The PC-FX - Review - Game Sack

hello and welcome to game sack this time around we're taking a look at any C's PC FX which was the follow-up to the PC engine yeah and maybe a lot of you haven't heard of this system I mean it was only released in Japan I heard of it of course but I never really knew a lot about it and since that's a case maybe our tech geek over here can fill us in on all about the system all right let's take a look at the PC FX itself the ncpc FX NEC released the CD based 32-bit pc FX in Japan in December of 1994 shortly after the releases of the Sega Saturn and the Sony Playstation this was the follow-up to the wildly successful pc engine which is known as the turbo graphics 16 in the u.s. it was made to resemble a powerful computer tower with upgradable expansion ports NEC finally realized that having more than one controller port was a good idea as would be building an AV and s-video jacks it also came stocked with a 6 button controller very similar to the old duo rx pad it offered up to seven different background layers capable of doing different things as well as two sprite layers and over 16 million colors it even had a layer which could do JPEG video which NEC heavily banked on to make their new system stand out unfortunately the pc FX was woefully underpowered compared to the Saturn and the PlayStation offering no 3d capabilities while costing slightly more this did not bode well for the system and it was discontinued telling just over a hundred thousand units nice Joe some really good info on the system there and I think that could have been a really strong 2d powerhouse with its seven layers of background scrolling and whatnot but but I think actually the Saturn did better at 2d I mean it didn't have quite as many layers but I think it just was a better 2d so yeah overall and this one didn't have the 3d capability of the Saturn and the PlayStation in Zippos II and NEC just said whatever we're out yeah dropped it anyway let's look at the games that are on this system we got the first one which is always the most important part so let's just go team innocent is an adventure game by Hudson and also a launch game firstly I've got to say that I really don't care for the title of this game I understand that it stars three young innocent girls but dang the title makes you feel like a Chester the molester just turning on the power naturally the whole game is in Japanese and from what I can figure out you're on a space station to gathering information to try and figure out what happened there I'm sure I'm wrong but oh well after a fairly lengthy intro and a lot of talking you finally start playing the game the backgrounds are all pre-rendered CG which looked pretty nice however your character is a hand-drawn sprite that's wearing what appears to be a standard uniform of a spandex suit with a g-string team innocent yeah right anyway the game controls in place similar to Resident Evil granted this game came out long before that one did you wander around looking for clues and items that will help you progress the story there's a few enemies scattered about that you can fight fighting isn't very easy and it seems you have to time your attacks where you'll die quickly there's no life bar or anything that lets you know what your health is so it's hard to know when you're close to dying or not yep I'm close damn there's only three missions here so overall I think is probably pretty short it's an interesting game with some decent music that might actually be pretty fun if I could read the text Super God troopers Eroica is the only shooter on the system you know this kind of obstinance the pc engine had more shooters than any other genre oh well unfortunately it's an overhead shooter which just happens to be my least favorite type but I don't hate them or anything as with pretty much all PC FX games you'll get tons of anime cutscenes explaining the story you start out as a weak airplane which can be slightly powered up but once you get to the boss of stage 1 you're suddenly playing as a mech which will last you the rest of the game this kind of looks like Musha or maybe even sprig in but it's a far cry from either of those in my opinion sadly your ship moves way too fast even on the slowest setting so you're going to be running into a lot of things until you get used to it and even then you're going to be running into a lot of things because you're huge and there's lots of enemy projectiles you have a ton of different sub weapons which you can select through with a menu each of these has their own meter and they last a different amount of time depending on how much you fire them this is also one of the very few games that takes advantage of the mode switch on the PC FX pad switch mode 1 to b4 automatic continuous fire you have a life bar and you can take several hits before you die you can also collect power-ups to beef up your weapons a bit but what's really interesting is that this game features a leveling up system you get experience in the levels and it's tallied up when you win the stage or even when you die here it shows me leveling up from 10 to 11 I assume now how this affects the actual gameplay I wasn't really able to precisely determine but you do really level up because I found that once you die and continue and try that stage again you suddenly seem a little bit more powerful and it's just a little bit easier overall but the really good news is that when you power up your firepower and anything touches you your firepower goes down so I'd really recommend not touching anything but honestly I'd recommend that for every shooter ever made the graphics are pretty good and they have some nice color it almost looks like a Super Nintendo game visually except there's way too much stuff on screen and everything is moving around way too fast still it does show off some cool things they're like a scaling and rotation effect the music is pretty good and I think it's worth ripping to your iPod or Android device too bad there's no sound test or Redbook audio tracks I don't know what all of the different options in the title screen do but one let me pick different characters to try out stage two with another one gave me an alternate version two stage one that faded out for no reason that I could discern as I was fighting the box this is obviously a time to Caravan mode to be honest I absolutely hated this game at first but after playing it for a while I grew to moderately enjoy it but in the grand scheme of shooters it's really nothing tremendously special let's take a look at Boundary Gate daughter of Kingdom it's a first-person RPG by pole star the game is completely in Japanese and there are no walkthroughs online that I could find so I did the only thing that I could do wander around aimlessly until I got stuck this took about 15 or 20 minutes as I was stopped at three different doors and couldn't progress the good thing is that I think I got a good feel for what the game is like in that short time you walk around in first-person mode the map in the corner is very helpful as you can see the backgrounds in this area all look very similar and without the map I would have been completely lost just like any other RPG you talk to people all over from shops to taverns when you do get into a battle it's no longer displayed in first-person mode but plays similar to most other JRPGs out there at least this part I was able to fumble my way through and figure out how to attack and how to heal I like that after I killed this guy they show his gooey corpse which was drawn really cool I think they did a fairly good job with this game in terms of graphics in the way it makes it look like it's scaling the music here seems to be pretty good and I liked it for what it was worth it'd be pretty fun to see what happens later in this game as and if you're just confined to towns and dungeons or if you actually get out into the open world to wander around battle heat was one of the launched games for the system it's a fighting game but not in the traditional sense this is more like an FMV game that you see on the Sega CD but perhaps even less controllable each side can choose one of four players that's right if you want to play as this Belmont looking guy you need to use controller too anyway you get into the game and you must input fighting commands and then the animation plays out you have strong and light attacks a guard a jump and special moves unfortunately the timing really sucks and you never know if a move you input is going to work at first I tried using Street Fighter moves and I definitely recommend not doing that instead your attacks are extremely basic like pressing a direction and an attack button the computer will almost always counter attack instances pre-rendered animations have very little time to respond I wasn't able to win a few matches though the game looks really cool and the music seems to use the PC engine sound chip still I really didn't enjoy any time I spent with this one I mean who thought a game like this would be a good idea well somebody did because we also have ten guy maku catechu deke akuto din well that's a mouthful this is pretty much the same game as battle heat but with ten guy Macchio characters instead ten guy Macchio 2 was the best selling game on the original PC engine so I guess they figured that people would flock to the PC FX for another game in the series although it's completely different anyway I haven't even harder time playing this one building the blue bar at the bottom of the screen appears to have something to do with your attacks but blue bar no my attacks rarely hit the good news is that either player can choose any character now also the animation is cooler and it has a lot more personality to it in fact at some damn nice-lookin FMV but rarely do you see both characters on the screen at the same time once again the PC engine chip is used for the music and I'm almost convinced that the PC FX as an entire PC engine built inside of it somewhere too bad it's not backwards compatible they must have really thought this was the future of gaming back then kind of sad here's bluebreaker this is another RPG game and again I played it until I got stuck which took about 30 minutes damn me and my lack of Japanese well I must say that from an aesthetic point of view this is a good-looking game it starts as most PC FX games deal with an anime intro I like the art style of the characters here and the animation is pretty good after another lengthy intro and some dialogue you're asked some questions of course I just picked some random answers in the next thing I knew I was slung into battle the battles look good and your character is super deformed and I don't have a problem with that what I do mind is that the picture of your character on the top of the screen has no eyeballs did they forget or was that on purpose and if it was on purpose why battle is really strange in this game I don't know if it was an option I turned on randomly but it was set to auto battle at first I was trying to input commands but it wasn't having any of that so I just sat back and watched in the half hour that I played I didn't do any wandering around but it was automatically placed at the next story point first I was at a par and I chose every option I could to see what would happen and then I was put in a cave with some enemies that were much tougher than me I fought and died a couple of times and then I just started running from every battle so I could try and get somewhere I found a treasure chest and then I found the end of the cave and searched it but nothing happened I went back to the bar and then back to the cave again but was stuck after trying everything I could so I quit I really think this would be a fun game to play if it wasn't for the damn language barrier the music's great and so are the artwork and backgrounds it's a shame I'm so damn old or I try and learn Japanese but I die of old age before I could learn enough to play these RPGs huh welcome to Pia carrot is a dating sim these have been popular in Japan for a while this is also the only PC FX game that I know of that has an English fan translation anyway you play the role of some dude who goes to work at his dad's diner you're surrounded by a ton of hot anime chicks and your goal is to get a girlfriend you have a limited amount of freedom in what you do and it affects your stacks you can also control the direction of the conversation with certain people depending on if you like them or not fortunately the working in the diner aspect is done automatically for you you really only control yourself during breaks in your time off if you tickle a girl's fancy then you too can hook up and yes there's plenty of nudity in this game well what passes for nudity in Japan anyway and now I can't show you here because YouTube would probably go nuts but if you're curious then you've likely already seen similar images online anyway all of the images from your encounters are saved into the system memory for you to utilize later I guess honestly I feel kind of creepy playing this game and of all the PC FX games out there why is this the one that somebody chose to translate I guess we know what the priority is in the PC FX community pick it up if you like Interactive anime softcore porn miraculous an RPG by rayforce yeah I haven't heard of rayforce the developer either they've only done a handful of RPGs and none of them left Japan of all the G RPGs I played so far for the PC FX this is the most traditional feeling of them all there's lots of story going on here it's done in a mix of voice acting and text bubbles I'm sure it's a truly amazing tale that would have me glued to my chair if I could understand it but I can't so oh well I just did my best to talk to everybody so I could trigger the storyline and I was able to fumble around and find my way fairly well the battles are all pretty bland in the way they look but at least it's easy to guess which button command is a basic attack and which one is a special attack that drains your magic points I guess it's magic points because the number by my stats is getting smaller every time I use it I was pretty amazed at the few times I actually leveled up I mean the second time it happened I got a 63 point jump in my hip points that never happens for the short time that I played this it was fun to wander around the towns in the overworld map exploring to see what kind of trouble I could get myself into well I guess I wanted a bit too far because I met a few enemies that handed out some heavy damage to my sorry ass level 3 character he met his doom on I almost continued playing because I was actually enjoying myself listening to the decent soundtrack and exploring but I decided not to something was missing and it was me I actually do need a bit of story to keep me interested and since there is no FAQ or translation I'll just end it right here you all right dad what are you thinking are the pc FX so far is that a worthy follow-up to the pc engine from the games that i played no it is not a worthy fallout for sure I mean first and foremost of the language barrier was obviously huge for me I didn't understand all you'd probably enjoy it more if you could read them oh of course by all means and of course I don't mind some anime you know vid trails and cut scenes but that ain't totally banked on them yeah that was just a little overload but yeah anyway we've got more games coming up so maybe there will be a good one in there let's take a look maybe too I hope Power Dolls effects is a military strategy game you're in charge of an all-female fighting force in there mechs the gameplay is fairly basic but it's still fun select the character you want to move and if you're within range of the enemy you can choose how to attack you have a bunch of different weapons to choose from and some of these weapons can reach multiple enemies if they're all grouped close together and as you'd expect each side takes a turn and politely waits for the other side to finish before attacking again the maps don't look like anything that couldn't be done on the pc engine but the close-up scenes of the equipment can look fairly nice the music is also pretty good with some pumping tunes that hopefully you won't get tired of too quickly I didn't Raoul ear Aurora is a comedy adventure game whoa whoa whoa Dave what was the name of that game again earlier Aurora really rarua that like scooby-doo or something trying to say that it starts off with a corny anime intro that has a really wacky song playing the game is pretty fun you start with the samurai character knee only has one attack right off the bat as you explore the game world your play will be interrupted by cutscenes here and there there's a lot of these efforts and now either further the story or you'll gain something from them like when I open this treasure chest up for a cutscene and now I have a sword attack cool not only is this a new attack I can now access areas I couldn't before you'll also gain new characters to play as and once you free them they'll join you I thought it was game over for me until I figured out how I could change characters as I was pretty much stuck as you'd guess each character has different abilities all of them controls similarly but they all have one really annoying feature for some stupid reason when you jump you jump forward you can't just jump straight up because you know that would be really helpful climbing this thing would have been super easy if he could jump straight up but now as a total chore and takes up a lot of time this game was announced in November 1995 but wasn't released until February of 1998 you think that with almost two and a half years of development they would have caught this oh well the music is enjoyable for the most part and I did laugh at some of the cutscenes as they're pretty funny this is a decent game that will stay forever lost with the PC FX as there's no part of it anywhere Derr languorous or FX is a really cool strategy RPG it's a port of the Super Famicom game of the same name which itself is largely based on language or two for the Mega Drive and of course that's the sequel to war song on the Genesis being all in Japanese this one is pretty tough to figure out I had to play a translated version of the Super Famicom game in order to figure out the menus once I figured that stuff out I was able to do well enough to get at least some footage if you're used to games like Shining Force you'll have to take some time to get used to this the battles are more like military madness rather than Shining Force as you have a bunch of Units rather than just one-on-one fights this version also features some anime cutscenes and some kickass music overall I'd say that this is a game that I'd really want to get into if I could read it but if you want to play it in English play the translated version on the Genesis or the Super Nintendo somehow I do think the battle scenes look best on the Genesis but the voice effects are pretty bad this is a fantastic game for the PC FX if you can read Japanese now why didn't this one get a fan translation ah the last imperial prince is another RPG for this system well it's listed as an RPG but I felt it was more of an action RPG I'm sure there's a truly fascinating story here as you start the game in the middle of the action some strange girl is being attacked and the chivalrous guy you are ends up helping her out she eventually falls to a cheap shot but doesn't dying gets taken to town for the healing I really like the way you play this game I like that everything is on a side view and there are no overhead parts that I came across you control your character in a real-time fight at first I was really liking how this was playing out you fight one enemy at a time and once you defeat him the next one comes at you all through the battle you collect gold that jumps at you from your enemies and that was fun to collect after a bunch of battles oh it started to feel very tedious I'd kill an enemy in hopes of seeing no more appear at the edge of the screen but they just kept showing up each enemy type has a different attack style so you have to learn when to attack and when to dodge the problem is you have very little reaction time so I more or less just try to anticipate their attack to catch them off-guard this would cause the enemy to block most of the time and it just got really boring one thing I found interesting is when your main character dies and you take control of his partner when you finally win your main character comes back to life and gains experience it feels a little like cheating but I didn't mind I think of the developers that tweaked the battles a bit more to make them more easy to control then this would have been a great game overall this was a fun experience and one of the better RPGs that I had a chance to play Kinchin doji zenki FX aka demon print zenki is a beat-em-up based on an anime of course you can play as a girl or what appears to be a small feral boy named zenki you have an attack block and a jump button if you put the mode 1 switch to B then the top row of buttons can be used for special attacks zenki fights best at close quarters and the girl fires projectile attacks generally I like playing a zenki more there's lots of boss fights in this and there's lots of drama between everything as well the drama actually adds to the frenetic feeling of the game and I don't usually like the talky talky stuff wedged into and then between the actual gameplay but here it absolutely works sometimes a guy will run in and drop a banana which gives you some life back or a ring which will turn you into a bigger more powerful zenki if you're playing as a girl and get the ring then big zenki comes in and he does a special attack and delivers a ton of damage the graphics are really nice some of the stages are fairly basic looking but that's okay because I think the style works well for the game I really like this death train with the skeletons that keep attacking you they go down but they don't stay down just like the red skeleton is in the Castlevania game there's lots of independently scrolling layers here and the PC effects has a ton of them and I'm glad to see them being shown off the animation is also really cool the music gets the job done with tunes that add to the pace and the tension I've got to admit I was confused at first while playing this game because there's a lot of actual gameplay in action is this really a PC FX game this doesn't make sense the system had more potential than we generally see in playing this one makes me sad that we didn't see that much effort put into many other games on the platform this is an absolute must own if you have a PC FX and the language barrier doesn't bring anything down oh and it's two-player simultaneous too this is fire women matoi goomy I really don't know what this game is about but from what I can deduce you might be a teacher at an all-girls school or you might be there just to protect them because you get into battles with some random punks that seem to come onto campus just to cause troubles the game goes by the days of the weekend Monday through Friday you can walk around and find activities to do like play soccer tennis kung fu and even sumo these activities are really boring because you don't actually take part in them but instead you watch your character go through the motions once he's done he gains hit points and his ring goes up all this is necessary to battle these thugs that randomly show up the battles are all really weird you imput battle commands before a fight starts one is attack and the other is maybe defense either way I fought a couple of battles and got my ass kicked both times maybe I didn't do enough training and my character is super weak there's lots of dialog in lots of menus it even as GPS or as the game calls it gal positioning system and I won't share my dirty joke about that because this is a family-friendly show I really wish that I knew what was going on here so I might actually enjoy this game but wandering around aimlessly and stupid as I'm doing here just isn't entertaining let me know if you play this game in what you thought it was also released on the PlayStation if you must play this game but don't have a PC FX farland story effects is another strategy RPG as always there's lots of anime since this is a PC FX game it must have been required or something the actual gameplay is pretty basic it's easy enough to pick up even if you don't know the language the battles are one-on-one just like Shining Force may require a hell of a lot more loading everything here is pretty average and I can't really recommend it unless you find it for a couple of bucks a slightly better strategy RPG is Dragon Knight 4 by NEC Avenue this one begins with fairly well fleshed out towns and a bunch of story there's a ton of text in this game but since I can't read it there's really no reason to let it waste my time so I just speed through it like a mofo basically you appear to be a 10 year old kid who goes on a quest for some reason and since you're 10 years old girls will disrobe when you talk to them that always happened to me when I was 10 once you get to the meat of the game it's pretty easy though the cursor is extremely twitchy the graphics in the sound are all PC engine quality but that's not necessarily a bad thing well unless you paid more than a Playstation or a Saturn cost to buy this system basically it just means that this game should have been on the PC engine the cutscenes do contain some high color stills though it's not a horrible game I suppose chip chan kik is an action-platformer game the introduction cutscene is nothing more than a pedophiles dream intro with little girls and panties and crap like that I really wanted to turn this game off while watching this as I felt totally disgusted by it after getting past that crap the actual game starts and it plays very similar to Bubble Bobble you run around a single screen Daisy and enemies and then fleeing them which destroys them the controls are simple and the game is really fun to play defeated enemies will leave items to grab which give you points or power-ups when you collect them there's no time limit for each round but if you do take a long time a little demon guy will appear and follow you around he'll even shoot at you so it's worth it to keep moving each stage is cleared once you defeat all of the enemies every tenth stage ends in a boss fight that's fairly entertaining the game controls nicely and the levels are all laid out fairly well touching enemies without them being stunned will take one of your lives a life bar would have been nice but you do have a fair amount of credits to burn through so you can keep going for a while I think the actual game itself is really fun and probably the best game that I played for this episode the gameplay graphics are simple but well done and the music is pretty damn good it was done by hitoshi sakimoto who's done other stuff like gone live foreign midnight resistance on the genesis as well as other things like ogre battle Final Fantasy Tactics & Gradius 5 I really wish the developers would have went in a different direction as far as the story goes because what they have here is pretty disgusting so if you ever do play this game just get the intro and get right to it and finally this is and I need to be very careful in how I pronounce this noggins nerd gems anyway in the opening cutscene that plays after the title screen it appears that you were stranded and then rescued by a giant airplane once you're on the plane and after a lot of dialogue you're free to wander around this is all done digital comic style which is kind of cool well I mean it would be if you knew the language hmm I wonder what they've got under this sheet anyway I just make sure to choose every single option twice before I leave an area just to progress things along I like how you have a map so you can choose where to go on the plane anyway eventually something happens and the thing they were hiding under the sheet is a secret plane for you to use to battle enemies you take off to save the day or maybe conquer it I don't know and here you go folks this is the extent of the 3d graphics on a 32-bit PC FX system you fly around trying to destroy the enemy and super sweet dogfighting action actually it's kind of weird to control there's lots of menus and stuff when you finally do kill an enemy it dies via a CG FMV cutscene which really isn't very satisfying while fumbling through the menus I was able to figure out how to transform into a mech anyway you have limited ammo and once it runs out there's really nothing for you to do other than turn off the power and stop playing I can't figure out how to resupply myself or return to my ship via the menus and I can't find my ship by flying around looking for it either the graphics are less than Super Nintendo and Sega CD quality and so is the music gonna have to recommend that you pass on this one all right there's the PC fx4 yet Dave let me ask you a question which did you enjoy more this or the CDI that is a good question um god I enjoyed this more all's I'll say that for sure I did like some of the RPGs that I played even though I didn't know what the hell was going on yeah I enjoyed the action of them the graphics and whatnot and I really liked that Bubble Bobble chip chain kick game that I played yeah I thought that was really fun - the total pedophile you know yeah yeah I thought it was it more interesting this CD I had a hard harder time maybe finding a lot of games to play for this episode than the CDI but there are a couple of standout titles like zenki and I guess is Roy Garr to a lesser degree know I'm not a huge shooter fan a lot overhead shooter fan that is um yes it's not a Worman no yeah for sure it's not a horrible game but that poor CDI but you know nothing nothing's really below that anyways yeah anyway what are your favorite PC FX games have you ever even heard of the system what did you think of the system from what we showed you let us know in the meantime thank you for watching game sack all right Dave check out this PC effects game maybe you can review it yeah dude let's play it let me let me play middle C maybe I'll review it that's good idea it's kind of good loading here Oh surprise surprise and Adam Ant row let's watch it because it you know we see a Panama intro we're skipping half the game right and now we'll be totally lost yes he's got a booger in your mustache jeez is this ever gonna end dick Dave we title screen now time yeah oh my god oh no all right oh yeah I'm out it's probably another 20 minutes Wow I'll see you

Channel: Game Sack

Views: 478,532

Rating: 4.8521938 out of 5

Keywords: sega, nintendo, turbografx, pc, engine, gameplay, video, games, retro, genesis, snes, nes, master, system, pc-fx, nec, zenki, zeroigar, chip chan kick, pcfx, fx, japan, japanese, import, oddware, tower, joe, dave, avgn, nerd, sexy, hell yeah, cat, kitty, kitten, cats, team innocent, langrisser, warsong, final bosses, finalbosses

Id: t7qGy1jxsM0

Length: 33min 16sec (1996 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 28 2015

Reddit Comments

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Someone posted one of Game Sack's videos a few months ago, and since then, it has become my favorite Youtube gaming channel. Love seeing people who genuinely love games and put out great content.

Mark from ClassicGameRoom is also great and kind of reminds me of the Game Sack dudes, with how old-school he is.