Games That Push The Limits of the TurboGrafx-16

the turbo Graphics 16. haven't had done this before well yes I have long time viewers may know but I'm having another go at it and I'm focusing on Purely the bass console the original machine with no add-ons and games that came on Hue card cartridges I'm going to pick out some Choice cuts that pushed this machine's limits without any extras and yes this thing has different names in different places I'm going with turbo Graphics just because I like the sound of it better let's start with our type not quite a launch title but still only the eighth game to be released on the system which got off to a pretty slow start this is though probably the first game that really showed what it could do a fabulous conversion of the huge alien biotech sci-fi nightmare shooter that was gulping down coins in arcades worldwide you are not going to see a better looking game on a home system anywhere in March 1988 when and this came out and certainly not the NES guess when NEC launched the PC engine as it was called in Japan Nintendo was by far the alpha in both the USA and Japan the world's two biggest video game markets this was clearly an assault on that position a serious competitor a better NES one with improved Graphics more colors more sound channels more storage space but one that was still easy for existing NES developers to adapt to a kind of Super NES if you will one that exceeded the original in pretty much every way technically an r-type really underlines that the original Japanese version came in two parts on to a separate Hue cards though the US release a couple of years later fitted it into one the size of available ROM chips having expanded some later games definitely exceeded this in graphical terms but well perhaps not all that much yeah our Tech remains one of the turbo Graphics top shooters and it was something that it was known for in fact there's so darn many it's hard to pick clear winners and especially pretty one though is Corey Yoon child of dragon and probably saying that wrong but anyway this is a game that's infused with a good dose of Parallax scrolling effects which were definitely the style at the time but actually the turbo Graphics wasn't really that Well Suited to them you see like it's competitive inspiration the NES the turbo Graphics Graphics that's awkward to say the turbo Graphics Graphics are made up of just two layers backgrounds and Sprites unlike the NES the turbo Graphics did have a much easier time when it came to splitting that background layer into strips that move at different speeds like we can see here the NES required either extra help built into the cartridge to do this or some very tricky programming but the turbo Graphics has a scan line counter built in which makes this much simpler what it really likes though is the multiple background layers that the Mega Drive and actual Super NES have these easily allow for real Parallax effects like the stunning Ranger X on the Mega Drive the turbo Graphics can't quite do this but it can have a good stab at it if we wind back to the very first level of Curry Yoon we can see what looks like three layers moving over the top of each other if I separate the scene into backgrounds and Sprites you can probably see the trick though yeah the background is split up into strips as we know it can do and those trees are Sprites passing over each other the turbo Graphics had enough Sprite capabilities in your moving objects to be able to do with things like this quite easily something again in evidence in the wonderful air Zonk created by the same developer knocks out softer different IP but a very similar feel to Korean in fact the art style in this is definitely refreshingly different it looks more like Nicktoons than Stark anime style despite this being very much a Japanese game though one that did make it to the USA for release this underwater vertical section is really clever a rare example of a vertical Parallax effect splitting up the layers again it's easy to see what's going on here with Sprites filling out the edges and those rocks in the middle you can see a flow in this effect if I move zunk up by the score here yes there's that line that appears this is a Sprite glitch also note how anything that moves past the score disappears you can't have more than 16 Sprites on a single line with the turbo graphics and here the score bumps this up to the Limit making anything else up here disappear a game that goes even further with Sprouts to fill out the background is Darius plus another shooter to add to the fail here all the foreground elements again being Sprites giving a really convincing two layer effect it does get a bit Flicker at times but it's surprising how well this works but let's leave the shooter's behind now and well let's start off with a one morning for flashing imagery if that's a problem for you well click away now if you want to easily skip ahead I will put a note in the chapter markers where all this ends okay so let's look at Ninja Gaiden okay ninja Ryu kenden as this Japanese only release was actually called but it's a conversion of the same game that was called Ninja Gaiden in the west this is probably the kind of thing NEC in their partner Hudson soft imagined when creating the turbo Graphics a deluxe remix of an NES classic that would surely be the draw for developers the chance to bring improved versions of their biggest games to this improved console right sadly that didn't really happen though it's probably no surprise Nintendo didn't allow their first party Treasures like Mario to head to the turbo Graphics but Nintendo had the clout to go even further than that and make third parties keep their games on the NES only two though Mega Man Contra or Final Fantasy to name but a few big NES games Ninja Gaiden here being an exception ported by a hong kong-based subsidiary of Hudson soft this is a bit more colorful it's got richer music less Flicker and well you've probably noticed there was an attempt an attempt to Parallax scrolling this looks a bit of a mess what on Earth is going on here let's slow the game right down as the main character Ryu Hayabusa walks along the background Scrolls in the other direction as you'd expect on a game like this but then every five or so frames think distant scenery suddenly snaps back a few pixels to the right and not always in one go that isn't ideal for this effect to really work that distant scenery would have to constantly stay in one place whilst the buildings in a foreground move two layers would make that absolutely possible but the turbo Graphics doesn't have that though you can rearrange the tiles that make up the background Graphics but they always have to fit into a grid of 8x8 pixels and that's the problem you can move the whole background at once pixel by pixel you just can't do it with individual Tails instead they just have to snap back into place every few frames which creates that distracting Jitter to make this actually look convincing you'd need to combine it with software rendering and if we look at the animated background on this Factory level well it is the kind of missing piece if this sort of Animation was horizontal and added to the background shifting it by a small amount each frame it could make everything move smoothly in fact this game boy game pretty historic man does something very similar though it is with a simpler repeating pattern maybe that was the plan for this game but the developer had to ditch it halfway through for some reason it would be fairly processor intensive but the turbo Graphics did have a pretty beefy one more or less the same as the NES but clocked around four times faster there's other factors at play but maybe this is getting to the actual limit of the system I can now think of one game that did do a very similar effect but made it look far better let's move on to Parasol Stars yes this game is colorful really colorful not surprising really considering this was Builders rainbow Islands too and also bubble bubble three not an arcade Port despite tantalizing rumors over the years this was the lead version from the starts and even though it was such a glorious showcase for the turbo Graphics it was only released in the USA in very limited numbers it really does though help to show how far in advance the turbo Graphics was of older 8-bit systems and how it could hold its own against its 16-bit competition which was by this point very evident in the market colors per 8x8 pixel tail play a big part in this and the Turbo Graphics could manage 16 the same as the Genesis and the Super NES and that is opposed to the four colors per tail of the NES and there's also total colors on screen and that could be a massive 482 for the turbo Graphics way more than either the Genesis or the Super NES could muster though the Super NES did do quite well in that regard the turbo Graphics total color palette was 512 Shades the same as the Genesis but less than the Super NES at 32 000 but still decent it's hard to imagine this game working out better on any other system than it did here and I can't even imagine an arcade version would have been that much better it probably couldn't have managed to more appropriately upbeat perky soundtrack either another thing the turbo Graphics could do well a third option between the robot farts of the Mega Drive and the muffled mumbling of the Super NES this this game does though have a couple of nice effects that I want to look at in a bit more detail but with sort of blinking you'll miss it but still nice this concertina effect starts the opening level of some worlds where the screen pops up out of the bottom looks good how's it done well it's the same sort of warping effect used in quite a few games of the era making use of the vertical scrolling capabilities of the machine to skip parts of the background jumping progressively less and less each time the screen is drawn for each frame making it look like it's growing some levels have a variation where it's all wavily moving and this is the horizontal scrolling offset being changed each line which adds an extra twist here but I think the most impressive little extra that Paracel Stars has is found in the transitions between the stages it's very quick let me slow it down a parallax effect where one stage a layout floats away or maybe it's the main character Bob doing the floating whatever one stage exits the screen and the other comes in whilst the distant scenery stays fixed do the blocks that make up the stage turn to Sprites when they float off well no if I replay the scene with the Sprites turned off we can see that's not the case what's actually happening is the same thing that's happening in Ninja Gaiden the stage blocks are redrawn in different positions every frame if I slow things down even further and take a look into the video memory as the screen is drawn we can see them being filled in this works here but looks terrible in Ninja Gaiden for two reasons firstly this game is redrawing the foreground not the background so it's not distracting when that moves and secondly this is happening very quickly so it doesn't look jerky when things jump forward eight pixels at a time it's just fast a clever hack and one that works way better than the mess in Ninja Gaiden but well actually someone did manage to pull off an even a better version of this trick it's ninja Spirit from Iran and would you look at that proper ish Parallax scrolling and it's not nearly so I wrenchingly jerky it's on quite a few levels too and this is really not a bad game overall inspired I think by the original Ninja Gaiden on the NES this came out before the turbo Graphics Port but on this platform it's actually the better game I would say and it looks really good all the way through let's slow this Parallax scrolling effect right the way down and we can see what it does differently as before it's scrolling the background to the left then the distant scenery The Parallax layer is scooting back but it's doing it in smaller jumps and in almost perfect look step the distance scenery doesn't stay completely still here but it does clearly move more slowly for every four pixels the foreground moves back the far background only moves one if we take a look into the video memory we can see those background tiles being updated being shifted to compensate for the movement in fact there's eight versions of each tile stored in the ROM each one shifted along one pixel and it's sort of playing them back like an animation like the factory backgrounds in Ninja Gaiden but aligned with the horizontal movement the only downside is though that these are Parallax backgrounds are just very simple repeating patterns there's only 16 Tails being updated each frame ninja gaiden's backgrounds work way more complicated it would take a lot more ROM space to do this same trick with that game and it would require a lot more processor time too making it very tricky but here though it does work great and adds a nice bit of eye candy to this already pretty game but on to the Final Act I think and it has to be Street Fighter 2 with Champion Edition yes this was a Japanese only release I don't know why it might have sold a few copies the turbo Graphics was definitely on the ropes at this point and maybe licensing was just too much yeah there are quite a few flirting games on this system but most of the best ones are locked away on the CD and seeing as I'm not doing CD stuff in this video well they're off the menu for now luckily though I don't think any of those CD fighting games have this beat a really masterful conversion of the massive arcade crowd puller the Super NES and the Mega Drive of course had their own versions of this and I'm not really sure I could call which is best but this version it absolutely does the job if this was the 90s and this was what you had I don't think you'd feel hard done too as long as you could get a six button control pad or two to go with it what is certain though is that the NES or any other older 8-bit system could not do this game any justice the Master System did have a port of this and it's not pretty the game boy version is probably even worse the tg16 though that has a good spray to capabilities and that's what makes the large characters in this game possible it can have 64 Sprites on screen at once the same as the NES and Master System but they can be much larger up to 32 by 64 pixels if we take a look at a debug view of Ken and Gail fighting on Gale stage we can see the individual Sprite objects that make up the full characters outlined there's enough object space available for not just the fighters but also the boxes too and the other scenery on other stages one of a combination of tricks that Street Fighter uses to make all of its elements fit together the Sprite scenery adds a little bit of parallaxon at most stages or a little bit of local color at least on others there's also a sort of well I don't know what to call it but a kind of 3D floor effect this is done by splitting the triangular shaped floor into strips and scrolling them at different rates giving a subtle but effective perspective View and tells him stage the feet of the front elephants are sprite that overlap this selling the effect even more the elephant's trunks also move but these aren't Sprites but changes to the background tail map used in a lot of other stages too to add some extra animated detail there's also the energy bar at the top too that appears over the rest of the scene moving underneath it is that done with Sprouts like the score bar in air zunk no it's actually just pasted over the top using background Graphics skipping to where it's stored by resetting the vertical scroll register another nice trick and all this is supported by the enormous size of the cartridge ROM relatively over two and a half megabytes this required the use of an NES style mapper sometimes called an enhancement chip to allow for the extra storage the only turbo Graphics game to do this the turbo Graphics 16 despite the name was arguably an 8-bit system given that it had an 8-bit CPU but understandably it is usually put in with the 16-bit generation something NEC were no doubt Keen to promote in Japan under the name PC engine it was a massive success the only real competition to the NES or famicom as it was in Japan even outselling it at one point it was designed to be a better NES or a better famicom those were the actual words of Hudson executive toshinori a Yama not just my speculation and it lived up to that to a fair degree in its Home Country a different story though in the USA where well it had its fans But ultimately it flopped a combination of inept marketing and absolutely Relentless competition from Nintendo and Sega it didn't even make it here to the UK officially or well maybe it did in small numbers no one seems to know but it wasn't much of a thing let me tell you you could have easily compiled a list of how the turbo Graphics outdid the NES technically without straying too far from the formula it's not compatible with it but there are so many obvious parallels apparently Hudson surfed at one point approached Nintendo with the hardware they were developing but were rebuffed and Nintendo went on to do their own thing but well maybe this could have actually have been the Super NES when Nintendo actually did make their own genuine Super NES well it was a different Beast entirely they might have started out with plans to make it backwards compatible but that was ditched early on it seems in the final machine was very very different with scaling rotation a fancy audio system and bells and whistles the three years older turbo Graphics stroke PC engine didn't have and yeah I know there's other games that I could talk about out silent debuggers blazing lasers good games definitely but well I'm gonna grind to a halt round about here though I think I've said all that I want to say about the base Hardware but one thing I am definitely missing is CD titles some of the best looking games not just on the turbo Graphics but in this whole console generation came out for this unusually successful add-on an unusually successful add-on in Japan anyway but that's something I want to consider separately in another video so thank you as ever to my wonderful patreons thank you so much your help makes a huge difference and if anyone else would like to join them that would be really superb there's a link below so thank you all for getting this far thank you for watching to the end if you have and if you haven't already subscribed well maybe it's a good time to do so and I will say goodbye thanks

Channel: Sharopolis

Views: 35,826

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Id: 9vfp0TsdVNw

Length: 21min 21sec (1281 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 12 2023

Reddit Comments

[u/SkyAdditional4963]

Man the turbografx is such a great system. Really punches above it's weight. The tricks they pulled off and how they utilized it's better sprite capabilities were top tier. It's kind of ridiculous how long a run it had in japan too. If you don't have one I'd definetely recommend getting one. A japanese pc engine and a turbo everdrive is a cheap investment for one of the best retro systems you can get.