What Turbo game are you currently playing?

[Purple1308]

Sidearms and alien crush

[Warbucks]

I'm playing some Bikini Girls.
Im about to beat it.

 

[JoshTurboTrollX]

Sidearms and alien crush

Have you tried Side Arms special!?  It's so good!!!

[Purple1308]

Sidearms and alien crush

Have you tried Side Arms special!?  It's so good!!!

Yeah that's what I bought I just called it a turbo game since I'm using it on my duo.

[johnnykonami]

I'm playing some Bikini Girls.
Im about to beat it.

 

I see what you did there!

[Warbucks]

I'm playing some Bikini Girls.
Im about to beat it.

 

I see what you did there!

Mwahahaha

[Xanadu Gaiden]

I got Final Blaster a week ago on Gothenburg's annual retro game fair and just played it for the first time.

I like it more than I expected, the weapons are fun, graphics cool and music excellent. There are some cute references to other Namco games like the rotating walls from Xevious and annoying dancing bugs from Galaga. I also like that you can force the scroll to go a little bit backwards if you miss something.

The only thing I dislike so far is that shots can be fired at you before the enemy has appeared at the top of the screen. Same goes for you, so you can destroy enemies before they appear too, so with memorization you can avoid getting shot at by those battleships on stage 3.

Yup, stage 3 is as far as I got but the first two levels had a pretty fair difficulty so even a novice like me can enjoy the game!

[NightWolve]

I got Final Blaster a week ago on Gothenburg's annual retro game fair and just played it for the first time.

Hm, another PCE shooter I missed out on, doesn't seem familiar to me at all. But not a bad job by Namco looks like, I'd say it's worth checking out. I really enjoyed their Dragon Spirit port on my TurboExpress BITD, shooters were my favorite genre on the PCE for the most part (RPGs for SNES).




(Found those shots from a decent review site just now with a PCE selection.)

[Xanadu Gaiden]

You know, I'm really not a shooter guy but I'm always on the lookout for good games. Final Blaster certainly wasn't on my "buy this" list but the price was right and turned out to be a fine game! It does have enough flavor to stand out and solid gameplay. There are many features left for me to figure out, I've only scraped the surface (there is some way to turn into a burning Phoenix). Some positive reviews claim that it's a hard game, but l'm glad the difficulty curve isn't overly steep.

[bigdawg8412]

Hey. I just recently played the game Coryoon. I just found out about this game for some reason. First thing I thought of when playing it was "Hey, this reminds me a lot of Air Zonk". Then I read that it was made by some of the same developers as Air Zonk. Great game.

[GoldenWheels]

Man for whatever reason I am really into Macross 2036. It isn't the best shooter by any means, and I know 0 about Macross. But it's just fun as hell and I love the (fairly simple) boss battles where you're in mech mode.

[nopepper]

Just 1CC Nexzr since got the itch to play it after the thread on lesser known great games. This is easily one of the top games for the PCE and deserves to be mentioned among the Rondos, Ys I & II, Ys IV, GoT and LoT. It's a bit of a bitch on the 3rd level, but once you get past that, it's very manageable, as it is oddly magnanimous (thanks Duomazovs) after the third level, so it's fairly easy to recover. I would say that the unbalance in difficulty is one of my knocks against it, along with some of the tunes sounding way too lounge-y, especially the title and opening level songs.

Then proceeded to 1CC Star Parodier, since I remember reading somewhere it utilized the same engine as Nexzr and wanted to check that out. Not sure I saw the similarities, although both games are beautifully drawn and are among the technical showcases of the hardware. I had beaten this one before, probably 15 years ago, and was unimpressed, and still am. It's a bit of a fun ride, but it just lacks any tension as it's just too damn easy. I like all the references and some of the levels are quite cleverly designed, but again, the lack of tension had me close to turning it off towards the end.

I think next up will be Darius Plus, as I just recently beat Darius Gaiden on Saturn (not 1CC mind you, had to use 7 lives...) and am hankering for more Darius. I've always shrugged off that series, especially since I found Gaiden to be unbearably difficult. But after giving it some time, have grown to appreciate it (especially the weird music!) and want to get to its roots.

[Gypsy]

Nexzr fucking rules.

The only issue with Star Parodier is that it is too easy. Still great fun though.

[Goemon]

Just finished Jigoku Meguri.
It's got some hellish inst-death setups and some super tricky platforming but still really enjoyed it.
Managed to 1CC it too as I nailed the early levels and built up a number of lives.

[tbone3969]

Tiger Road

[dshadoff]

I've been testing out the UperGrafx digital video/CDROM replacement device for compatibility lately, so I've been playing a lot of games, after a long absence from playing anything...

For American games,
- Just finishing up a run through Cosmic Fantasy 2 again (this time, with the "Un-Worked Designs" patch)
- Next up will be Exile/Exile 2 - again with the unworked designs patches to return difficulty to the original - maybe this time I'll be able to complete Exile 2 !

Now that I have several years of Japanese study under my belt, I also tried to work through a bunch of Japanese games... I understood more of the digital comics than I expected (as in, close to 100% without looking up many words), but RPGs are still a mental challenge.  Just finished these in the past 2-3 weeks:
- Pastel Lime (very short and kind of dumb)
- Gunbuster 1 & 2 (though I loved the anime, these games were not nearly as good as I expected)
- Fushigi no Umi no Nadia (overall I liked this)
- Urusei Yatsura (nicely done, but a little long)

Currently working on:
- Galaxy Fraulein Yuna (not so bad - great graphics and voicing, but slightly tedious because the story is a bit on the juvenile side)
- Sailor Moon (a little childish, but OK I guess - based on the very first season though)
- Tenchi Muyo (pretty true to the original, with great graphics and seems to be a fair bit of content)

Actually, for some reason, I had always imagined digital comics as being trivially short - only about 1 hour in length.  But in fact, the majority of them are probably between 6 and 10 hours long.  I'm surprised how much graphics and speech they were able to pack in.

[NightWolve]

For American games,
- Just finishing up a run through Cosmic Fantasy 2 again (this time, with the "Un-Worked Designs" patch)
- Next up will be Exile/Exile 2 - again with the unworked designs patches to return difficulty to the original - maybe this time I'll be able to complete Exile 2 !

I heard about those "Un-Working Designs" patches at romhacking.net I recall...

I forgot about what the Cosmic Fantasy 2 one does, I don't recall ever having a problem with the game, and I don't think I care if it was some spiteful protest at WD anyway. The WD haters got way too fanatical over the years...

As for Exile 2, I know people complained about the difficulty. I beat both Exiles pretty much as soon as they arrived from Turbo Zone Direct in a couple of days. I didn't really have a strong reaction to the difficulty as some did because I saw it was very easy to grind/level up: I just took an adjustable wrench, tightened it down on the sword button with turbo active, positioned Sadler where enemies would just keep spawning from right-to-left in a straight-forward manner, turned off the TV, "let it ride" and some hours later, I was fully leveled-up, ready to beat the final boss with just a little bit of basic strategy... The End. ;)

Is that cheating ?? I dunno, in those days I cared more about the story and EXP grinding just hurts my fingers, wastes my time, so I wasn't above using a trick or two to skip past all of that if it was available. Guess Victor Ireland didn't really iron out all issues to stop renters from being able to beat his localized games over a weekend and avoid paying full price to buy/own the game (which is why he said he deliberately tried to increase the difficulty in his batch of products)...

[dshadoff]

For Cosmic Fantasy, they also undid the censorship on graphics. I think all it was, was Babette flipping the bird to the computer, but I wasn't sure whether the shower scene was also affected. They said difficulty and gold had been adjusted, but to be honest, I didn't notice.  (Of course, I hadn't played it in like 15 or 20 years).

For Exile 1 and Exile 2, it was all about difficulty. I was able to beat Exile 1 back in the day, but I was frustrated by the final boss sequence in Exile 2 back then (something about a staircase... this was about 20 years ago).

Over the years, this difficulty level became famous (because it was effectively untested and a mistake), and I've been dying to try out a patch which corrects that.

Here's a link to the post where all of the changes are described:
romhacking.net/forum/index.php?topic=23436.0

Like you, I felt that they expressed their feelings a little more emotionally and more specifically at a person/entity (Working Designs) than would have been optimal.

Dave

[gilbert]

For Cosmic Fantasy, they also undid the censorship on graphics. I think all it was, was Babette flipping the bird to the computer, but I wasn't sure whether the shower scene was also affected. They said difficulty and gold had been adjusted, but to be honest, I didn't notice.  (Of course, I hadn't played it in like 15 or 20 years).

Don't know about the patch, but there is at least another subtly censored scene that I know of (but seems that no one talks about, or they just didn't notice) in the English version.
During the cutscene where Van/Ban fist met the captured and tied up Rim/Lim/Babette, Rim was actually not wearing any pants in the original Japanese version. She was given back her usual (hot) pants in the English release.

[dshadoff]

I wasn't sure what you were talking about, so I looked it up - there was a "walkthrough" insert in one of the magazines back in the day... the walkthrough wasn't so thorough, but it had a pic of that scene.  It's perhaps an overstatement to say she wasn't wearing any pants... her white shirt covered the same area in the same way as if she had been wearing them.  This is probably why nobody talks about it - it's really hard to notice.

I'm pretty sure that the patch left it as it was in the American release (red hotpants).

[gilbert]

Actually you see more than that, during the vertically panning full body scene just before the pic you mentioned.
However, after checking I found that she's not wearing her pants in the English version either:

(skip to around 14:30)

So it's possibly just my memory being bad, as the scene was not changed, though for some reasons I did remember seeing that scene with her pants on.
Not sure, but maybe it's the Mega CD version.

[farankoshan]

Booted up Cadash today and missed seeing those pigs in the 1st cave... 🐷

[Ashevent]

Picked up Legendary Axe II a little while ago and decided to give it a go lately, pretty darn fun and I dig the more sinister look of the game. Looks freaking great too IMO.

[NightWolve]

Picked up Legendary Axe II a little while ago and decided to give it a go lately, pretty darn fun and I dig the more sinister look of the game. Looks freaking great too IMO.

Glad you randomly brought up Legendary Axe II, I rediscovered what my favorite track was on the game so perfect opportunity to log some tweets forum-style that I made about it a while back!

The best chiptune of Legendary Axe II (1990) (TurboGrafx-16) I identified awhile back: Stage 3, wait about ~56 seconds for that sweet hook to kick in (though it's much too short)! ❤️

https://downloads.khinsider.com/game-soundtracks/album/legendary-axe-ii-ost-1990-nec-turbografx-16
Direct Download: 06 Stage 03.mp3 (Sometimes direct link breaks, but page link above should work)
Or better yet, I'll add it to the PC Engine Greatest Hits audio folder:

_{► /audio/Legendary-Axe-II-06-Stage-3.mp3}

I still remember actually getting to rent it as a kid via 1 of 2 video rental stores (Ken's World of Video & Bogarts) that actually stocked TurboGrafx-16 HuCards (never CDs though), was blown away! I owned an original TurboGrafx-16 model at that point which I had won with Bloody Wolf included, but I upgraded to a Turbo Duo after it broke...

Anyway, just wanted to preserve some of my history/share the soundtrack/add content in longer form given the context/your post.

[Obfuscate]

L-DIS and Gradius 2

The last of the higher rated shooters I've played for the system. A delight to play. I haven't beaten it either but I'm working on it.

[NightWolve]

L-DIS and Gradius 2

The last of the higher rated shooters I've played for the system. A delight to play. I haven't beaten it either but I'm working on it.

I bought L-DIS new in the 90's because it was so cheap (for an import!) in the back of gaming magazines (I think $15??)! Not bad for a cute'em up shooter I guess, but Star Parodier is best in that area. Its cover was so unusual!

https://catalog.pcengine-fx.com/#cd1970


I was meaning to buy a real copy of Gradius II too when they were going for $20-ish on eBay (I loved that Konami shooter era and I finished the Gradius/Lifeforce ports on NES), but I think I'm too late and no biggie, I'll eventually load it on my Analogue Duo (or one of the Konami PCE minis!) some day when the mood strikes to finally take it off the backlog.

P. S. Thanks for remembering the forum, haha! Needs to earn back membership every little bit!

While I'm at it, I was reminded before Aaron closed OG PCEFX I was working on my catalog jukebox player as a replacement for PCEFX Radio, and I had encoded the 2 best tracks from L-DIS to MP3 though I never uploaded them anywhere until...today!

_{► /audio/L-Dis-13-Stage-3.mp3}

_{► /audio/L-Dis-37-Stage-6.mp3}

They can randomly be played 24/7 either at:
https://www.pcengine-fx.com/main/radio.html
https://catalog.pcengine-fx.com/

[Tak-MK]

I'm with Tengai Makyou, using v1.2 translation now that I know it exists... Before that I abandoned the game a week before because of the v1.0 issues with loading from real hardware 

So far I like the game, but I hate being forced to go back to last inn each time a companion faints, I think it happened to me three times already to beat a boss with a companion fainted, then moved to the last inn, and having to go to the boss place again (and some times to beat it again...  ).

[NightWolve]

I'm with Tengai Makyou, using v1.2 translation now that I know it exists... Before that I abandoned the game a week before because of the v1.0 issues with loading from real hardware 

I was actually looking forward to break in my new Analogue Turbo Duo clone using Supper's localization patch for Ziria, but it's on the backburner after being very disillusioned with the buggy state of the firmware/product... Hopefully the jailbreak redeems it.

Incidentally, Analogue released a new firmware v1.2 [2024-03-15] today actually. But this presents a hard choice to the user: get the bug fixes, but go back to being a normal Duo again, so no CD/ROM image support from the SD card, resume using CD-Rs for localizations... Just gotta wait some more until the jailbreak firmware is synced.
https://www.analogue.co/support/duo

If an updated/synced JailBreak is published soon this is the link to keep watch of:
https://github.com/analoguejb/Analogue-Duo-JB

[Tak-MK]

I was actually looking forward to break in my new Analogue Turbo Duo clone using Supper's localization patch for Ziria, but it's on the backburner after being very disillusioned with the buggy state of the firmware/product... Hopefully the jailbreak redeems it.

Incidentally, Analogue released a new firmware v1.2 [2024-03-15] today actually. But this presents a hard choice to the user: get the bug fixes, but go back to being a normal Duo again, so no CD/ROM image support from the SD card, resume using CD-Rs for localizations... Just gotta wait some more until the jailbreak firmware is synced.
https://www.analogue.co/support/duo

If an updated/synced JailBreak is published soon, this is the link to keep watch of:
https://github.com/analoguejb/Analogue-Duo-JB

I'm on the side of the real hardware so no savestates, no load isos, yes to loading times... hahaha the full old experience.
Regarding the game it wasn't a bad one having in mind that it was the beginning of the JRPG, but definitely had some weird random things added onto it that I don't even know how to react to them xD You'll tell me when you play it!

[elartur77]

Right now Im playing Valis 1, never played before, and Im having a lot of fun with it, little short, but great challenge.

[cho_aniki]

Currently playing Ane-San, definitely one of my favourites.

[cho_aniki]

 Recently finished DE.JA (Super CD).

 What a great story.

 It also has a sequel, which unfortunately wasn't released on PC Engine.