly approach on screen and fire. Gone are the complex waltzes I would share with enemy helicopters. It’s just see tank, shoot tank.

The plane I fly is slow, too, because I can call in a whole squadron of planes to shoot alongside me. It’s neat, but also just makes me feel complacent. With all of the planes on screen, I’m covering half the field with bullets. Do I even need to move? Maybe every five seconds, but not much more than that. That is, until a boss comes and starts shooting out homing spreads. These are kind of ridiculous and not fun at all to dodge with such a slow plane. Booooo, Daisenpuuuu.


9 Likes

Dang I was just about to post about Metal Stoker. My opinion? It’s no Granada! Granada is one of the best games ever made and on Megadrive.

When I did my shooter list last month everything below Daisenpuu was bad and everything above I more or less liked.

3 Likes

Fighting Run

What a strange game by Nichibutsu. Like a racing robot fighting game? It also runs like shit on Mister so I gotta finally file a bug report. Constant graphic glitches I gotta assume are not on real hardware and if they are Oh Boi.

Super Metal Crusher

You know how Pokemon begins with two monsters fighting? Well in this we see a Robot get sliced in half and explode. This is The Cock Fighting of Mech games. You choose your weapons choose a large variety of stats like Torque and Nature then watch it fight another robot to the death with I Think no input from you. These fights can take a while because the robots are dumb as hell, or maybe do not want to die or kill their brethren.

Spiral Wave
Some kind of space drama and you know I zoned out as text box after text box flew by. I eventually got to change location and save. I moved to Mars and that started a very barebones, very jank Space Harrier clone. I got murdered by the first enemy and sent back to the title screen.

8 Likes

you failed to mention that the soundtrack in this game is an all-timer, just Powerful Crunch Energy

5 Likes

RPReplay_Final1683597930_2

13 Likes