PC Engine Coregrafx Mini (Turbografx 16) Review | Ashens

hello it's finally here the core graphics mini or the pc engine mini or the turbo graphics 16 mini depending where you are in the world but we'll get on to that in a minute so this was originally due out mid-march um but was massively delayed due to covid and stuff so mine arrived about four days ago and i've been playing it a lot ever since obviously because i've got to tell you about it now haven't i so the pc engine i've done videos on the pc engine in the past so uh if you haven't seen those let's have a quick recap it's basically kind of a it was a console released it's kind of halfway between the 8-bit and 16-bit eras it was sort of late 8-bit in japan and early 16-bit by the time we got to america and it has a very interesting history uh it was very big very successful in japan or it's called the pc engine they took it over to america and called it the turbo graphics 16 the you know emphasizing the 16-bit stuff so it was more obviously up against the uh genesis and all that kind of stuff and they also completely uh redesigned the actual um physical console well the case of it at the very least for the american market made it a lot bigger so it looked like you were getting more for your money or whatever because the original pc engine of which this is the shape although a different color we'll get onto that as well oh it's confusing um it was a tiny little thing in fact this is a mini console but it's only about like 25 smaller if that because it was so we in the first place yeah um anyway yeah big in japan did not sell well in america at all really and didn't even get a proper release over here in fact i didn't even know until a few years ago it had an official release at all in europe i thought it was only available through sort of um grey market imports and that kind of thing but no they did release a version over here i think it was just called the turbo graphics as opposed to turbo graphics 16 and they use the um elongated american design but for the european version of the pc engine mini they're giving us the core graphics which was a differently colored version of the uh pc engine that had oh the top of my head i think it had a slightly different cpu which like fixed a minor bug or something and it had a proper av out as opposed to a sort of direct rf out to your telly but other than that it was the same it's very odd that they've chosen to give us this sort of japanese-only version not the one we actually had here but to be fair that's probably because it was released in such ridiculously small numbers i don't even know how they released it was never in shops or anything so um yeah it doesn't really matter what they give us over here since we have no nostalgia for it whatsoever almost i remember it being you know like a sort of gaming version of bigfoot you would see blurry photos of it in magazines and saying oh there's this uh console thing and it's really amazing but you never saw it in real life ever or even had the chance to take your own photos of it uh what a time it was so yeah we're gonna quickly touch on the various different versions of the pc engine released over the years because they released a lot like a ridiculous amount of side systems and upgrades and things over 15 of them i think it's like 16 or 17. i once did a video um catch it on youtube somewhere of um all the different pc engine variants that my friend quang took to the center for computing history and several of us went through them all and like there are so many it's unbelievable and many of them the games weren't compatible with one or another you've got things like the super graphics which i think is one of the sort of least successful from a games point of view of any sort of console release because it only had like six games released for it there's at least one on here this basically has games from all different versions from the cd versions from the uh cartridge version so the couches were taking little cards you slide into the front there called who cards um yeah there's a lot of these things as i say i've done a video on the topographic 6d the turbo express which is the handheld one you see even thinking about it the names start blurring into one of my head my actual version of this uh that i have plugging into the tele my original pc engine is a turbo duo which is one of the built-in cd drive which is a shame because it means i haven't got one of these little ones i can show you to compare size but such is life and do you want to know something terrifying friends something that i don't think has ever happened before in the history of the world it's pretty much that the japanese version of this mini console is the weakest because it comes with um joy pads without the auto fire feature can you believe it whereas the american and european versions do have the auto fire i know right i couldn't believe it either anyway let's have a look at the nice box you will notice well if you know of such things there is no nec logo on here so originally pc engine was a sort of a combination attack from uh hudson soft the people behind bomberman and that and nec who actually made the thing with their super clever factory stuff and yeah they were all bought by konami so which is yes gotta be on the box somewhere there so this is effectively a konami console not just a pachinko game loosely based on metal gear solid or something um yeah so you're not gonna be seeing any nec logo on there because everything's been brought up and assimilated and all that kind of stuff but otherwise yeah they've done quite a good job of making it authentic to looking at the hardware of the time so let us uh well here's the here's the games we'll get onto the games later but to give you a slight taster of well there's a weird problem with this which is see it says pc engine games and topographic 16 games but stuart do you say weren't they the same thing well yeah but these ones are in english these ones are in japanese basically it's nice and easy in it but some of these games you cannot play unless you are completely fluent in japanese um and it says here on the back which i think is massively misleading for the back of a box pc engine games featured games are in japanese and this tiny writing at the top you probably can't even make it out there i think i get it close enough to the camera with an asterisk but the asterisk doesn't lead anywhere or come from anywhere it's very very odd that's not how asterisks work um so there's actually quite a few duplicate games you've got like the japanese and the english version they're pretty much bloody saying and there's some other one here you won't be able to play now this is a big problem i think when you look at something like snatcher so snatcher um early hideo kojima game who went on to do metal gear solid and all that uh it's kind of a i didn't say a mash up to be honest it's more of a rip-off really of terminator and blade runner smashed together it's very very good though and it's a game a lot of people want to play and haven't played however there is no english language version for the pc engine so the version on here you would have to be able to a read japanese perfectly and be understand spoken japanese perfectly because there's um you know speaking an audio in it in order to play the game so sticking it on the back of the eu box in such a prominent position is a bit naf really in it because unless you have a very specific set of language skills or our japanese is not going to be working for you really um and it's a bad thing to stick on the back of the box although i must say this is not something i don't think you can actually get in a shop so you wouldn't like see it on a shelf and go oh i'll get it for that oh you're liars i think in fact this is only sold through amazon in europe so uh that's the end of that anyway we shall get on to all this later um made by hori there they've got their hand in it which is good because they're very good manufacturers of arcade parts and stuff and uh it's rated 12 and over that's interesting in it it's rated 12 and over because it's got violent swearing spiders that have sex so that's something to look forward to right anyway anything else in the box not really tells you what's inside pc engine core graphics mini controller hdmi cable usb cable instruction manual nice no charger they've given up on giving you micro usb chargers these days i can't really say i blame them now um it has moved on to the point where everybody's got so many bloody phone chargers that these things work with you just don't need any more in your house they do still give you the cable though so there we are right let's open her up and see what lurks inside instruction manual is it in 47 languages yay that's the main thing it's not difficult you put the wires in and you plug it in the mains in your telly and that's about it really can't say much more than that here is the actual device itself if i can get it out under here is let's take the joy powder actually notice nice long lead oh yeah that's the kind of thing you want going on uh a nice long micro usb lead as well in case you don't have 50 in your house i'm sure you do i've literally spoken to a woman in her 80s who had multiple spare chargers um it's not something you've avoided these days i think i've actually looked at this but this is just an hdmi cable i believe yep there we are for all your hdmi needs right here's the device itself it never comes out of the bag to keep it safe now here it is yeah it's gray it's got blue writing on it uh the japanese version is basically the original one which is white with orange writing on or is it red writing oh can i remember the top of my head oh well swear out me in the comments that'll sort it out on the front you've got two usb ports for controllers it only comes with one controller which is a shame so it has some decent two-player games on there um you can buy separate controllers and a multi-tap to enable loads of people to play bomberman and stuff but uh while they're listed on amazon uk at the moment they don't have a price or anything so don't know the availability or the price of those so i cannot comment um that's it really that's all you got says konami on the bottom you've got your external bus take it off and actually hdmi out and micro usb in for the power nice and easy and you know what it gets bonus points for this when you switch it on that little green blob goes overlook that is because the original unit you slid your card in here with the game on sadly i don't have access to any of the who cards i have is in my office which is inaccessible at the moment um but you would slot them in do that then you can't pull it out you see it blocks it a bit like the old game boy cartridge retention thing so that's cool isn't it a little bit of um attention to detail which we do appreciate as gaming nerd humans ac adapter av out to kind of point to the side of the not anymore we won't worry about that right we've got exact replica of the controller exact replica um plastic feels maybe a little bit cheaper than um this feels quite uh well it doesn't say it feels quite light and empty but i mean it's going to be his name he's only got a small bit of electronics in it um they're an actual controller but in use practically it's really really good the d-pad is very solid and feels exactly like a pc engine one should the buttons are very good you've got your auto fires here off medium and then super speed if i recall correctly i think i only have a habit in some bottom or top positions and if you're wondering why they would have an auto fire in here there are a lot of shoot em ups a lot of shoot em ups for the bc engine as you will discover when we go through the games because like there are many on here because it was the bread and butter of the pc engine like how snk stuff and the neo geo was mostly fighting games this stuff is mostly shoot em ups select run and there you are it's great really really like this it feels exactly as it should um once you've been using it for two minutes um 10 points for that and also incredibly long lead another good points for that is a shame you don't get a second one when you did get a second with some of the other mini consoles from other manufacturers which were cheaper which we'll get onto at the end but um yeah there we are so what's it like to use then well uh short answer really really nice so the menus are lovely and when you select a game you get a pretty animation showing a card being put into the system and that changes depending on the hardware the game ran on so um you know if you change it over to a cd-rom game you see the card go in but then the cds spin up as well and when you change over to the japanese games the whole menu aesthetic changes it like turns itself off and then comes back on as if you plugged a different console in again appreciate these little touches in fact i think it's my favorite menu of any of these mini consoles but most importantly of course what is the game emulation like because you know that's what the whole thing's about and as far as i can tell it is absolutely spot on i've seen no graphics problems that weren't um in the original games the very least no sound problems they've added the ability to save your game at any point and come back to it later in fact you've got three save slots per game which i think is pretty much a minimum thing to be putting on these but it works very well and it's all nice and most importantly gives a nice 720p output which looks all clear and beautiful on your hd tv ah now um we're getting into something slightly sticky here because there are different settings for the video output which is really important because the pc engine had this weird thing where the image you saw was actually slightly stretched horizontally from what the console itself output so if you just replicate the pixels exactly in the original aspect ratio everything looks too thin and squished up because it's expecting to be stretched out slowly now stretching on an old analog crt display wasn't really a problem at all because um you know it's all slightly blurry and it's analog all that kind of stuff but with the pin sharp digital spod vision devices we have these days there are trade-offs right so the default setup is a 4x3 picture which doesn't quite fill the screen vertically but it's been stretched uh slightly horizontally so that everything's in the proper aspect ratio and not you know the squished up one thing outputs the vertical here is an exact three time scale so vertically there's no problems but the horizontal scaling gives i find it hard to describe like a slight glistening effect when the screen scrolls sideways i mean it's very minor to the extent that frankly i would imagine most people probably wouldn't notice it unless they were looking at it and it certainly doesn't get in the way of the games but it is a thing uh the second option is for the 4x3 picture to fill the screen vertically which obviously is slightly bigger because you know it's filling your screen vertically but it then adds that glistening effect to vertical scrolling as well because it's now not an exact integer scale up of what the um original software is outputting so the third option is an exact three time scale of the output which eliminates all the shimmering and is lovely and perfect but looks completely wrong because you know as i said earlier the output was designed to be stretched a bit horizontally so everything's too damn thin and really that's not a particularly good option to pick and my favorite is the standard setting with the gaps at the top and the bottom i can totally see why they set that as the default because it minimizes the glistening effect um which is very minor anyway but you know if you can have it gone have it bloody gone and but it also looks right it doesn't look all squished up and you're not really losing much real estate from the top and bottom either there's also a weird comedy mode where you can emulate a turbo express handheld it looks like this uh it's clearly in there for a bit of fun shall we say it's a bit of a novelty gag type thing um yeah i don't think anybody's going to be playing the game in a small window with a weird effect on it and i suppose i've got to mention as ever there's a rubbish fake crt filter which just blurs the image of it and sticks scan lines over it don't bother it's never worth bothering within these things and this is no exception and tragically there is of course the option to stretch everything to 16x9 to fill your entire widescreen tv which i will not even show you because it's frankly evil i mean it's i don't understand it's surely the only use of this thing is for idiots with brains the size of cashew nuts who want the entire picture horribly distorted for some reason i don't get it i think manufacturers just feel they have to have an option to fill the screen but nobody in their right mind would touch it with somebody else's barge pole frankly so the games i am going to go through every single game on this thing right and then we'll add them all up afterwards because there's so like there's ostensibly 57 games but there aren't really i'll get into that at the end but yeah i'm going to be very brief but we're going to run through all of them because pc engine games not nearly as well known as the old saga and nintendo stuff so we shall start with the turbo graphics 16 games the ones in english unlike the box for some reason so we've got uh alien crush which is a very very good pinball game the ball is a little bit floaty which means this will always be below the sort of really good amiga games like pinball fantasies and that for me but it is a really good game inexplicably missing is the sequel devil crush devil's crush devil's crash i don't know i think there's multiple titles if i remember um which is a real shame because that's even better don't know why it's not on here blazing lasers uh is a solid shoot em up some of that is shoot em up really good fun there's a lot of those on here i'll be honest with you uh in japan it was a film tie-in for a film called gun head but they removed all the um references to that for us western peoples uh dungeon explorer is kind of like gauntlet frankly um sort of a nice gauntlet game with multiple people it's quite big in japan very influential over there i believe but didn't make much of a dent over here at all really mainly because you know we didn't have anything a player honest really did we uh moto rhoda is sort of a sprint game i supposed to call it one of those overhead racing games um it's it's all right it's not great um certainly not i mean if you want like the best overhead racing game although it's not technically overhead you want something like super skid marks on the amiga stick to micro machines or something frankly it's interesting for five minutes but not much else power golf is fine it's quite a simple golf game and it's quite good fun decent implementation um there's much better out there but you won't waste your time with it you know you will have a bit of a laugh our type yeah i mean the pc engine version of our type is lauded as one of the best arcade conversions and rightly bloody so um the only question now is what worth really do coin-up conversions have these days when you can quite easily emulate the original coin-op i don't know that's a sort of different question isn't it but as conversions go it's bloody great uh victory run is a sort of into the screen scaling racer thing not really into those sort of games um i i found it boring as hell to be honest it's certainly not an outrun or something but that is not my genre so maybe don't listen to me on that and ask a racing man chu man foo it seriously is called that uh it's a puzzle game with hints of sort of bomberman i suppose you're sort of pushing things around yeah it's all right i hadn't played it before got bored of it quickly but i do tend to that kind of game anyway but uh it's something a bit different in it now jj and jeff i was really surprised they put this on here at all because um it's like a localization of this japanese game which right i've gotta remember the name of it i can't i should have written it down it's like kato and ken i think or kato chan and ken chan something like that um who were like tv stars in japan had this comedy game made and it's all very scatological humor everything's toilets and poos and farts and goodness knows what um but they kind of just genericized it for a western release well the american release because you know they didn't have any specific power games can you tell that i'm still bitter that was never properly released here um and called it jj and jeff yeah and there you are it's crap frankly because it's just not very a not very good platform it's still got sort of elements of humor but it's yeah yeah not really worth the time honestly a military madness so this is i mean it's a turn-based strategy game um you know tanks and groups of things attacking each other and all that kind of stuff very much like advanced wars and it's pretty good it's very simple but frankly now that advance wars exists it's not really any point to go back to it newtopia right is a zelda clone basically the old 2d top down zelda rpg stuff it's very much a clone of that not a game genre i particularly enjoy i couldn't get on with it but people who like this sort of thing say it's okay it's okay it's a bit simple that kind of thing ninja spirit i like a bit of ninja spirit it's sort of a run and gun game except with a billion shurikens on screen at once um i remember playing the 8-bit versions on the home computers in the uk oh not good this is a million times better um yeah it's a really good conversion it's a little bit flickery and again really if you can play the coin up go play the coin up but it's it's good it's good fun psychosis is disappointing actually i hadn't put much time into this and played it properly over the weekend and i'm going to have to say yeah it's a bit weak it's another um side scrolling uh shooty shooter spaceship mcshooter there's so many of these on this thing but it's just not that really very good one it's got slightly weird graphics which are interesting but um nah didn't get much joy of that space harrier is a good port of space harrier simple as you know sega's old into the screen shooting shooty um again now that you can play the arcade version does it i've never thought the space harry was much of a game for home release anyway to be honest with you always felt like more of an arcade thing but there we are splatterhouse is a very good port of again the arcade game splatterhouse which is uh you know you walk from left to right usually sometimes from right to left sometimes you climb ladders but i tell you what you do all the time kill monsters um i'm not a massive fan of splatterhouse but every so often i fancy a game and i go back to it i rarely go back to the first one to be honest um but it's here it's decent version i don't know the the controls aren't great i think is the thing for splatterhouse you always feel like you want to tell your bloody character to do something and he doesn't quite do it no i felt that was less of a problem in later ones is is it pronounced is i'm going to pronounce it is could be pronounced your sinclair that'd be weird wouldn't it uh book one and two so it's another overhead zelda thing um so but the people who are into such games say it's much better than utopia these are very well i don't know do you want to say very well regarded i don't know quite well regarded they're looked on with fondness so yeah if you like such things you'll get many hours of enjoyment there bonk's revenge bloody bonk always revenging something so bonk was kind of uh the mascot kind of for the pc engine for a bit they called him pc kid this is basically a sequel to the game uh pc kid there's also called box adventure over here so it always confused me because i thought it was called bc kid because he's a caveman but now it's pc because of pc engine you see still confusing me to this day anyway really fun cute platformer he's got a big heavy head he jumps in the air and then squashes things with his head by turning upside down and headbutts stuff and stuff it's really good fun and most importantly uh something people very rarely mention is that uh when you eat like a big meat on the bone dinosaur power-up thing bonk gets very angry and his head turns into a big bum i think it's very important that people realize that they just don't uh kaddash is next so kadash another coin-op conversion so yeah but as sort of a platform with rpg elements i always enjoy connection i don't know why it's slow as hell it really is i don't it's probably not that good a game in the scheme of things it's something i keep going back to don't know why something in it appeals but now parasol stars oh my god so i thought paracel stars was an arcade game there was no arcade version of parasol stars it was uh just written for the home market so parasol stars if you don't know is the story of bubble bubble three so it goes bubble bobble it goes uh rainbow islands then it goes parasol stars i had played parasol stars a bit on the amiga and remember really liking it this version which is kind of the lead version is bloody fantastic like this is probably and there's a very strong argument for being the best game on the system it is tip top when i say this system i mean uh the mini here because i haven't played every single game with pc engine so couldn't uh comment i've only played all the ones on here um yeah parasol stuff is fantastic absolutely fantastic um yeah you will not go wrong with it air zonk so zonk is kind of bonk from the future it looks like a cyborg something i don't know but it's a side-scrolling shoot em up it's okay quite like the graphics very clear and cartoony it's fine newtopia two is yeah the sequel to newtopia um zelda knockoff kind of thing and it's meant to be all right slightly better than the first one but mostly the same new adventure island is well it's kind of a wonderboy game well to me it feels very much like a wonderboy game because it plays very similar as the first one but um i don't know it's i could never quite get on with it i don't know i prefer the simplicity of the very first wonderboy but yeah wonderboy has a very strange and checkered history and this is one of those games it's perfectly good but i just never clicked with me soldier blade is great really really great um is a shoot-em-up as uh you know we are saying many many times but it's a really [ __ ] good ones probably yeah i'm gonna say i think it's my favorite shoot-em-up on this device yeah as in the mini not it all the pc engine games because i have a soft spot for uh oh there's a game like cotton where you play it's a horizontal scroll where you play a witch and i can never remember the name of it something like magical something or other um it's not on here which i think is a massive massive shame so it's a really good game though but uh yeah soldier blade [ __ ] love soldier blade it's great it's one of the best uh shoot-em-ups from that era bomberman 93 is great really really good version of bomberman um best versions of bomberman as far as i'm concerned about my 93 bomberman 94 and saturn bomberman and i tell you what bombard94 is on here as well i couldn't really pick between the two um i like both of them but uh i'd have to play them more especially because they tend to blur into one in my memory but yeah really good version of one man i can't go wrong there and loads of thunder i've completely forgotten what lords of thunder is totally forgotten to the extent that i'm gonna have to uh dub something in i bring you greetings from the world of the future uh yeah it's a side scrolling shoot em up and it's really good i hadn't played it before it's got kind of a samurai ninja aesthetic thing going on and yeah really really good one actually very tight controls really interesting power-ups slightly spoiled for me though because you pick up a lot of sort of gems as you're going along for scoring stuff and it's constantly making this bling-bling noise as you pick them up so you can't hear the soundtrack or any other noises and it really got on my nerves after a bit and almost spoiled what is otherwise a very good game anyway back to your scheduled timeline now on to the pc engine games which are the japanese games quite literally in japanese so if they aren't arcadey games you can pick up very quickly and rely on text you are [ __ ] out of luck son right start off with the kung fu um which has another name china warriors or something um yeah this is the game i always use to test pc engines because i have it on who card and it's crap it is crap they've got massive jerky sprites that look like bruce lee and it's it's just really really janky and rubbish um i can see why they put it on here though because it is very different um but yeah you're not going to get much joy out of he'll load it up have five minutes i'm gonna go bloody hell that's the end of that just like a necromancer i had never heard of it is a japanese rpg it's got a slight horror theme in fact the graphics are heavily inspired by hr giga so there's a lot of biomechanical weirdness going on um unfortunately it's yeah a jrpg in japanese so unless you speak japanese it is of no consequence because you won't be able to understand it or therefore play it uh galaga 88 i really like alligator it's a gallagher update simple as that um gets a slightly rough time but i really like it i always have a really good time in gallagher 88 so that's my recommendation fantasy zone i'm the other way around on most people seem to like fantasy zone never did much for me um sort of horizontal uh scrolling shooter where you can sort of um loop around the same area a bit like defender it's got very pasty graphics it's fine i i've never enjoyed playing it it's never done anything for me dragon spirit now we're talking so dragon spirit was an arcade game a coin-op shooter they converted um i had various versions for um the home computers it was always a bit [ __ ] the arcade is okay but the pc engine version i like more and i doubt i'm on my own there because the pc engine version is easier the arcade is too bloody difficult but uh dragon spirit pc engine yeah i would i would say have more fun without the arcade version your mileage may vary a parry got a ball so um i always thought gati ball was like golf but um after attempting to play this game um it's more like croquet or something i think uh it took me a while to get my head around this one because yeah it's in japanese but um you can get your head around it and play it and it was all right actually yeah i think i'd probably stick to the golf game on here that i could understand personally but to hey that's just me um next up nektaris so nektaris is the japanese version of military madness the turn-based strategy game from earlier simple as it's just a duplicate there's no reason to play it unless you particularly want to play a version where you can't understand the text under secret speaking japanese dungeon explorer um yeah that's a duplicate again just japanese version of yeah dungeon explorer so frankly that's another game we mark off newtopia yet again yep it's just the japanese version that you can't quite understand of the game we've got on here in english i mean i like the idea that they just dumped all the games on when right everybody gets everything although that's not strictly true there are a couple of differences for different territories but um overall they've given you everything you know there's a few um problems where basically getting the same game twice and one of the versions you can't understand but hey it's completeness in it and it's better than just leaving it off frankly pc engine pc engine is uh well it's box adventure i think is the name for it um what we mentioned earlier simple as good old pc kid it's not as good as box revenge the sequel but it's still pretty good and it is a different game to one down here so that's all good is oz is it whatever it's called one two yeah japanese versions of those meh i mean you're just repetition in a different language the genji and the haiki clan yes that is a thing i had never bloody heard of this game and it's easily playable without understanding japanese so the first stage was like an amiga public domain ripoff of ninja spirit is all i can say it feels like a crap version of ninja spirit written in somebody's shed or something the second stage um was like the kung fu uh the big old sprites thing and equally as janky frankly and apparently the third stage is something else still but i didn't get that far um yes it's weird it's it somehow feels more amateur than the other games on here um i mean it's interesting for five minutes but yeah it's not exactly a quality edition uh super darius is a horizontal shooter and i mean we all know of the darius series it went on for a million years um i super dare is okay don't know if i'm after a darius i'll play darius gaiden usually on the saturn but um yeah it's not one of the better ones superstar soldier so this is kind of an earlier version of soldier blade and it's not as good but in fact i don't say primitive but it is quite an early one um yeah i really like it i've always had a soft spot for superstar soldiers know why it was the only game i ever bought in the wii virtual console if i remember correctly um yeah really like it i think you'll have a lot of fun with that dimer kamura is ghouls and ghosts just what girls and ghosts call them japanese and this is a fantastic conversion of the arcade game really really good cannot fault it i mean if you've got access to the arcade game as we'll play that um because it's gonna be slightly better but there we go there was to say there really other than is too bloody hard but that's golden ghosts all over and they didn't make it any easier for the pc engine or anything but um one day i will complete that game just kidding i don't plan to live that long the legend of valkyrie um so this is a game i was kind of dimly aware of but hadn't actually put any time into so it's sort of a it was an arcade game again um and it's sort of a top shooter like a bit like hikari warriors but fantasy and there's kind of some sword slashery stuff going on as well it's um some rpg elements yeah i quite liked it actually um there's a little bit of japanese text but um seems to get all right without it uh yeah that's quite a nice addition actually eldine so aldines is a side-scrolling shooter apparently it's very good i mean it seems very good quality thing but i i can't bloody get on this it's just too bloody difficult for my liking you're like really bloody difficult i don't know it's just me finding that or that is a common opinion but uh yeah i'm not saying any of these uh shoot-em-ups on this machine are particularly easy because uh they are quite difficult games in general but aldine's old dean's i don't know all seems a little bit otd sorry senshi spriggan um so this is a vertical shooter um we play like a is when we play a roboty thing i think you do like a mech there's several of those actually um it's it's got an interesting power-up system we can kind of mix the power-ups together but overall once you've stopped messing about with the power-ups frankly it's just a bit kind of meh i mean it's decent enough but compared to the other shooters on here it's not one of the best ones newtopia 2 is a japanese version of newtopia 2. do you see do you see do you see gradius oh yeah love me some gradius uh it's coin up our conversion really really good coin up conversion and in fact wait for it it's better than the arcade version it's got extra stages this is like like the pc engine version of gradius is kind of the top version of greatest even over the arcade so that's lovely to see that on there and equally lovely to see salamander which is part of the greatest series and probably my fave of the greatest games actually um i i can't say it's the best version though it kind of chugs a bit at times this conversion it's still very good but if you've got access the arcade go salamander but stick to pc engine for gradius that's my tip for the top super momotaro dentetsu 2 this time it's personal um yeah this is a a game it's a some sort of board game it's entirely in japanese i've got no idea and couldn't play it and statistically it's very unlikely you will be able to either ninja ryukonden um so this is actually ninja gaiden but not the arcade ninja gaiden it's based on the nes game i i didn't even know this was this existed and sort of pc engine version of it there's all sorts of weird versions of that um nes ninja gun there's a black version for bloody amiga which is based on the any oh it's very odd very odd anyway it's overly fiddly for me didn't enjoy it um all i liked really was you can jump in front of the status panel at the top which amused me that's all i could say on that i'd stick the nes one there star perodia so you know how parodious is a piss take of gradius with cutesy graphics well this is the same thing but for star soldier i didn't know this existed um and you play as a little shooty pc engine ah endless fun now i really like that never played it before never heard of it before really enjoyed it yeah hats off to it spriggan mark ii so this is kind of the sequel to sairae sanchi spriggan there it's really odd because that's a vertically scrolling game this is a horizontally scrolling game um so it really did mix it up there to say the least um i don't know i thought this was a bit crap actually it's not as good as the first one and he keeps stopping for bloody cutscenes drove me [ __ ] mad it's like oh here's another cutscene of some people talking in japanese no no this is a shooty game i want to be doing the twitch game shooting not stopping and looking at this and stuff i can't understand anyway snatcher we've been through but yeah it's yeah i mean no so annoying to play this version if you don't understand japanese you will basically need a printout translation or something there is an english version of the game of course but it's only for the mega cd or sega cd if you're in america um there is no pc engine version in english which is why there is no version in english on here shame because you know it looks very prominent as well because it's you know a white where everything's generally darker thought that and bomberman stand out anyway gradius ii um vulcan venture this was called outside japan wasn't vulcan adventure no it was vulcan adventure wasn't it um yeah this is the best version again like gradius it's got extra bits in the arcade and have tip top can't say much more than that really good fun great shooter great shooter and the first chowaniki yes so cho nikki yes it is the series you're thinking of the sort of crazy homoerotic bodybuilder shoot em up thingamajiggy um this isn't the best one in there it's not as crazy as the latest one later ones there's still plenty of craziness in there and i don't know it's just not very good it just doesn't play that well i don't think um yes it's not as much fun as the others but you never know what it's going to throw at you next so when you're playing it for the first few times you're still going to have a lot of fun just being surprised at the uh very interesting enemies uh then we've got amikakumarjo dracula x chino rondo as you may have guessed this is rondo of blood um just in japanese rondo of blood is pretty much considered i think i think it's safe to say this sort of the best um non-rpg castlevania so before castlevania sort of became the metroidvania games with the rpg elements with symphony of the night um this was kind of the best one actually i don't know where it was released chronologically maybe it came out after some video that although that seems unlikely um yeah it's really good really good platform action game really nice i much prefer the later metroidvania stuff but uh doesn't mean that isn't a good game bomb man 94 i mentioned earlier is good uh very very good exceptionally good actually one of the best bomberman games is it better than 93 don't know don't know i'd have to plan some more to tell you but frankly they're both honest who cares bomberman panic bomber oh god every character gets his own bloody puzzle game eventually doesn't he so this is a bomberman themed falling blocks puzzler it's about generic as you can bloody get i mean it's fine but the whole time i was playing it i was thinking i'd much rather be playing super puzzle fighter frankly which is similar but much better um and ginga fukai densetsu sapphire yes it's a vertical scroller i hadn't played it before it's really good really good very impressed with that game um tip top and that's all the games on it but wait no it isn't it's not all the games because there's two hidden ones i [ __ ] you not comrades right i'll tell you how to get them just in case well i'm sure every website in the world has got it noted down but we'll say anyway right what you do is you highlight salamander and then you uh press the select button twice and you get to play force gear which is a side scrolling shoot em up with uh where you play as a sort of battle mech type thing and it's it's okay it's okay so it's not marvellous but there's a little extra unadvertised freebie pretty nice press select three times and you get twin b returns which is a vertical shooter with graphics a bit like fantasy zone or even simpler um and it's it's not great i'll be honest it's it's a little bit overly simple for me but again as a little freebie hidden game that's quite nice and it brings your total up to 59 games well it doesn't really does it because you know you can't really play the japanese ones and there's all the duplicates in that so if we think about it there are 32 japanese games 25 english games and two hidden games so that's 59 but five of the games are repeated and three of them you cannot play um basically at all unless you are fluent in japanese so realistically there are 51 games 49 advertised and the two extra ones there's also a couple of other little hidden secrety things maybe more that they haven't found yet but uh ones i know of um if you uh go over to i don't try and think what it was it was fantasy zone gradius and i think salamander um if you uh go on to them and hold down the select button and press run to select them you get slightly alternate versions like um we'll use fancy zone as the example fancy zone has been recolored i think to look a bit more like the arcade machine and the music sounds different yeah actually i'll demonstrate [Music] so there we go it's now that time of the video where we moan about the games we wanted on there that we didn't get i would have liked to have seen uh cotton uh fantastic knights uh little witch scrolling schumer mentioned earlier and i'd like to see the oth the game that's like that called magical something or other i can never remember the name of it but uh i like that better than cotton i'd like to see that on there there's no street fighter 2 championship edition there is a fantastic version of street fighter 2 championship edition for this but just not on there i mean i don't really have a problem with that because everybody's got so many bloody versions of street fighter 2 now and the championship edition isn't even you know the bestest of them and you'd have to be playing on a two-button pad and let's face it it's fine it's fine you can play that and a million other things better um gakibo isn't on here which is like a weird geckibo i'm gonna say akiba um this is like a weird sort of photography game which it's very strange but really good fun and it's just re so much fun to play it's real shame that's not on this it's quite unique as well speaking of unique um there's no gamola speed right which is this really weird sort of action puzzle game there's no other game quite like it so it's not i'm aware of at least so it's a real shame that isn't on higgs it's quite a unique pc engine thing uh there's also really nice arcade conversions of uh atomic robo kid and mr heli it would have been nice to have seen those on there as well but hey it's still a really good selection and it's a really good selection of games that a lot of people won't have played so that's pretty good isn't it so how does this stack up well the thing is when you look at how well the emulation is put in how good the controller is how good the definition is on the screen and indeed the options of how to change it if you should want and the lineup of the games yeah i mean you have to cap knock the numbers down due to repetition and stuff but there's a lot of bloody games on here still and the overall quality is really high there's only like two or three on here i'd say oh don't bother with do you know i mean out of all of those and i mean parasol stars alone is bloody fantastic but there's a lot of fun on here and they're games which i mean it's very unlikely unless you were super into the turbo graphics 16 in america you wouldn't have played and a lot of these you just wouldn't have played at all because they were japanese only and if you're european i mean bloody hell unless you picked up an emulation later or somehow your dad was like i don't know the um worked for nec or something you're very unlikely to have seen these at all back in the day so it's really nice to have a very easy way to experience these games for people who don't want to mess about with emulation and that kind of stuff buy this plug it into your telly jobs are good and fantastic gift for people who are into their video games and haven't played these and want to spend a bit of time doing it which i mean you know with all the lockdowns and things going on at the moment could be the time to do that so i am going to say from i think this is the best mini console is the best implementation and it's the best all-round set of games i mean there's a lot of shoot maps if you don't like shoot-em-ups there's still enough in there to keep you interested but it will knock you down a bit but play some bloody shoot-em-ups there's some good ones play soldier blade damn you it's fantastic however there's always a bloody sticking point in there and the sting point this time is the price because it may be the best mini console for me but it's also the most bloody expensive i had to pay a hundred pounds to rich uncle amazon for this and a hundred pounds is a bloody lot in the mini consoles i mean some of them 60 70 quid the playstation one was knocked down to like 30 and came with i think that came with two controllers didn't it kind of relevant because it was a bit [ __ ] frankly but um so depressing i couldn't even bring myself to review it in fact um so maybe that's not the best comparison but it's pricey it is pricey a hundred pounds is a lot more than the others which is a shame and you only get the one controller whereas most of them had two new you know but if this goes down in price a bit wow this would be like a massive recommendation for anyone who isn't emulating these things if you've got your raspberry pi set up or even just a good pc set up with a decent controller and you've got this emulated there's no point in this it's just a pretty thing for your shelf um do you really need another one of those if you're not gonna turn it on we're looking at you i i mean i really like this and it's my favorite of the mini consoles but if i wasn't reviewing it i wouldn't have bought it just because i can play all these another time anyway although i am pleased that it uh effectively forced me to play a few of these i hadn't come across which is nice and maybe it'll do the same for you but yeah overall it's overpriced a bit but it's really really bloody good that's nice in it oh i love reading books i've written myself so my first book terrible old games you've probably never heard of it's this one is being published in paperback in a few days and you can order a copy now from amazon or from your local book place what you buy books from or whatsoever and you can also buy signed copies from unbound direct from the publisher there we've also got a few little merchandise bits out like t-shirts and pin badges and mugs and stuff like that if you should enjoy such things and my second book attack of the flickering skeletons is still available in hardback if you should want a copy but yeah paperback terrible old games you've probably never heard of coming very soon i think it's the first time it has been properly published in america so if you are in the us of a now is your chance to get hold of a copy for slightly less than the hardback cost because paperbacks are slightly cheaper that's how that works so if you want to hear about some games that are old and terrible and you've probably never heard of them then this is very much the book you should be looking for that attack of the flickering skeletons as well bye [Music] [Music] foreign

Channel: ashens

Views: 354,849

Keywords: pc engine, pc engine mini, turbografx 16 mini, turbografx mini, coregrafx, coregrafx mini, review, unboxing, all games, hidden games, ashens, funny, core grafx mini, core grafx, pc engine mini review, pc engine mini hands on, turbografx 16 mini review, mini console, video games, pc engine core grafx mini, retro gaming, pc engine core grafx mini complete games list

Id: qbKxnfjOxI4

Length: 48min 35sec (2915 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 11 2020