Games That Push The Limits of The TurboGrafx/PC-Engine 

I think gnensis had better resolution and Turbografx had more colors on screen.

Wow how much did you pay?

It did. It actually passed the SNES with max colors on screen, where Sega Genesis has 64, SNES had 256, and the TG16 had a whipping 512 colors on screen.

@@worsethanhitlerpt.2539 That was true, even surpassed the SNES with 512 colors on screen.

@@MaxOakland I think I paid $30 or $40 at the time, and games were like $6 - $10

Dungeon Explorer ? i like this Gauntlet clone but the difficulty is insane. can't manage to level up once.

The Turbo could do high-frequency sounds the Genesis couldnt. Compare the sound of the corner-pocket launchers in Devils Crush with Dragons Fury on Genesis. The Genesis has a dull sound effect that sucks compared to the Turbo

@@worsethanhitlerpt.2539 And the MD had horrible stereo. You could put a sound left, right or left and right. The PCE had 16 step placement from L to R. Many awesome soundtracks: Neutopia II, Dragon Spirit, After Burner, Jackie Chan, Kyukyoku Tiger, Bomberman 94, Cross WIber, Final Soldier, Space Harrier

It also has a 16 bit vpu

@@brianhedley5139 While it is marketing wise 16bit, there's nothing actually 16bit there. The tiles use 4 bits per color and the palette use 9bits on a 333 RGB scheme. But that puts it on par with the sega genesis in total number of colors, that is a "16bit system". But it blows the genesis out of water in terms of total number of colors per screen, because it has 16 palettes of 16 colors each, while the genesis only have 4 palettes of 16 colors.

@@dan_loup I guess we have Hudson and NEC to thank for it then

Final sprite position may be 8-bit, but in the whole mix of things that doesn't matter too much, since most objects will have many 16- bit fixed point variables.

@@big_b_radical3985 Objects is the key word here. A game object will generally be made of several sprites, so you only need to do the 16bit fixed point math once, then setup the sprites with 8bit offsets of the final result of the fixed point math. And in many genres of games and cases, you can get away with just 8bit coordinates, such as space shooters and bullets in general.

U had an Amiga in the states? Wow

@@j0nnyism I live in Canada, but yes I started with an Amiga 500 in 1988 and then a 1200 in 1992. The Amiga 500's were only sold in Kmart back in the day.

I was impressed with the Turbo version of Street Fighter. The Turbo has 512 colors like Genesis but the Turbo looks closer to SNES many times.

buuuuuuulllshiiiiitt!

@@craigcotter7476 And yet, true.

@@edale2 And somehow, not

@@patsfan4life I don't know what's so hard to believe about it. I played all sorts of video games all the time, just not that particular one. He played video games rarely, and only 2 or 3 of them. Is it _that_ hard to believe I was able to get further than him after seeing ahead of time what was coming in the first few stages?

​@@patsfan4life And as to the whole "never forgave me for it" thing, this was the same man who refused to ever play a game of chess with me again after I beat him once when I was 7. He didn't take losing competitions well.

sorry to be so off topic but does anybody know of a method to get back into an Instagram account? I was dumb forgot the password. I would appreciate any tricks you can offer me!

@Maddox Zakai instablaster =)

The Turbo had a good Street Fighter 2 the colors look almost like SNES. Lack of scrolls is weak though

Bad marketing and management played a big part, but truth is, no matter how strong its shoot em up library is, the console relied too heavily on them. Genesis, while also having a strong shoot em up library, also had a strong platformer, racing, fighting, puzzle, and sports library, and a decent RPG one as well. Super Nintendo had a strong platforming, racing, fighting, RPG, puzzle, and a decent shooter library. Also, it had all the heavy hitter first party titles, from Mario and Zelda, to Donkey Kong and Yoshi, to Metroid and Star Fox, to F-Zero and Mario Kart. And also, both the Genesis and Super Nintendo had MUCH stronger third party support than the Turbo. The Turbo had a strong library of quality titles, but you needed to play them to realize that, where the Super and Genesis, you could just watch watch a commercial or look at the back of the game's box and know you were in for some fun. OH! And speaking of box, so much of the Turbo's American box art was trash. Like NES-era Capcom trash.

Sega and Nintendo of America did a lot more to make their systems successful in the US. The TurboGrafx team in the US wasn't as successful. Software titles like Mario 2 and Sonic were the result of strong US leadership making sure they had the right software for their audiences.

Yeah, and there's something about their use of dithering and the Anime style that make their games look so cool.

actually better than snes snes games used various color counts turbo used 512 colors at once in every game

I do too

Thanks for watching and thanks for the sub!

@@Sharopolis no worries mate. I really enjoy your videos. First one I watched was NES games that pushed the limit. Excellent stuff and quite surprising what they were getting out of it. Also, as an Australian, commodore 64 and amiga were huge here too. Great memories. Here's hoping your channel continues to grow. You deserve it!

Thanks!

Did that happen?

Thanks!

Thanks!

Game commentary is annoying for me. I didnt watch this video to the end because of it and useless background music. Sometimes less is better.

The Genesis version was released three years prior and like most early Genesis games, was a victim of the 4 Mbit ROM size curse, as well as a rushed development cycle. It did have parallax scrolling through, while the PCE version has totally flat backgrounds, but that's a given, considering that Genesis gets a "free" second background layer in the hardware. Things obviously do get a lot more busy (and processing power intensive) with two players on screen. But yeah, other than the one player limit and lack of parallax, the PCE version looks way closer to the CPS1 version. On the other hand, the PCE version of Strider did not work out so well compared to the Genesis one, even though it uses the Arcade Card. Genesis port had the benefit of a 8 Mbit ROM that time.

@@Prizrak-hv6qk Thanks for the info!

"Terraforming" was on TG16 and had insane psychedelic FX. Shouldve been on the list.

@@Prizrak-hv6qk Strider had a very limited audience since it was only released in Japan, on CD and required the ACD upgrade. I wonder it ever made its investment money back. That had to affect the moral of the team building it.

​@@bobfrasure8436 I recall reading that it was originally being developed as a SuperGrafx game, which was then moved to SCD2 and then ACD, getting delayed a bunch of times. Something obviously went wrong with it, as even ignoring the lack of parallax scrolling, it looks and moves all kinds of off, making the hardware look weak. Either the screwed up development cycle or perhaps also something about Strider specifically hit certain limitations of the system. I mean, it is a particularly fast and busy CPS1 game. Even the SNES Strider rip-off game, Run Saber, had to scale down and slow the action by quiet a bit compared to its inspiration. The Genesis/MD seemed particularly well-suited for fast, arcade style action games with a lot or large, animated sprites moving at the same time.

Konami released the PC Engine Mini in March 2020 in Japan, in May 2020 in the United States and in June 2020 in Europe. This plug and play features the best of the PC Engine games on it along with hidden unlockable games and the ability to change regions.

100% agreed

I know that Lords of Thunder is on PC Engine CD that might explain that

@@samuelthehobo4441 I thought CD games were open since Dracula X (or rather Rondo of Blood) is on the list.

@@andsoooo yeah true

Didn't want coregrafx mini?

To run Sapphire you needed the arcade Card which added over a meg of more memory on the card

@@brianhedley5139 2MBytes, 16mbits with the Arcade Card Duo. The Super System Card already brought the system to 2mb so the Arcade Card Pro actually adds 18megs to the base system. That's as big as some of the larger cartridge games of the era. Imagine having a new 18Mbit cartridge for every level in a game where they could dedicate the entire 18meg cartridge memory to excessive sprites and animation in that one level. There wasn't really "sprite morphing" or anything fancy like that... just using the brute force of all that memory to hold a ridiculous number of sprite variations to manually animate a "morph." Just look at the fluid animations the SNES could do with a 32mbit cartridge for all of Donkey Kong Country and then imagine having more than half of that dedicated to a single level on PC Engine and you really start to get a picture of what it was capable of (though horribly under-utilized). Sapphire is the only one that even begins to show this as they use the gobs of memory to add superfluous animated text and morphs and so much more, but I still wish someone would have made a platformer or something along the lines of Yoshi's Island/Earthworm Jim while fully utilizing 18megs of RAM for every level. It would've been INSANE.

SFII was a first party title.

The 'bit' thing did in fact have nothing to do with graphics. Good for marketing more powerful machines, though. The Mega Drive in particular - harder to explain to kids what a wonder machine it was.

Good point, should have mentioned that too.

Truth. I tried. It's not possible.

RefractionPCSX2 they're actually getting M2 to do it, who are famous for going the extra mile, so it might be promising. when they did the konami ds collection they even added a mode that allowed you to push the dip switches on a virtual arcade board to change settings

@@amr-OH that is good to hear!

Oh stop with that stupid meme. People need to stop thinking that's funny or accurate, anymore. Konami STILL has a gaming division and they STILL release games, and keep their old brands going. Far more than many still do, actually. I swear to god, 2 or 3 kids mistranslate a Japanese press statement about a very long-established and Japanese respected Pachinko market getting a FEW games announced for it and suddenly everyone is losing their shit, falling all over themselves to make shitty, inaccurate, unfunny jokes, just because they have a few executives that are shitheads to their employees and because they stabbed Kojima in the back. At the very least, if you're going to keep up with that lame ass "fuck konami" shtick that got old a fucking year ago, at least hold them accountable for the right reasons and not shit that a few dumb people ignorantly misread and somehow think it's funny even though it's just blatantly false, untrue urban-myth bullshit that isn't even nearly as important as their ACTUAL faults. Entitled little manchildren really need to get over themselves and actually look at the real history of what's going on, and not get all their "woke" knowledge from garbage memes.

@@the-NightStar Wow, nobody mentioned "fuck konami" and you went off on a massive rant. I think you need to treat your anger issues, buddy.

Try Final Soldier. I like that one the best.

Star Fox came first, so I'd wager it was the other way around

Shame it was never ported to the add-on back then. Even pce cd games were ported late on the sega cd.

Thanks! That is a compliment, right?

@@Sharopolis Ha! Absolutely!! Your writing and delivery is cock on. Looking forward to the next one.

Yep, you got me there, it would look better. Next video will be 60fps!

@@Sharopolis thanks!

Thank you!

But aren't old games 30 to 60fps, starfox is 15fps how would 60fps video make 30fps screen recording game better!?

@@rustymixer2886 It will benefit other games, most of them run at 50/60 depending the region.

That is literally next on the list! I'm going to try talking about how mappers changed things and maybe also try and focus on some slightly lesser known, more surprising additions to the NES library.

And pit fighter including other 2D digital graphics games.

I wish Super Street fighter 2 turbo was ported to the PCE CD.

Those are in fact the right character names! That's the Japanese version we're seeing. Things were switched around for western release, I assume because of the obvious M. Bison/M Tyson thing.

Never had that problem... I always found the PCE space shooters to have this..."too smooth" feel, which is great for shoot 'em ups but kinda weird feeling for some other types of games like platformers. I think I may have seen that shakyness in an emulator I used before, though. The only PCE emulator I remember using that didn't suck was called Magic Engine, I think.