The Video Game Critic

Here are some new PC Engine/Turbografx reviews.
Note only Order of the Griffon will run on a Turbografx. Monster Lair is a CD, and Genji is a Japanese game, meaning it will only run with an adapter.

You probably notice the resemblance between the dude in Monster Lair and the one in Adventure Island because the latter was Hudson Soft's NES conversion of Wonder Boy, and Monster Lair in the arcade was actually a Wonder Boy sequel called Wonder Boy III: Monster Lair! I'm sure you already knew that though I've owned this CD for ages now but can't get my infernal PC Engine CD ROM to load any discs any more This has made me really want to play it again! Thanks Dave!!

I played Monsters Lair years ago on a friend Mega Drive thanks for bringing back the memories! It is indeed a fun game.

The PC Engine seems a system that would be right up my alley, but the games are so hellishly expensive + it was never released in Europe so I might have to resort to emulation.

The Wonder Boy/Adventure Island debacle is quite a weird chapter of gaming history. Basically, the first Wonder Boy game gets ported to the NES as the first Adventure Island game, and then the Wonder Boy series adopts a completely different style of gameplay while the Adventure Island series keeps the gameplay of the first game, even though the first entries of both series are the same game. Truly bizarre.

Nice set of reviews, perhaps you could make icons specifically for the Turbografx section of your site, with CD icons and HU card icons.

I won't go near this console as getting it and collecting for it would make me go bankrupt. But I still enjoy reading the reviews.

Yeah my Turbografx section is getting more convoluted by the day. I could separate out the PC Engine titles, but then what would I do about the CDs? It's a mess.

And get this - I bought the Ghouls and Ghosts game for this thing, but it turns out that it's for the "Supergrafx" which is a whole new console in of itself with only about six games. It was supposed to be a true 16-bit version of the PC-Engine, but it was a flop. I'm actually thinking about buying one, but it's not cheap.

VideoGameCritic wrote:Yeah my Turbografx section is getting more convoluted by the day. I could separate out the PC Engine titles, but then what would I do about the CDs? It's a mess.

And get this - I bought the Ghouls and Ghosts game for this thing, but it turns out that it's for the "Supergrafx" which is a whole new console in of itself with only about six games. It was supposed to be a true 16-bit version of the PC-Engine, but it was a flop. I'm actually thinking about buying one, but it's not cheap.

The turbografx is such a unique beast in upon itself... Perhaps instead of a turbografx and pc engine section you could do a CD and hu card section instead... Or icons might be helpful. Another thing you might consider is in the console review link out to a forum topic that describes what you would need to play turbografx games or write up a tutorial on everything you need to play turbografx games. I'd write up an article for you if you are interested, as you re aware it gets very complicated. I sold some turbografx cd games I had a few years ago and had to explain to the buyers that they didn't have broken equipment (as far as I knew), they had the wrong setup. You could post the article on three turbografx main page.

TurboGrafx-16, PC Engine, and CD games all belong together. The only thing that could be separated out is SuperGrafx, but there's so few games for it.

I agree that games for all the different hardware configurations should be kept together. The litmus test I generally use is whether the hardware add-on adds a CPU or not; if it doesn't, it's not a new system. Some games, e.g. Bonk 3 and Altered Beast (any others?), are even available in both CD and cart versions, like the Neo Geo vs. Neo Geo CD.

That said the SuperGrafx, as Gentlegamer says, has so few games that it hardly merits its own console entry. (It's also not an add-on, of course, but something more akin to the Atari 7800 or Game Boy Color.) If any SuperGrafx games are folded into the main list, that should be fine from a reader's/site user's perspective.

BTW I'm strictly a Turbo EverDrive user when it comes to the PC Engine, though I also have a half-dozen HuCards that the person who sold me the system was kind enough to throw in. Otherwise, real games are just too expensive. But so far I really like the system; World Court Tennis is great, goofy fun.