PCエンジン shenanigans
this is a big one, full of pics, so i'll cut right here, right now.



over the past couple days i took a stroll through my PCE ROMs and now i've decided to single out some games that made an impression on me in some way or another. why? i dunno. i figure people on my friends list would enjoy it, and i enjoy putting this kind of thing together. and i do have the time, right now. i've broken this down into a few categories that are rather arbitrary, but i'm sure you'll forgive me.

SPECIAL
these are games that seem to have some sort of special, interesting quality that makes them stand out in some way. yeah, that's really vague. some of these are old favorites; some of these are games i'd never touched before in my life and played for about five minutes, but i think are interesting enough to show off a bit.


how about this, for a start? bonk's revenge.

i decided to give this game a whirl, and i'm probably about halfway through it at this point -- i dunno; i've never beaten it before. it really does feel different than the first game in more ways than the spin being changed. the bonk sprite looks different, the aesthetics are very different -- the last game was all prehistoric, more or less, and this one has beach resorts, big boats full of shipping crates, and this stone age train bonus stage. if you get 50 happy faces in any level, you get access to the best train when you beat a level, which gives you both a 1up and an extra heart for your life bar. anyway, i just love the way this image looks.


after you get off the best train, princess za grabs you by the head and "WARP!!"s you to, uh, the next level? i dunno if this lets you skip something or what ... it doesn't happen on the other trains, but i wasn't paying careful enough attention to know what the result was, and there's no bonk's revenge faq on gamefaqs. anyway, it's cute, if nothing else.


before CSI, there was this... sorry, that's all i got. it's a really mediocre-seeming driving game with a bit of a shooting element -- your partner pops up out of the sunroof and shoots cars for you. not bad, i guess, even if the tunnel section looked like night driver.


granzort, at least according to old TML lore i've assimilated but don't really remember, is a psuedo-sequel to majin eiyuu wataru (i.e. keith courage in alpha zones.) they're both anime licensed games in japan, with the same copyright info, but i don't know if the series are related. there are some similarities, which makes me think they're probably made by the same team (and, as an aside, xexyz, for the NES, feels a hell of a lot like keith courage.) by the way, this is a supergrafx game. i'm mostly just calling it out cos this vista is so pretty. love the vivacity of turbografx color.


this one's just something i thought fenegi would like. the game is called はなたーかだか！？ (hana taaka daka!?, whatever the hell that means.) maybe i'll make a video fenky banner out of it sometime.


uh, yeah. this is from the opening of mesopotamia (aka somer assault in the US.) hello, god. what are you doing here? this game is definitely special in the "special people" sort of way, by the by.


did you know that hudson soft made an original 忍者龍剣伝 (ninja gaiden) game based on the first NES one, four years after it came out? me either. (well, i bet you did, ben.)

oddly enough the sprites seem even smaller, though i could be wrong. the visual design is (more or less) the same but the actual level design is completely different. odder, the music is original, except for the death fanfare. i didn't bother playing beyond the first level, but ... weird.


amongst the HuCARDs i have dumps of, there are about 30,000 unremarkable shooters. oh, 16-bit era, you're so silly... anyway, this game, P-47: some subtitle i've forgotten, is not at all interesting. i just liked the way that little church and log cabin looked, against the blue sky and the mountains.


another very "special" game, pachiokun is an RPG starring a sentient pachinko ball in the realm of humans, sent by the pachinko king (a pachinko ball with a big white mustache and a crown, of course.) i love how the game even starts off in a pachinko parlor. isn't that a bit depressing, really? pachinko parlors depress me, anyway.


i actually owned pac-land on HuCARD back then (still do, actually.) i always thought the fairy that greeted you at the end of the level looked really neat, so here she is, in her flowery abode.


i always wanted to get silent debuggers but i never did. (that happened with a lot of games -- especially for TG and SMS, as they were kind of second-string systems and i'd usually pick to get a NES, genesis, or SNES game instead.) mainly i wanted it because the title was so freaking cool. i also though the back of the box looked promising. yeah, those sure were the days of informed games consumerism. this title screen is cool, though, isn't it? wish i'd gotten it after all... and this is the US version, katakana inclusive.

let's see...



uh, all right.



well, i don't think much of your name either.


OPENINGS
these are openings that, in some way, caught my eye. you know, they had that certain something. perhaps it's good... or perhaps not.


as night creatures begins, you're bitten by a bat, which causes you to get a nosebleed (well, that's what the animation looks like, anyway.) then dracula (i guess) comes out and tells you you're a vampire. but, you don't seem to have any cool powers. shame. as i explained to kevin yesterday, the game looks and feels like a shittier version of captain silver, which is just a really scarily bad idea.

i beat captain silver, by the way.


the opening line of toy shop boys, one of aforementioned gaggle of utterly mediocre shooters. bad game, but what a motivating factor! fuck saving princesses.


what a title. what a cool mech. i wanna play this game! actually, you don't, but this screenshot will stay with us forever.

TEXT
whether it's comically bad engrish, or, uh, comically bad english, here we go.

this one is really, really special. rock-on is bad. it's on the low end of the HuCARD based PC engine shooter repertoire, which is really rather weak. but what's very notable about it -- besides its totally bitchin' cover art -- is this opening text crawl. this thing flies by so unbelievably fast that it took shane and i about 4-5 system resets to actually make it through the whole thing. if we can't read it, and we're good little readers, what about those poor japanese kids who bought this game back in 1989 or whenever? shame. but look at that. "dealy beloved"? classic. zero wing, eat your heart out.

to offset that, we've got this:

cross wiber's story is actually almost completely coherent and mistake-free. i always sort of feel bad when i see this much english in a japanese game and it's not funny, so i had to save it and present it to everyone. we can't get ironic joy out of it, and the original audience probably can't even read it. pity.


now this is is just a bit judgmental for me. dragon's curse is the turbografx version of wonder boy III: the dragon's trap, one of my favorite SMS games. i don't like the PCE version quite as much; it somehow lacks a bit of charm. ugly and disgusting demons? calm down! the narration also calls you disgusting for getting changed into a dragon (er, lizard-man). funny, i thought that was pretty cool when i was 12.


well, i better follow it then, huh? namco made a lot of really shitty PCE games, including samurai ghost. this is the US version, by the way.


and of course, the inspiration for my blog's new name. pretty cool title screen, which is why i blew it up. it's far a future RPG on PC engine, a corridor crawler. those are so unplayable nowadays. but it's neat to see a hard-SF one.


from sokoban. really, that's meant as a command to the player -- you're to challenge the japan levels. but really, it seems more like it's a nationalistic exhortation, doesn't it? they should heed it right now, anyway, game-wise.


this time, not god: somer assault's dumb opening. there's always something so funny about ridiculously eeeeeeeeeeevil stuff like this. after this the slinky/main character appears in her crystal ball and pomously argues with her. it's pretty off the wall. atlus has come a long way.


from neutopia. you think pretty well of yourself, huh, old man?


and he's back in the sequel with a quip. lord.

hudson should port these two games to the GBA in a double cart. or DS, whatever. they're cute little zelda clones.

HORRID
games that inspire unpleasant reactions in the player. whether from being bad, or just plain.. wrong.


oh, china warrior. is that bruce lee? nice face. if you haven't played this, you must. it's auto-scrolling, the enemies don't attack you, they just walk toward you, and it was part of the short-lived 16 bit genre of "REALLY TALL SPRITES LOOK IMPRESSIVE". yurk.


hi-keeba!


shudder. ghost manor is a decent late-8/early-16 bit style action game, from what i've played, but it's US developed and is horrifyingly ugly. what's wrong with your GODDAMN HEAD!?


obocchama-kun (which translates to something like "little mathter" -- yes, it's got a lisp, for fuck's sake) is an incredibly generic platformer from prime PCE shit shovelevers namco (assisted by the ever-trashy pack-in-video.) this game is old enough that the design doc was merely "make a mediocre platformer with a wacky character." for some reason, when obocchama-kun stands on a turtle shell, if you hold up he acts like this. uh-huh. i think i'll go play some chubby cherub.


W T F. tatsunoko fighter confronts us with this character. no, the text box does not actually say "what the FUCK IS WRONG WITH MY EYES?" like you might expect.


maybe i should have put this in openings, but i'm torn. well, it's a better motivation than ninjas kidnapping the president, i guess. turns out vigilante is more or less a sequel to kung-fu (is it also based on a jackie chan movie in its original japanese incarnation, like spartan-X is? anybody know?) it has sort of "double dragon goes old west" aesthetics, but it plays almost entirely like kung fu, but with some weaponry. weird.

UNNECESSARY CHANGES
you know, before "localization" was invented, people did whatever the fuck. here we go...


when TTi decided, for some reason, to bring shubibinman 2 to the US under the title shockman (well, changing the title was a good move, natch) they also changed the names of the characters. you know, in 1992, the audience for the TG was infintesimal -- why bother americanizing? our current governor aside, "arnold" is not a terribly cool name, either. and i'm fond of "kyapiko" because, well, what the hell? that's a horrible name. i bought the game, though, because it was on clearance and looked like mega man. job well done, TTi!


i'm not really clear on why they changed paranoia to psychosis. and then trademarked it. they're both good game titles. unfortunately, there's nothing very scary about a big purple jellybean. even if you put an alien on it. i do approve of the US version's logo, though. the game is yet another mediocre shooter.


magical chase is stupidly rare. i think it's the rarest US TG game, but i'm not positive. (it did go to stores, i think, unlike dynastic hero.) anyway, this is the japanese version.


same level, US version. 2 years later, by the by -- 1993 (so late! 1993 was the last year for TG games.) the tetris blocks have gone and been replaced by a (rather nice looking, actually) castle. and the cool enemies have been replaced by, blech, teddy bears.

given that the japanese version is really rare, too, you'd have to spend a stupid amount of money to end up with all the magical chase content that there is. how sad. you have to wonder why they'd bother to put so much effort into the game in 1993, when there was no real reason to do so. a total mystery. it's not like they replaced the cute witch character with something more american-appeal, or whatever. totally bizarre...

and that's it for this trip down turbografx way. hope you enjoyed the ramblings.