PC Engine: WELCOME TO THE IDEAL WORLD!

[Rudie]

While it is particularly dire, I think part of it is we’re looking around at 1994 games and the PC Engine isn’t just showing it’s age, it’s dropped out of the race. Shooters have completely dried up in a near instant manner, I need to go back and track releases in the year of 1993 if we really did just get to 1994 and NOTHING.

Then the companies that remain are pretty loyal to PC Engine and not just one game in 1994, but 3-4. Namco and Hudson and Konami are a lot quieter and now it is C,D-rate companies like Right Stuff and Rayforce. Falcom’s releases have been High Quality but their merits as actual games, ehhhhhh.

I’m sorry the rest of the forum can’t enjoy Tokimeki Memorial, because what a treasure. We also got Nectaris, but on CD. I think any other year Mad Stalker would be Broken Good Game, but here feels like…weighed down by it’s company.

Still “proud” of my service slogging through the JRPGs, I got 3 left on my list (Brandish, Dragon Knight 3, Travellers) and there are at least 2 others left for the rest of you (Startling Odyssey 2 and Wizardry Something.) so I got another questionable Falcom game. I beginning to think Warning A Huge Podcast was lying to me about the merits of Falcom games and dungeon crawlers.

So Thanks for the kind words! We’re almost done, outside of the Mahjong and pornography we didn’t play.

[Rudie]

Dragon Knight 3

If you remember DK2, that game was all the beautiful women had been kidnapped. This has a dingus legendary hero immediately have all his cool stuff get stolen and then he kisses a magic medal that lowers his LVL from 25 to 1. As opposed to 2 being a dungeon crawler this is just generic topdown overworld with bad topdown dungeons. You touch the ground, there was pornography here, once. There had to be.

The character designs were better in 2 as well. And that one didn’t have attempted assault in the first 2 minutes! Go to the dump Dragon Knight 3.

I beat Basted to, as it is only 3 or so hours long. I didn’t even see any of the secret boob scenes. I remain Anime Pure, for my future Anime Marriage…

I love the redhead.

[MintyJuffowup]

Puyo Puyo CD

Okay, the port was handled by NEC Avenue and a company called “Goo!” but it’s not that bad. With the CD audio, they added voices to all of the characters and that’s just perfect. They absolutely needed to do that. I don’t think characters say anything during the actual match, so they don’t get a full five stars from me. Also, I just like Mean Bean Machine’s music more than whatever this is.

It’s Puyo Puyo and it works how many other NEC Avenue ports can say the same thing? Gain Ground and Bonanza Bros? I’m blanking on other ones. I love Puyo Puyo. I am not at all a “Pro-player.” I will lose to just about any human who bothers to be good at it. However, I can beat the game and that means something to me.

[MintyJuffowup]

I almost forgot to chime in on the dire circumstances of the PC Engine circa 1994. This is the year that Hudson and NEC put out the PC-FX, I think knowing it was going to fail, as well as the year that they introduce the Arcade System card. That means Hudson was overextending itself trying to create launch titles for the FX and supporting the console that people actually owned. Their position is similar to SEGA’s at the time but much worse.

In 1995, Hudson will pivot to sunsetting the PC Engine and supporting the Saturn and Super Famicom. We will get to have some pretty nice swan songs.

[Rudie]

Shooter release Research:

Mystic Formula July 23 1993
CD Denjin July 30th 1993
Sylphia October 22 1993
MagiCool October 29 1993
Super Darius II Dec 24 1993

Fray CD Xak Gaiden March 30 1994
Tokimeki Memorial May 27 1994

Ai ChouAniki Feb 24 1995
Space Invaders The Original Game July 28 1995
SAPPHIRE Nov 24th 1995

Steamhearts March 22 1996

Look there is still shooters coming! The Mission Starts Now.

(I’m going to post about the secret shooter in Tokimeki when I beat it.)

[Rudie]

Well How are things going on the Super Famicom in 1994 with…370 releases!? Most of the Common with PC Engine are by series.

Common with PC Engine
Super Fire Pro Wrestlinf 3, Daisenkai Jidai 2, Super Real Mahjong PIV, Space Invaders, Cotton 100%, Super Bomberman 2, Ranma 1/2 fighting game, Pachiokun Special 2, Popful Mail, kikikaikai, Brandish, World Heroes 2, Fatal Fury Special, Tenshi no Uta??, Load Runner Twin, Genocide 2, Shin Nippon Pro Wrestling Ring 94 Battle Field in blahblah, Super Sangoshi, Super Final Match Tennis, Cyber Night 2, Shanghai 3, Human Grandprix3 F1 Triple Battle, Ultima VII, Tadaima Yuusha Oubouchu Okawari, Naruhodo The World, Godzilla Kaiju Daikeisen, Sangoshi IV, Super Momotarou 3, Super Wrestling Angels, Art of Fighting 2, Super Fire Pro Wrestling Special, YuYuHakusho Tokubetsushuu, Monster Maker Kids

Notable Games
Fire Emblem, Ninja Warriors Again, Super Metroid, Shadowrun, Final fantasy VI, Kunio no Oden, Stuntrace FX, Bubsy, Super Street Fighter 2, TSURITAROU, Goof Troop, Super Bonk, Fire Pro Joshi All star Slam, Wild Guns, Mother 2, Live A Live, The Firemen, Sparkster, Dazaemon, Kirby Bowl, Libble Rabble, Demon’s Crest, Freda Emblem of Justice, GON, Fire Fighting (??), Mortal Kombat 2, Kamaitachi no Yoru, Gekijou Parodius, Donkey Kong Country, Wonder Project J, Ganbare Goemon 3, Super Snakey (?), Rockman X2, Umihara Kawase,

There are 3 Hebereke games from Sunsoft for this year alone? I didn’t even know there was 3 Hebereke games for Super Famicom.

There are Two Fire Fighting games??? Have I confused them for one for many years? Are they both good??

There are so so many Pachinko, Horse Racing, Mahjong, Fishing, Shogi, Baseball, Wrestling games. You know what is not on this list? Shooters! I just remembered oh yeah Street Fighter 2 came out and killed all other arcade genres. There are a lot of SF2 clones, including on the PC Engine. Mystery Solved.

[loki]

fire fighting was renamed “the ignition factor” for western release

the firemen also has a sequel on playstation

the ranma 1/2 fighting games on snes and pc engine are different games, but both suck, so does it really matter? the snes one got released in the uk like a decade before any actual ranma 1/2 stuff did, presumably just to cash in on the general anime craze that was going around at the time.

[Rudie]

Are both of the fire fighting games good? Is there a better one? Two top down fire fighting on one system in one year localized entirely in Japan?

[Rudie]

I did it I beat Force Gear! It took 3 nights of trying but I did it!!! Before that though:

Brandish

Brandish is one of the most cursed pieces of software in existence. It’s a top-down dungeon crawler where every time you turn the world is redrawn to face up. You can instantly get completely turned around. You can only attack when an enemy is adjacent to you and there is nothing to prevent an enemy bum-rushing you from the side. Interacting with objects is Holding I and pressing down. II contextually makes you jump. There are fake walls, hidden pits, poison chests, poison enemies, and you can die instantly at any point.

Play the PSP version that was released when the Vita was dying in the west. Yeah you read that sentence right. They did a good job and the world rotates instead of being redrawn.

The setting is kickass in that a king betrayed the God-Dragon that guarded the city so with the Dragon’s last breath buried the city and cursed the land. Now a thousand years later your ex-girlfriend shoots you with a magic missile and you both fall into the Curse Hole. Welcome to Brandish asshole.

This Falcom game ported by NEC (not Avenue) is full pure-blooded sickos only.

Force Gear

This is a Badass Score Attack Shooter hidden in Tokimeki Memorial. It almost makes me forget all the time I’ve wasted on RPGs. It fucking owns. The stand-alone ISO is out there, you can secretly launch it on the PC Engine Mini. It is one of the dozens of reasons Tokimeki Memorial owns.

Every further tried gave me a new score method. The final boss is a puzzle. It takes defeating enemies quick to spawn more enemies to the limit. There is no reason Konami should have worked this hard to make something this good that you would only see if you happen to join the Electronics Club OR go to the electronics club on Culture Day. I hadn’t! I need to track down the bonus games in other Tokimeki Memorials. Spoiler: Anearth Stories’s Demo Also has a hidden shooter in it. I bought it for Brandon Sheffield. I’m not sure it’s out on the internet yet.

Force Gear!!! Ah yes Video Games!!!

FIGHT ME COWARDS

[meauxdal]

gradius font is so good

[Rudie]

Okay I’ve played 10 minutes of TRAVELLERS and that is enough.

Travellers Densetsu wo Buttobase

Original: It sure is buddy. Victor Entertainment bringing the last released game of 1994.

Protagonists: 4 Legendary Heroes, who are now bored and one of them is pervert (The Hero) (He’s also a drunk). The two girls are noted underage. The older wiser one is of course 19 years old. It reminds me of the most dreck anime you’d watch in a college anime club.

Thousands of years ago intro: Nope, but the starting narration giving these 18 year old’s life history made me immediately start looking at clothes on yahoo auctions.

Unique Concepts: I desperately want to show y’all how “animation” works in this game but literally no one has uploaded a video of it to youtube. No one. This game might as well not exist. Let’s check the Kurisu score

Thousands of years ago intro: WAIT YES ACTUALLY. It was just so immediately “oh fuck no” that I rejected remembering it.

“Knight of Legend”, damn I wanna play that guy. Not these dorkuses. Too bad he died 1000 years ago.

Did The Grind Make You Quit: i didn’t even make it past the first battle. The game doesn’t deserve me explaining what’s happening in this photo:

Verdict: 0 out of 5 Parody Games. Joke games can go in the dumpster!

[Rudie]

One more thing today: Brandish’s cool ass setting is basically just Dark Souls and that I can play Dark Souls is so cool. Dang…Dark Souls…

[RT-55J]

battle screen looks extremely Demon Rush-esque at a glance

[loki]

time for a snes post: i played the fire games

fire fighting/the ignition factor has the more realstic visual style of the two, and to go along with that, is the more sim-felling game. you’ve got to manage equipment and resources, there’s different fire extinguishers for different kinds of fires, and it manages to make an eight minute time limit feel incredibly short.

the firemen looks a lot more cartoony, and it’s also a lot more videogamey. it’s kind of a top down shooting game like zombies ate my neighbours, but the enemies are all fire. like, literally, there are fireballs that move around and even chase you. i liked this one better. feels like it must have been the inspiration for tamsoft’s simple series fire fighting game on the ds, too.

[MintyJuffowup]

Alright, let’s wrap this month up!

Akiyama Jin no Sūgaku Mystery
I actually couldn’t find this game online. Apparently it’s some blend of edutainment and adventure game. It features a television personality mathematician. It has this song, which has to be better than anything else the game has to offer.

【PCE Song】秋山仁の数学ミステリー 秘宝 インドの炎 (Akiyama Jin no Suugaku Mystery) ~♪ Ending Song

21 Emon: Mezase! Hotel Ō

This is another board game! From what I can tell, it’s even more like Monopoly than MomoDen. It also throws in something that would become familiar with Hudson’s future board game series, mini-games. Unfortunately, the font is really tiny and hard for an OCR to pick up. I played three turns, won a whack-a-mole game, and felt completely lost as to whether I was winning or losing. My money for best board game still goes to MomoDen 2.

Bonk 3 CD
For some reason, Turbo Technologies saw fit to rerelease this game in CD format. I think I like the audio a bit better, but the level design is off. I mean, just as off as they were in the HuCard release. I can become big or small, which can act like keys to different pathways. The stages fell big and labyrinthine, but with Bonk’s slow waddle, it’s not really exciting to find out where the secrets are.

Ryūkō no Ken

This is a pretty cool early fighter, but the weird tricks Hudson did to make zoom-outs work do not work on my CRT. Or maybe I need to change settings in Retroarch, idk. When I get up close, it’s fine and it plays like a high damage, slow-paced Street Fighter II. There’s a story mode with a scripted progression from fight to fight. You can only pick one of two characters. I like Robert more. This is the only PC Engine SNK game where I could win two rounds.

Wizardry III & IV
They just kept making these ports. They are fine. There’s no auto-mapping so you have to stick with the age old method of casting a spell to read your co-ordinates. I played for a bit and found that a lot of monsters were easier than I expected. Maybe I had just remembered enough about how to play in order to make good decisions. Wizardry is cool. One of these days, I’m going to play through a 6-person dungeon crawler. Maybe it will be Etrian Odyssey. People love those, right?

World Heroes 2
World Heroes 2 is kind of dumb. Which is a strength, I guess. It’s hard for me to choose it over Fatal Fury Special. I mean, the AI is just as unfair. Then again, sometimes you want to be a football player, tackling a ninja. I realized Hudson designed the game so you could play it with a two-button controller. Tapping buttons gave light attacks while holding them a little longer registered as heavies. It makes a turbo pad work a little bit like a 4 button controller. I’m still amazed that the Arcade card could make a game this big, fast, and detailed.

Startling Odyssey II

RayForce went from making a generic, Famicom-looking RPG, to making a generic, Super Famicom-looking RPG. Everyone regards the protagonist as a legend, a blue god who can kill monsters in one slash. That translates into the first few battles as well. The main character can wipe out enemies with one attack while the two others have to try at least four times. The fan translation of this is a lightly edited, machine-translated script. It makes it possible to know what to do in order to progress, but there’s hardly any personality here. I’d rather play Cosmic Fantasy 4, and that feels like one of the worst insults I could possibly give.

Because I’ve become a lot busier now, I’m going to suggest we stretch things out a bit. I’m planning on playing 1995’s games in September and cleaning up the rest in October. Thanks for reading, everyone!

[Rudie]

I was wondering what else there was for this month.

I spent the evening with fighters. Algunos ran me down with it’s one song for every generic stage. The intro made me laugh because it went on for so long in text, while the visuals did almost nothing. It just kept restating “these powerful warriors are gathered to fight in a contest of 10 warriors and then there will be one warrior who has defeated 9 warriors which means they are the strongest warrior of the 10 but there is also a secret warrior who is organizing the tournament and he may be one of the 9 opponents or the 10 warriors.”

I can actually answer a bit about Art of Fighting. Thanks to the mister and my HD TV i can say to simulate the scaling the arcade did it is actually switching resolutions. Pretty neat trick on Hudson’s part. But the fighting games for the PC Engine don’t feel good. They feel like magic tricks. Like Famicom fighters. None of those are good either, and the best taiwanese effort is a miracle that it even works as well as it does. I feel like I am playing a pirate cart with all of these.

Which is to say I’ve always been enamored by World Heroes 2. I saw it at a gas station once, and then had a fighting game strategy guide with it in the back. It’s so bright and colorful and holy shit a SF2 copy. It plays just as bad as any of the Hudson ports which generates in me a face of “eh you could and can play it…” like minty said it’s got a football player and mudman and some ninjas. Incredible that it’s pulled off at all.

I keep arriving at Advanced Geo at the end of the night when I have no more energy. I’ve done it 3 times. I enjoy the beautiful Osaka stage and have to turn off the non-ero game. I think I am getting the name wrong too. It’ll have ports on Saturn and Playstation that have to be better than this.

[Rudie]

Rudie’s very tired Megadrive 1994 Mook recap. The Sega Megadricve/Genesis saw the launch of the 32X to thunderous nothing in 1994. There are also Laseractive games we can’t cover just like the Laser Disc games on PC Engine we haven’t covered. Sonic 3 arrives in the spring and Sonic and Knuckles comes out in the fall.

PC Engine Buddies: Art of Fighting, Noubunaga no Yabou: Maouden, Dungeon Master 2, Popful Mail, Bakuden Unbalance Zone, Record of the Lodoss War, Fatal Fury 2, Daifuusen Jidai 2, Dragon Slayer Eiyuu Densetsu, After Harmageddon Gaiden,

Notable Originals: Devil’s Course, Madden 94, Eternal Champions, Cool Spot, General Chaos, Virtua Racing GEN, Castlevania Bloodlines, Bare Knuckle 3, V.V, Monster World IV, Urusai Yatsura Dear My Friends CD, Captain Rang, NBA Jam, Sonic 3, Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat CD, Robocop V Terminator, Crusader of Centy, Lord Monarch, Super Street Fighter 2, Shining Force CD, Pulseman, Dynamite Heady, Panorama Cotton, Langrisser 2, Mortal Kombat 2, Contra Hard Corps, Ecco The Dolphin 2, Star Wars Rebel Assault CD, Captain Tsubasa CD, that treasure YuYuHakusho fighter, Sonic and Knuckles, Rockman World, Starblade CD, Samurai Shodown, PuyoPuyo Tsuu, Doom 32X, Space Harrier 32X, Beyond Oasis, Virtual Racing 32X, Back to the Edo CD, Soulstar CD, Lunar 2 CD,

Damn does…does Megadrive have a better year than Super Famicom? Certainly would be happier than PC Engine town (I’m sorry Tokimeki!)

Even a decent year for the Sega CD. If you’ve never seen Soulstar look up Soulstar it’s better looking and playing than almost the entire 32X library. Also think it was funny how Japan got all the mortal kombat in a pile there. Definitely would rather play MK2 for Genesis than this year’s fighters. And that game cheats a lot!

[smbhax]

@Rudie

I can actually answer a bit about Art of Fighting. Thanks to the mister and my HD TV i can say to simulate the scaling the arcade did it is actually switching resolutions.

Not a change of screen resolution, but a jump between a single fixed zoomed-in art scale and a single fixed zoomed-out art scale as you reach a certain range from the opponent, instead of the smooth in-out scaling of the original NEOGEO hardware. It is quite jarring, and neither scale feels comfortable.

[MintyJuffowup]

Huh, it certainly seems like it’s changing resolutions because it was bugging out when I tried playing it!

[smbhax]

Some sort of emulation thing, maybe. If my Duo had actually been switching resolutions, it would have caused my Elgato HD60 to switch to an empty screen for a second each time, and that didn’t happen. It just popped from one scene scale to the other suddenly:

5 minutes of Art of Fighting (PC Engine)