Well, even without spine card, these are going at around $150 now.
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PC Engine/TG Appreciation and Collecting Thread, Because who needs a 2nd controller?
- Thread starter gryz
- Start date
Well, even without spine card, these are going at around $150 now.
Ouch, hope the person who bought it didn't buy it off the recommendation assuming the spinecard was legit.
sixteen-bit
Member
Damn, Rondo nearing that SNES Drac X price
Not really. It's vastly inferior to the imagination, play, and eye-candy of the first Spriggan. I was pumped for Mark 2 - until I played it. Ugh.
Indeed; I didn't see the note. If they're just looking for the spinecard, I screwed them royally. Sorry about that, random GAFer or lurker. Good news though, you now own one of the best games of all time at a decent price for it.
Real stupid of someone to fake a Spinecard. I don't understand that at all... I've got quite a few of them (real ones, including Drac X) and they just sit, mid-manual, on my shelf. Completely silly thing to collect. But, then, I don't see a point in SNES boxes due to simple practicality.
But, still, $100 shipped in the USA for a copy in that shape is fantastic. I haven't seen a copy with actual real spinecards in ages, I guess.
I'll defend it, unto death....kinda like the Orb of Ora
foobarry81
Member
I find it a bit shady tbh. The aim is clearly to boost the perceived value of what's on offer.
From the description: "The photos speak for themselves but here are further details.:"
Well, no.... I couldn't see from those pictures that the obi is a repro...
Yeah, you're right. The guy's certainly covered with eBay, but it is kind of sleazy.
D.Lo
Member
Yes, but you also said there aren't any AAA platformers on the platform apart from Akumajou Dracula X.
Yes there are fewer, but I think my list (Parasol Stars, Son Son II, Jackie Chan, Adventure Island, New Zealand Story, Ninja Spirit) are pretty much as good as almost anything on the Mega Drive (for evidence, I googled 'Best Genesis Platformers' and got lists like this and this). Man, Ninja Spirit is better than Ristar or Alex Kidd! of course those lists also include stuff like Contra and Gunstar Heroes, which are much more shooter than platformer IMO.
It's not quite in the Mega Drive's league, but there's not nothing either (and/or Mega Drive is vastly overrated for platformers).
SNES is way ahead of both in top-tier however.
Yep, for better or worse that piece of cardboard is worth $30-$60, and is easily fakable.
That was a dodgy auction.
My copy has no Obi, I threw it out in 1999ish when I got it
IrishNinja
Member
Keep this opinion far away from the Sonic-fans.
I agree, btw.
If anything, the PC Engine is underrated when it comes to platformers, particularly when everybody talks up the shooters when the platformers definitely showed up to play. I guess it doesn't help that some of the better ones didn't leave Japan like Son Son II or Momotarou Katsugeki.
The only genre that PC Engine is a slouch in is RPGs, and that's even including the Japanese releases.
A Black Falcon
Member
Any list which puts Alex Kidd for the Genesis on it is very, very suspect... that's not a particularly good game. The Genesis has dozens of platformers better than that game.
Also, I agree that run & guns like Contra, Alien Soldier, or Gunstar Heroes really should be on a separate list -- and it's a pretty great kind of game, and a category that the TG16+CD has virtually nothing in. Is there even ONE decent run & gun on the platform at all? Would you have to count the Shockman games as run & guns to come up with anything? I mean, those are pretty good, but they're really more platform-action than run & gun.
No, it isn't. Those lists are okay, but they're missing so many okay, good, and great games! And that's relaly the difference. With four times more games in the genre, of course the Genesis completely overwhelms the TG16.
Also, the best of the games in Racketboy's list there, and some others not listed, are better than any of those TG16 platformers you mention. Vectorman, Sonics 1, 2, 3 &K, RKA, Shadow Dancer, etc... amazing games! Games like The Lost Vikings, Boogerman, the other two Shinobi games, Ristar, Vectorman 2, the Illusion games, Ghouls & Ghosts (just as good on Supergrafx, but not on Turbografx/CD), and plenty of others are just as good as anything on that list of yours too. But list wars shouldn't be the point here; apart from the very best games, it's about numbers, not specific titles, I think.
I mean, sure. Yes, I like Son Son II quite a bit, and Jackie Chan and Ninja Spirit are also good. There are more decent platformers and platform-action games on the system as well, certainly -- Shockman and Shubibinman 1 (and 3), Liquid Kids/Mizubaku Adventure, etc., not to mention Bonk. But when your platform is outnumbered four to one in the genre, it's going to be really hard to be just as good, and I don't think it is. TG16 platformers are much more likely to look more dated than Genesis games thanks to no parallax, more NES-styled game designs in many cases, etc.
And as for the very best games in the genre, I really love Super Mario World, Sonic the Hedgehog (all 3, but 3 & Knuckles is best), and Donkey Kong Country (all 3 are great, but the last is my favorite)! They're among the all-time greats of the 2d platformer genre. The closest thing the TG16 has to that tier is Rondo of Blood -- and, while good, I at least would not put that game as being quite as great as those games are. And nor is Bonk's Adventure. It's a good fun platformer and I like it, but it's not one of the great classics like those games are, I don't think. Hudson didn't make platformers on par with Sega or Nintendo's best, and NEC and the third parties didn't make up the slack, as the vast disaprity in total releases shows.
Eh, the SNES may have more of the best platformers, but the Genesis has some great ones too, some which rival Nintendo's best (Sonic, particularly 2 and 3&K!), and a lot of good mid-tier platformers, just as much as the SNES has. It's definitely not "way behind" the SNES, no way at all.
Well then you're crazy-wrong! Any one of the Genesis Sonic platformers is better than any platformer on the TG16 except for maybe Rondo of Blood. It's not all that close.
Eh, maybe it's slightly under-rated in platformers, but it's still very badly disappointing in the genre compared to the SNES or Genesis. It's got less than a quarter the number of titles in the genre!
If you can read Japaense, the TG16+CD outdoes the Genesis+CD+32X in number of RPG releases by a wide, wide margin. Sure, I don't know if any of them are as great as Lunar 2 is, but it has far more of them, and it's hard for me to judge a lot of the games since I can't understand much Japanese, and story is important in RPGs. So no, the system is no slouch in RPGs compared to Sega. Of course Nintendo crushes everyone in the genre, but for CD RPGs (with voice acting, etc.) NEC had the most. The TG16+CD almost certainly wins in action-RPGs, too. The Genesis and SCD have some highlights, perhaps most notably Beyond Oasis, Landstalker, and Crusader of Centy on Genesis and Popful Mail on SCD, but the TG16 has more and better, headlined by far more Falcom games. Again, neither one can match the SNES, but the SNES won a dominant victory in Japan that generation, while RPGs were one of the most popular genres, so that is to be expected.
My copy has no Obi, I threw it out in 1999ish when I got it
Good, that's where those belong.
What !?
No no no (if you are including the CD games, otherwise I can see why you said that).
Tengai Makyou 2, Legend of Xanadu 2, Gulliver Boy, Emerald Dragon, YS IV, Anearth Fantasy Stories just to name a few are some of the best RPG that generation (at least that's my impression).
Oh my god, there's so much wrong here. First, I don't get this whole "Sonic's not a good platformer" kick that the internet is on. That's CRAZY to me. And not in like a rabid fan sort of way; Sonic 3 and Knuckles combined is one of the great highlights of the 16 bit era in so many ways... music, graphical design, actual gameplay design.
Second, the PC Engine isn't where one should go just for platformers. Yes, it has arguably the best platformer of all time, but come on! It just doesn't keep up with the SNES or Genesis in that genre. Are some of the great platformers icing on a delicious Shooter / RPG / Funky other stuff cake? Totally.
As for RPGs, come ON. The PC Engine CD is, especially in Japan, second only to the SNES. The Genesis wasn't as popular in Japan as the PC Engine, and therefore doesn't have as many RPGs. It's a popular genre there, and of course the second most popular system had the second most RPG releases.
Startling Odyssey 2 is also quite excellent and a visual feast as far as PCE RPGs go. HuCard or US released RPGs the system fares much more poorly though, sadly. So many great RPGs left in Japan, at least they are pretty cheap to purchase!
Oh man, that 90's post apocalyptic/Neo Tokyo/cyberpunk aesthetic so common around that era is probably my favorite game style ever...
I'm not "The Internet", feeling like Sonic is an overrated platform series created by corporate committee is an opinion I came to on my own years ago thank you very much, and I willingly own my opinion.
And don't misinterpret that as not being a Sega fan, I love other Sega franchises and their arcade catalog, but IMO Sonic isn't even Sega's best in-house platform game. Heck the best Sonic game isn't even on the Genesis.
Best Sonic game is Sonic Pocket Adventure on Neo Geo Pocket Color. It's a synthesis of everything that works in a Sonic game while stripping away the excess fat that doesn't.
I never said the PC Engine was where one should go to for platformers. I said it's underrated for platformers, I never said it could compete with SNES or Genesis, I merely said it's no slouch in that dept. I may be opinionated, but I'm not hyperbolic.
I'll give people Tenkai Makkyo, but everybody that keeps bringing up Falcom adventure games, I'm talking straight up RPG's. And even including PC Engine CD and Sega CD, Sega CD has a better showing with RPG'S.
And let's be real here, unless some of you read fluent Japanese, it's not like you can play the PC Engine's RPG catalog and form an actual opinion not based on heresay.
A Black Falcon
Member
.... Yeah. no. That game's okay, but nothing really special. It's about on par with the first Game Gear game or the GBA games, in being okay-ish games that are nowhere remotely near the level of greatness of the Genesis games. The Genesis games are the amazing ones.
Compared to the SNES or Genesis, sorry, but the TG16+PCE is indeed pretty disappointing as far as platformers go. It's got less than a quarter the number of titles, and far fewer truly great platformers as well. Sure, people often overlook the system because of how terribly it sold in the US and because it never released at all in the rest of the world, but if it is thought of, of course people think of Bonk and Rondo of Blood... but beyond that the library is thin and limited. Yeah, there are some other good ones, but far fewer than on the other platforms, as you'd expect from a system with so many fewer games in the genre.
What? Falcom made a few traditional RPGs -- think of the Dragon Slayer games -- and the rest of their stuff are action-RPGs, not adventure games. Action-RPGs are a subgenre of RPGs, just like how turnbased RPGs are,
We don't need to be able to read much Japanese to look at a list and see that the Sega CD has at most a third the number of RPGs that the Turbo CD does. And that the Turbo CD has many more exclusives, while outside of the two exceptional Lunar games, most other Sega CD RPGs are ports, either from the Turbo CD or Japanese computers. And sure, I and many others love the Lunar games, but saying that those games are better than a library that's more than triple the size of the Sega CD's RPG library... sorry, that's unlikely.
Seriously, the Turbo CD has more than triple the number of RPGs of the Sega CD. And you're saying that its library is worse? Unlikely.
I'm constantly finding new PCE games I had never even HEARD of before, but to my amateur eye it does seem to have fewer straight up mascot platformers than the 16-bit systems. If we're counting Castlevania as a platformer then Legendary Axe and LA2 count as well.
New Adventure Island is the SHIT however. Best Adventure Island game by leaps and bounds.
Sonic Genesis trilogy and Knuckles for life.
New Adventure Island is the SHIT however. Best Adventure Island game by leaps and bounds.
Sonic Genesis trilogy and Knuckles for life.
Yuji Naka is not a "corporate committee".
IrishNinja
Member
preach
although i agree with Mzo about there being so, so much quality PCE stuff im discovering all the time, really can't wait to get a turbo everdrive
I have a hard time considering Castlevania or LA as platformers (but I assume it's just a question of point of view or definition).
Disposing enemies are far more important than "jumping".
As mentioned a few posts above, Momotarou Katsugeki is the best "hidden gem" platform game for PCE IMO.
New Adventure Island is indeed an awesome game, pure unalduterated jumping bliss (bosses are weak though).
Yeah, but I can form an opinion and as sure as hell PCE CD has a far better showing compared to Sega CD as far as RPG goes (IMO, again if we include japanese CD games
).The level of detail in a game like Legend of Xanadu 2 can dwarf even mighty SNES RPGs (of course helped by the storage media).
Whoa whoa whoa. Naka didn't "create" Sonic. He's completely right here: Sonic was created by corporate committee in one country, then changed by a different committee in another country. Let's call a spade a spade.
IrishNinja
Member
Naoto made him with love, contest be damned! haha for real though, this also isn't a conclusion you come to "all by yourself", you have to read the history on it, and even then it does nothing to diminish the greatness of the series, just like knowing jumpman was a last-minute pinch hitter for a failed popeye license doesn't mean revisionist history about mario games should be indulged, either.
sixteen-bit
Member
^gotta make yourself seem like a big fish
So I can't come to a conclusion based on evidence and history to back up an opinion, I have to make decisions on things in a vacuum?
At least with Mario, his creation and evolution was a matter of practicality and problem solving. Can't use Popeye? Come up with a different sprite. Give him a red hat so you can see his head on a black background. Give him a moustache so you can differentiate his nose from the rest of his face. Need to see his arms swinging? Put him in red overalls and blue shirt so you can see the arms moving. Mario comes from a place of problem solving and engineering, not on trying to "sell" a character.
FWIW, I'd still love to play Oshima's original vision for Sonic before SoA watered it down to be more palatable.
IrishNinja
Member
apparently, yes
yes, mario's design & many forms were all born of authenticity & practicality, and have never been affected by focus groups, which is why everyone loves the exciting design found in the NSMB series
there's so many ROMhacks out there that this very well might be possible! fair warning though, you'll still be stuck playing some of the finest platformers ever made, sorry =/
Oh please, so I had an opinion on it before people thought that the internet collectively decided to start dogging on Sonic at the same time, and not because I smelled something rotten in Denmark when Sega and the gaming press for years tried to pitch Yuji Naka as the "creator" of Sonic even though I had seen the early Naoto Oshima sketches years prior. Thanks for that info, SEGA-16!
We're talking about the creation of the character, not current times, I'm not going to deny that both Mario and Sonic have been whored out to kingdom come in the last few years. Sonic from the beginning was designed to sell product. Mario was the playable character, called "Jumpman", btw, in an arcade game called...not Mario, DONKEY KONG. That, btw, was believed to be destined for failure by the US branch of the company when they first saw it. Mario wasn't designed to sell initially, it evolved as the series evolved. Sonic from day 1 was a marketing ploy, and you know it!
Look, I don't care about companies trying to sell product, it's whatever, but it's so bold faced with Sonic, and it's so choreographed, that I can't understand or relate to what people like in the character. Don't make me pull the Poochy card.
IrishNinja
Member
i honestly don't care when you arrived at this "overrated" conclusion that Mercutio was originally reffering to; if you're upset they didn't go with the earlier designs with sonic playing in a band & dating madonna...okay? the sketches are great, but thankfully things evolved past that clearly-not-pitched-for-america concept
weird, i was just talking about jumpman too, but thank you for all this knowledge
since we can agree that sega was evil for redesigning its effort at a mascot character to increase its mighty 4% market share & possibly keep its doors open longer, i thought i'd like to drop more truth-bombs and list all the companies in the history of ever which had 0 marketing ploys because they were not by nature actually in it for the money, here goes:
A Black Falcon
Member
The TG16 and TCD have a LOT fewer mascot platformers. Orders of magnitude fewer. The main issue is that in Japan, the TG16 (PCE) had its peak of popularity between 1988 and 1991 -- before Sonic. The system started to fade essentially just as soon as the SNES released. NEC and Hudson changed focus to the TCD, but that never sold as well as the HuCard systems had, and the popular genres were different too -- shooters and RPGs and anime-style visual novels, more so than platformers. This means that the TG16/CD's platformer library is heavily weighted to the earlier years of the generation, before Sonic made the mascot platformer so important (Mario alone didn't do it, that just told people that they needed platformers, not that specific kind).
In addition, Hudson, as I said, just never quite rose to Nintendo or Sega's level in platformers. Their best 2d platfoirmers, like Bonk's Adventure, aren't nearly as great as the Sonic or Mario games. This didn't change -- Hudson's Super Bonk 2, looking very much like the first Bonk's Adventure from five years earlier, released in 1995, the same year Nintendo released Yoshi's Island. Hudson was a good developer and made plenty of good games, but they never were able to make platformers quite as great as Nintendo's, or Sega's best games. You also see this in 3d platformers; Bomberman 64, Bomberman Hero, and Willy Wombat are pretty good games, but they're no match for Mario 64.
As for Adventure Island, I've never liked that series, so I can't be too objective about those games; I didn't like them much as a kid, and don't like them much more now. I love Monster Lair, but Adventure Island... the only ones I've gotten much of any fun out of at all are the second and third NES/GB games, because the addition of the dinosaurs make the game slightly better. New Adventure Island might be slightly better than Super Adventure Island, but neither one is any good, really. I do think it's worth noting that Adventure Island started out as Westone's Wonder Boy. It's an okay but not that great game, and Westone improved on it immensely in the Monster World series that they made subsequently, and in Monster Lair as well. Hudson, however, stuck with dated Wonder Boy 1 clones all the way until 1993, after which they FINALLY branched out in the last two games (IV on the NES and Super Adventure Island II for SNES), which add some Monster World-ish elements. Despite that, though, the Monster World series was still better. Super Adventure Island II vs. Monster World IV, for instance? MWIV wins by a landslide! Fortunately Hudson did also make TG16/CD versions of the first three Monster World games and also Monster Lair... those are all great games.
This is ridiculous. Who cares why they created Sonic, the character? Lots of characters are created with the intent of making games sell better. Most games for a long time now use focus-testing and are designed around what they think the audience wants. Games are a consumer product, not just something designed purely for fun.
But anyway, what makes Sonic important is not the character. It's the GAME. The game, one of the best platformers ever up to that point, an all-time classic with even better sequels. Sonic is one of those games that made a big impression on a lot of people, and it should have! It's a fantastic game, incredibly fun right from the start. Sonic did not sell just because people decided the character was "cool". Sonic sold because the game is outstanding. The game has great graphics, great music, and fast gameplay. Without the great graphics, music, and gameplay, few people would care about Sonic, regardless of how "cool" he was supposed to be. Characters alone do not sell games, not when they're previously-unknown characters headlining a new IP.
Mario is exactly like Sonic in that he became an icon because his early games were fantastic games. If they hadn't been, Nintendo would have moved on and designed more characters. And these days, I'm sure that Nintendo uses focus-testing and characters designed to sell as much as anyone does.
Whaaaa? The PC-Engine is a RPG BEAST. Tengai Makyo I, II, Fuun Kabuki Den, Cosmic Fantasy 2,3,4a,4b, Tenshi No Uta I and II, Of the 600+ PC-Engine games (maybe it was 700 at the end) there were at least 50, probably more if you counted action RPGs like Exile I, Exile II, Efera and Jilliora, etc. HUGE amount of RPGs on the system.
Tengai II was the most expensive RPG ever made on any console to that point, with an extravagant budget of over 5 million US dollars in the early 1990s.
Azzurri
Member
How many of those can I play with no knowledge of Japanese?
I'm playing Dragon Slayer, and after that I'm gonna play Mysterious Song which was a Homebrew. I have Ys III, but want to play the I&II first.
Buy Legend of Xanadu 2, language isn't much of a barrier.
Azzurri
Member
You will roughly understand the general story, you won't get the dialogues of course.
You can play it with no knowledge of Japanese.
It's a great game, check it out.
Azzurri
Member
Cool, I'll give it shot. How long is it?
I have yet to finish it, but it shouldn't be too long.
Azzurri
Member
I'll give it a shot.
Beyond lols at this.
sixteen-bit
Member
Are people who say Sonic is bad playing the 8-bit versions by accident?
But unless you can read Japanese, that vast RPG library is mostly unplayable.