TurboGrafx 16 / PC-Engine

While the internet holds many, many, maaany reasons to make you 

want to get off of this planet and go somewhere else where humanity 

does not exist, it also does hold some valuable good points.

One of those, is the vast oceans of information of any kind

you can access with waggling your fingers on a keyboard,

which, obviously, can be taken advantage of to learn more

about many things, like video games and game-related stuff.

This gives us the chance to learn about games, or even,

entire systems, that never were popular or even launched

in that part of the world you live, in a time where people

around the world was pretty disconnected and our only

source of information were magazines or word of mouth.

That's how I ended up discovering about this system, as,

back then, the Super Nintendo and Sega Mega Drive were 

the only systems that got extended coverage around here. 

So, lets basks on one of the positive aspects of the net

as I talk about for a bit about a little something called the 

TurboGrafx 16 internationally, or the PC-Engine in Japan.

But first, to talk about this system we need first know a bit about who made it, don't you think?

Well, surprisingly enough, it was console brought by a collaboration between two different companies!

The first one, NEC, was an important personal computer company, with a major role in the Japanese market, thanks to previously developed systems like the PC-88 and the PC-98. After years of looking how well Nintendo was doing with their Famicom, NEC thought of entering this medium and getting a piece of that sweet, sweet pie.

This interest appeared, coincidentally enough, at the same time that Hudson Soft, wanted to enter the home console market too. And yes, those Hudson soft, the people behind Bomberman and Adventure Island, among many other things. They tried to make several deals with Nintendo, like trying to pitch them a new format of "cartridge" to store data back when Nintendo was designing the Famicom Disk System.

Because NEC did not have experience in consoles, and Hudson Soft wasn't big enough to make one system alone, they ended up working together to bring a new console to this world.

This is the Japanese PC-Engine. I find it quite a bit more classy than the american version, but of course,
back then it was expected to change it to make it more "attractive" to american consumers.
At least we didn't have all of these systems in wood grain.

The system, at its core was a 8-Bit with improvements more akin to what you would expect from a 16-Bit system, making it kind of a half-step, to what we would see later with other 16-Bit systems. It had a 8-Bit CPU, and 16-Bit video encoder and video display controller, even sound-wise would end up being something between 8-Bit systems and the Sega Mega Drive. In any case, it was a huge technical improvement over the Famicom or the Master System, the systems existing at that point.

Not only that, it was, and still is, the smallest major home console conceived, which was considered a plus back then, compared to its rivals. Heck, it should be a plus even today. With a 14 cm x 14 cm x 3.8 cm dimensions, it would take around two stacks of 4 PC-Engines in a square formation to take more or less as much space of a Xbox One or a Play Station 4... Jesus, systems today are massive.

It wouldn't be the only thing that would catch the attention of the consumers, though; the format in which games came is also interesting.

That there on the right is a HuCard (another Japanese shortening for Hudson Cards!), and its the form of the "cartridges" on this system.

These little guys were an evolution of a prior creation of Hudson, the appropriately named "Bee Cards". Originally pitched to Nintendo for their Famicom Disk System, they would end up being used for certain games for MSX computers.

Later they would be reworked and made the format for PC-Engine games. This things are about a credit card's size, a bit thicker, and could hold up to a Megabyte of information, which was around double the amount most NES games could get.

In North America, they would get renamed Turbochips, to go along with the name change.






It was released in Japan on 30th October, 1987, and it rapidly become a huge success in that region, going so far as to achieve the level of popularity of Nintendo, and even selling more systems than Casa de Mario on 1988, all of this, of course, leaving Sega on a far third spot with their Master System. The system of NEC and Hudson would be the second most popular one during the fourth generation in that region.

The same didn't happen in America and Europe... Like, not even close at all.
You see, while it launched in Japan while the NES and the Master System were still a thing, Sega would catch up fast and develop the Sega Mega Drive, and they would market it to the U.S. before NEC would do the same for the PC-Engine. In fact, the Sega Genesis would launch around half a month earlier than the PC-Engine there.

For the international release, the system was given a new look, a new name, and a new marketing campaign. It became the TurboGrafx 16, in order to accentuate its stronger graphical capabilities compared to the most hardware there, the NES, something that wouldn't work nearly as well because the Sega Genesis was already doing that, and it was its direct competition now.

While at the very beginning it would sell okay in the U.S., sales would start falling off as time went on, and once Nintendo arrived with their Super Nintendo, the attention and interest in NEC and its system was pushed back enormously to leave space for the stupid, stupid 16-Bit console war, to the point that in 1994, they ended their support for the system in that region and went back to focusing on Japan. Very sad, indeed.


At the very least the left us these super-ultra-cheesy commercials....

Wait, so they make you pay 50 damn bucks for Kid Courage, which was a rather... forgettable experience, but they give you Bonk's Revenge, one of the best games in the system, for free? ...What?

Fortunately, the years the system kept being alive served to bring a good chunk games outside Japan! Curiously enough, when you look at the TG-16 / PC-E library, you will notice that there is some overlap between its library and the Sega Mega Drive library, with both sporting a lot of Shoot'em Ups and Arcade Ports, albeit, not the same games themselves, so thankfully is only a genre overlap, and not even one too big, as the system offered unique titles compared to Sega's machine, and it had other genres in spades, like Puzzle games.

There's a lot of neat stuff here!

Because of its very little popularity, the system's library is one of those that is mostly unknown by the majority, which also means its a lot more interesting to dive into and see what games it has.

Something that TG-16 / PC-E games have and its kind of neat is that there's very little slowdown or sprite flickering, something you probably can see from time to time in the other 16-Bit systems, this being to me quite impressive as the system would often use big graphics, like for example in Coryoon - Child of Dragon (that awesomely 80's anime cover in the lower right part). and all that while being less powerful than its two rivals.

Not only that, for some reason the games in this system made better use of the console's palette in comparison with the Mega Drive, in which you could find more often than you would like games with dull palettes or poor colour choices (often enough result as "meh" porting).

Another thing it did "better" than Sega's machine is make a better use of its CD-based add-on. PC-Engine would be the first console to use CDs beating Sega to the punch by years, which is a nice badge there already, but also avoided the awful amount of terrible FMV games that the poor Sega CD received.

In fact, the CD add-on is surprisingly worthy, with many good games released on CD format, that expands the moderately extensive HuCard library. Heck, it is worth to praise alone for the awesome soundtracks that its CD games brought to the table.

I find early video game CD music was absolutely stunning, with all that glam rock and jazz.

This CD add-on was even region free (unlike the base system, sadly), so you could import games from other regions and enjoy them, and it was even less expensive than a Sega CD in the states, with the Turbo CD being 300, and the Sega CD being 400 (Just like I said on the Mega Drive introduction, CD stuff was expensive as all hell back then!).

Yet another little fun thing about the system lies in the controller. While, by and large, was pretty much the NES controller with different shape, it added two "Turbo Switches". I think the name gives you an idea of what they did, but whatever: This switches would let you use turbo capacities in the I and II buttons (A and B, basically), so you didn't need a third party controller with turbo buttons if you wanted to use them.

Some game manuals would even call your attention on those switches and tell you to use them "as a tactic". Yeah, sure... Also, if I recall correctly, some games had interesting uses for the switches too.

All in all, the Turbografx 16 or PC-Engine is a rather curious hardware, one that I didn't know it existed until the Nintendo Wii was announced to have a "Virtual Console"; and it would provide something called "TurboGrafx 16" games; occurrence that made me go find info about this system, a system that today I find a welcome addition to the 16-Bit generation, even if there's some overlap with Sega's machine in certain areas.

Although let me say that, even with said overlap, you still had three systems with wildly different libraries, making all three worth to acknowledge and enjoy, and to me that's reason enough to celebrate.

So...

LET'S ALL DANCE LIKE IT'S A TURBOGRAFX COMMERCIAL!

Fuck yeah, white people! I love these two goofballs, and I hope
one day I can dance as well as them.