Ys-ing Into the Turbografx 16 Mini

I've had a week to play around on the finally-shipped Turbografx 16 Mini console, a tight little unit larger than similar mini consoles from Nintendo and Sega. As promised, it came with one controller, a back cover, and a lineup of classic Turbografx 16 and PC Engine titles.

The PC Engine is the Japanese name for the console, and as such all of its titles are in Japanese.  On some games it doesn't matter, as the player can just jump in and play. In fact, the vast majority of games that make up the PC Engine lineup are amazing bullethell shooters, schmups, or what have yous where the screen is full of bullets and I die quickly. It's never been my genre, but damn this console is a treasure trove of the golden age of them.

It is very regrettable that there wasn't a localization effort for these titles, though. I've always been curious about Snatcher, which is on here, but unplayable for me in Japanese.  Adventure games in the lineup like Jaseiken Necromancer and The Legend of Valkyrie would have been worth exploring as well.

Also annoying is that some of the titles exist twice on the console, in both libraries. So, let's talk about the Turbografx 16 side of the library. With these mini consoles you take what you can get with the lineup and there is no way that every game one personally wants or fondly remembers will be on there. That being said, there are definitely some essentials on here (Military Madness, Splatterhouse, Neutopia, Ninja Spirit, Dungeon Explorer, Chew Man Fu, JJ & Jeff, Bonk's Revenge), 2 CD ROM games I never got to experience (Ys Book 1 & 2, Lords of Thunder), 2 Working Designs classics (Cadash and Parasol Stars), and some middle of the road stuff (Moto Roader, Power Golf), and a few more shooters that are not on the PC Engine side.

Missing on the TG16 side are Bonk's Adventure, Devil's Crush, The Legendary Axe, TV Sports Football, and the system pack-in game Keith Courage in the Alpha Zones.  I would even put Bonk 3 on that list for completness. Regrets aside, this mini console is perfect for my limited retrogaming needs, and the main draw for me is getting to play Ys Book 1 & 2 after a three-decade wait. I'm at the second major boss in that game already, and still enjoying its gorgeous art and amazing music along with its quirky combat. 

It is absolutely great to have this beloved old friend back in the roster, albeit with its limitations. I would recommend it to any retrogamer who needs a fix of this classic era but does not have the desire to go all in on building a full Turbografx16 collection.

Beaten: A Boy and His Blob: The Rescue of Princess Blobette (Game Boy)

The David Crane classic A Boy and His Blob: The Rescue of Princess Blobette has been in my backlog since March of 1992, surviving the Purge with my entire Nintendo Game Boy collection, and occasionally played via the Gamecube's essential Game Boy Player attachment over the years. Admittedly, my earlier efforts were short sessions at best, but I recognized some of that David Crane (Pitfall) design magic and vowed to return to that title.

The player controls Boy, who is accompanied by Blob, a fiesty AI companion that will just murder you at times for not paying attention to the game design, dammit. No, serously, when you enter a new room, Blob will follow, and if you're stopped at the edge of a cliff or some "what's it even for" stamping machine, he will push you ahead to your death.

And that's what the real puzzle of this game is - figuring out the mechanics and rules so you can navigate to the intended puzzles. Boy goes from zero to a hundred with just more than the slightest urging of the D-pad, and making short steps to be in just the right place involves micro-tapping the direction and hoping you don't start sprinting - which by the way ends in sliding, to add distance to your already-overshot attempt to put yourself on just the right pixel.

The brilliance of the game design really shines when you figure out what jellybean to feed Blob at what spot. Different flavors get different results, and learning how to use them to overcome obstacles is a blast. There's not a plethora of these moments in the game, but they are a treat.  Most of the gameplay will be figuring out how to trampoline up to ledges and high places in caverns to collect treasures and other items.

Admittedly, I beat the game but did not play for a perfect run, where I also collect all of the treasures. If I ever decide to try that, though, I know where they all are thanks to this map I made:

Earlier this year I had my "Play games from every era of gaming going forward, you're getting old" epiphany, so I went waaaay back to William Crowther's Colossal Cave Adventure, the first text adventure. While playing, I mapped it out in the very primitive MS Paint, but in spite of the frustration and limitations of that program, I had as much fun mapping the game as I did playing it.

I've always been a map nerd, and in the early days of gaming players were on their own with that one. There was little to no room back then for the program itself to map it all for you, so it was graph paper, pages of notes, and meticulous exploration of complex and devious dungeons. I still have a vast set of file folders with maps and notes from that era, and recently broke out my folder for The Bard's Tale: Tales of the Unknown to test it against the remaster released on the XBox One. The maps still held up!

So, when I decided to take on A Boy and His Blob: The Rescue of Princess Blobette, I broke out a much better program than MS Paint known as AutoCAD. The same program I use at work to create shop drawings for clients turned out to be a great videogame mapping program.

Again, I enjoyed that nerdy mapping buzz as much as the game itself. While I won't do it or even need to do it with every game I play, once in awhile I can scratch that old itch, as much a part of my personal videogame history as the games themselves.

Iron Man VR Demo Impressions (PSVR)

See, my blog is not just a whimsical dance through videogaming's history, I can cover new releases too, right off the servers, like a million younger sources you might find on the internet, but with a middle-aged viewpoint.

Iron Man VR for the Playstation 4's VR headset, which I guess most folks call PSVR, came out with a playable demo a few days ago, and I got to sneak in a full playthrough of the demo this morning.  It utilizes the move controllers and from the first time taking flight, it immediately feels like they nailed it.

For the most part, anyway. In the tutorial area at the rocky shoreline near Stark's Malibu home, the player is given some targets to blast with repulsors, some hoops to fly through, and some other targets to rocket punch. The tool tip that popped up when it came time to rocket punch went away too fast, and I'm not exactly sure how to do that move. Nonetheless, I pulled it off during my clumsy attempts to figure it out and proceeded to the main demo level.

You get to play as Stark himself, chatting with Pepper and AI assistant Friday aboard the Stark  corporate jet before all hell breaks loose. The villain looked like the Ghost, sort of, and he/she hacks the plane into crashing, muttering the usual villain taunts and vague references to revenge. As Iron Man you fly around the jet, defending it from waves of drones, and sometimes flying close to broken parts of the plane to repair them. 

I don't think the level was on rails, but it took little effort to stay near the jet or get back to it after beating another wave of drones. The same ease came with the jet repairs that pop up during this chapter - I intuitively swooped in on those attempts to keep the jet in the air. Once you fly into the marker at the repair spot, the game goes into a mini-game where you move Reed Richards - sorry, Tony Stark's arms and hands to specific positions to initiate the repair action.

I slipped and said Reed Richards back there because Tony's arms in the game seem to stretch comically long when you reach out. I could not hold back a chuckle the first time it happened, and laughed even harder when I did it as Stark in the plane. I suspect that's just one of those VR things that have to be so the game works for players with all sorts of armspans.

So yeah, Iron Man VR controls beautifully, at least I think after taking it for a spin. Decent visuals and a good enough story for a demo make this a demo worth playing a few times at least, and should keep my interest in the July 3 release of the full game. 

Beaten: Gears of War Judgment (360)

I sampled the first Gears of War game back in late 2008, but was not impressed enough to pursue it at the time, as at that point I was catching up on a lot of other XBox 360 titles. It wasn't until 2011, after beating the entire Killzone Trilogy back-to-back, that I decided to do the same with Gears of War, and beat the first 2 and any substantial DLC they had ahead of the release of Gears of War 3.

And that was plenty of COG-tastic action for awhile. When Gears of War Judgment released in 2013, I ignored it, but in April 2015 when it was available for free on XBox Live Gold, I downloaded it, fired it up, and said "Nahhh, not yet."

Apparently I was in the mood last week, playing it as my upstairs campaign (a game played on one of the consoles in the guest bedroom). The action and combat are really just more of the same as the trilogy ahead of it, but the story is that of one of the side characters and his squad, all doing.....the exact things these soldiers do in every game - defy orders to win and get in trouble for it. Okay, so the action, combat, and story are the same.

It doesn't matter, because Gears of War games are all polish.They look great, the combat controls are tight, and the game's rules are kept simple. Area after area of waist-high barriers for fun cover shooting of badass enemies is what you get. The ally AI is better than most, and they aren't a burden at all to have along. The game's chapters let each of the squad have their own testimony about the situation to share, and the player controls them at these times.

So yes, I recommend Gears of War Judgment if you want more Gears. Me, I've got a still shrink-wrapped copy of Gears 4 in my backlog already for the next time I get that itch.

Something that was a first for me in gaming with Gears of War Judgment is that I was able to start the campaign on the XBox 360 and finish it on the XBox One. Microsoft's backwards compatability push over the last few years (and hopefully ahead) gets a huge thumbs from this middle-aged gamer. Hopefully we see more and more systems and gaming architectures maintain playability for past titles going forward.

Beaten: Beyond Oasis (Genesis)

When the global pandemic derailed production of the US version of the Turbografx 16 Mini, with it went my dream of finally playing Ys Book 1 & 2 for a good retro RPG challenge. Still wanting to scratch that itch, I turned to my Sega Genesis Mini and choose Beyond Oasis, an action RPG with great graphics and cool design elements.

Yesterday, I beat the game and decided to revive the type of posts here where I would write fresh impressions of it right after the credits roll. Beyond Oasis certainly made a good impression with its colorful graphics, mildly challenging combat and puzzles, and tight controls.

In addition, I realized that while I had a Sega Genesis back in the day, I had never beaten a single title I had for it - not even Ecco the Dolphin. That’s changed now, thanks to Beyond Oasis.

The nitty gritty of this action adventure are the 4 elemental companions you learn to summon throughout the game. While water, fire, and shadow are pretty common elemental archetypes, the fourth one was plant, which was weird but cool in its execution. Solving puzzles with the unique abilities of each elemental was very fun and satisfying, and balanced well with the hack and slash combat and the game’s great looking 2D sprites.

It should be noted that I took full advantage of the Sega Genesis Mini’s “save anywhere” ability. The game itself did not allow for saving within dungeon areas, but I was able to utilize that tool to save myself from repeated dungeon runs just to get to the boss fight again. On those boss fights they did a spectacular job, creating bosses that require some trial and error to figure out what works.

I would certainly recommend Beyond Oasis to my 1994 self, and tell him to appreciate the Sega Genesis more, but honestly that guy had just been playing Doom on his Atari Jaguar and would probably have none of it.

2010 - 2020: The Lost Years

So much has happened, I could write a thousand blog posts about those lost years. I still plan to do that, but for now let me offer a framework of yet another decade of insane circumstances.

When we left off, I was a happily married prep cook at one of the city's most acclaimed fine dining establishments. It paid the bills and kept me caught up with the latest gaming releases, and my skills were enlisted as a lead trainer in 2009 as I was sent to Dallas to train staff and assist with the opening of another restaurant.  The financial benefit of which allowed me to get a PS3 upon my return so I could dive into the insanity that was Demon's Souls.

My schedule was Tuesday through Saturday, which made Mondays heaven. The wife worked, I did the laundry, cleaning, and cooking and still had hours-long game sessions.

2010
There were no restaurant openings in 2010, which was fine as our social circle kept growing and we were enjoying the DINK lifestyle, partying with our friends and listening to them bitch about how bad their kids were. I played catch-up on the PS3 exclusives I'd missed, which means I beat the first two Uncharteds, two Riddicks, two Resistances, and too many others to mention. It was a year of twos - Mass Effect 2, Assassin's Creed 2, Just Cause 2, Saint's Row 2. By this point I was pretty much done with the Wii and DS.

In addition, the flood of DLC that followed each game release was a lot to keep up with, but I was kind of all over it. If I liked a game, I left no DLC unbeaten. Six followed Mass Effect 2, more came for Borderlands, and even Red Dead Redemption had a zombie one that was a blast. They were a lot more substantive for the most part back then, it feels.

2011
This year started out with a month-long restaurant opening in Denver, and I took the good old PS3 along for the ride. I worked 14-18 hour days but had the weekends free. I was already playing Singularity when I got there and finished it the first weekend. All in all, I beat four games that month, including The Saboteur, Heavy Rain, and Escape: Odyssey to the West. It was hard work but the reward each weekend was worth it.

There were more franchise sophomore efforts in the form of Dead Space 2, Crysis 2, and the overjoy that was Portal 2. The numbers shifted to threes though, as I decided to start doing trilogies of game series' that I hadn't caught up on yet, starting with Killzone. I dusted off the PS2 and fired up the original first, and then the second one, called Killzone 2. A masterpiece so good, with a final boss fight for the ages and a great multiplayer component, I actually kept playing the multiplayer all summer, even after beating Killzone 3.

Another trilogy I beat was Gears of War, and the year wrapped up with 32 games and 17 DLC packs beaten, somehow. It boggles my mind that I found time to do all that. Fallout 3, LA Noire, and Skyrim are on that list. I remember a lot of partying, still, too. 

2012
I finished the F.E.A.R. Trilogy, had a blast in the open worlds of Mafia 2 and Sleeping Dogs, and beat Dark Souls. It was the year Assassin's Creed and Mass Effect let us down with their 3's, as well as the year I played and beat 2 Telltale episodic games. At the end of the year, though, I tried a free demo of Minecraft, a game I had previously dismissed, and was hooked.

On another note, the whole world came to know the glory of a comic book I was reading back in 1978 as Marvel pulled off The Avengers in movie theaters, something that was unthinkable most of my life. I never cried at a movie until Aragorn told some Hobbits that they bow to no one, but that was nothing compared to the "That's my secret, Cap...I'm always angry." assembling of Earth's Mightiest Heroes. The unspeakable glory of having lived long enough to see that on a movie screen packs a hell of a punch

2013
Minecraft captivated me for much of the year, as I built and created and explored that strange blocky world. I balanced by game time between regular XBox 360 and PS3 games and building Pinnacle City. That will be a whole separate article at some point.

I began another trilogy to start the year, and five years after an absolute asshole of a co-worker spoiled the twist, I had forgotten it mostly and enjoyed a perfect run on Bioshock. I finished the underrated Bioshock 2 just in time for Bioshock Infinite. Lots of zombie action on deck this year with Dead Island Riptide, State of Decay, and The Last of Us, a game 99% depressing. The 1% that isn't is worth it, though. Of course, nothing tops Spec Ops: The Line for depressing.

The pinnacle of portable gaming arrived in the form of Killzone Mercenary, the last hurrah not just for the PS Vita but for Killzone itself. Grand Theft Auto V arrived, was awesome, and heralded the end of the single player GTA game as Rockstar realized that multiplayer is where the real money is, apparently. Seven years later and there stands no announcement of GTA 6 as of this writing. A quick turnaround from the unlikable Assassin's Creed 3 brought us the awesome piratey goodness that was Assassin's Creed 4 Black Flag.

2014
More time spent with friends meant less time gaming, and while I acquired a PS4 this year and entered the ninth generation of consoles (by my reckoning), the games for it at the time were depressing ends to two great series. KIllzone Shadow Fall was technically great, but the story made as much sense as Star Wars movies lately, in that not at all to anyone paying attention to the plot. Infamous Second Son was just okay.

Fortunately, Dark Souls 2 arrived to save the year, and before I was done with it and its DLC, I had logged nearly 230 hours paying it.  Other notables included South Park: The Stick of Truth and Watchdogs.

2015
Mostly a PS4 year, but damn there were some good newbies on the scene. Wolfenstein:The New Order, Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor, Dying Light, Bloodborne, and Mad Max all felt fresh and were great to play. The last great Bethesda game, Fallout 4, arrived and lived up to expectations.

In my personal life, I was very burnt out on my career as a prep cook.  Even with experiences opening restaurants in Beverly Hills and midtown Manhattan, the joy had gone as a new generation of young idiot chefs were coming into the scene, not holding to the standards of yesteryear.

Our two closest friends are engineers, and one time while visiting they beheld the wonder of my city in Minecraft and informed me that not everyone can think in 3D like that. Sick of  hearing me bitch about my career rut, they suggested community college and a career change. When I brought up the financial concerns about paying for it, they directed me toward a federal tax break for people who change careers at my age, which I never knew existed.

2016
While in school, I worked full time and even did a local restaurant opening, and we kept up the usual level of over-the-top revelries. Most importantly, I kept gaming, taking on XBox 360, PS3, and PS4 titles all over the place. It was this year I became less focued on the latest and greatest, and more about not missing a cool older game just because it's a little less polished.

I finished the Army of Two trilogy, beat the first two Dead Rising games (having given up on the first one back in 2010), spent months on a space combat sim game called Darkstar One, and managed to still plow through Metal Gear Solid 3:Snake Eater, Darkest of Days, Gone Home, Grow Home, and the unreal coolness of Deadly Premonition:Director's Cut. I got an XBox One for Christmas, but nothing worth noting to play on it, and the wife got a Switch, with the usual suspects in terms of software.

In spite of the world beginning its slow painful slide into the apocalype after a Russian attack on our election put their pawn in the fucking White House, in December I pulled off the long shot I was hoping for after a year of busting my ass for a 4.0 GPA in community college. I made a total middle-aged career change, retiring from the culinary arts after 33 years of it, and starting as an entry level CAD Drafter at a unique family-owned company. I'm still there as of this writing, now in charge of the whole department somehow.

2017
I was making more money now, which was nice, but the price that had to be paid for it was losing those glorious Monday play sessions. My new work schedule meant that the wife and I worked the same Monday through Friday grind. Combine that with our active social life and you get a lot less games played throughout the year.

But Horizon Zero Dawn was a great one, and kept me busy for several months, also bringing some redemption after ending the Killzome series with Shadow Fall.  Mafia 3 was fun because of the setting, music, and the fact that historically racist enemies very much deserved the rampaging you do in that game. A few months were lost to Fallout New Vegas as well. Money was good so we got each other a PS VR set and a Switch for Christmas.

A Kickstarter gift from a friend got me in as a horror contributor to Perception, and my name is in the credits. It was an okay game with some definitely creepy stuff going on. That should be another whole article on its own. It was a year of firsts, as around this time I did a model shoot and was an extra in a commercial, but those weird accomplishments will also most definitely need their own articles to explain and show off.

2018
It was clear by this point that my wife had total control of the main downstairs television from the time right after work until the wee hours of the morning, I could only sneak an hour or so on it in the morning before work, because our hours were not quite lined up at that point. By now though I had set up a secondary gaming oasis at my desk in the guest bedroom, with the old PS3, XBox 360, and Gamecube retired there.

Between the Switch's portabilty and peeling off the XBox One upstairs temporarily so I could get some level of modern gaming, I beat The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, as well as South Park:The Fractured But Whole, Watchdogs 2, Dishonored 2, Red Dead Redemption 2. Having the upstairs / downstairs dynamic to my gaming only served to encourage my new way of thinking about what I should be playing and why.

Now in my fifties, I started to realize that there were a lot of games that had passed me by over the years that I always wanted to get back to at some point. My gaming would be directed not by the release day camping out for the latest new title, but for a variety of games and experiences across a lot of platforms.

2019
I guess we will be looking back at 2019 as the pre-pandemic times going forward, and my new gaming directive toward variety was taking shape.  Having the second gaming station upstairs, and even adding a third gaming station in my mud room (another article about that is forthcoming) allowed me the opportunity to get more gaming in than I had the previous few years. Keep in mind, I was still catching up on years of backlog in my collection, so I played very few new releases this year.

Some of the old franchises were back and blander than ever (Mass Effect Andromeda, Farcry 5, Rage 2), but others were still on their, well, game (Dark Souls 3, State of Decay 2, Grow Up). Astro Bot Rescue Mission for the PSVR stood out as a new experience, as did Asura's Wrath (PS3) and What Remains of Edith Finch (PS4). Another part of my new directive emerged when I replayed in full King's Field: The Ancient City (PS2), which I had installed in the aforementioned mud room. There were some games so good that I might just replay them rather than dipping into my backlog.

Conclusion
It was a decade of huge changes in my personal life as well as my gaming habits. I shifted from a lifetime of "too many games, not enough money" to a new problem of "too many games, not enough time". In addition, the shift in my perspective resulting from my advancing years took me from "I'll get back to that game later in life" to "I better get to that game soon, no telling how much life is left".

Work and relationships are hard. Finding a balance between fulfilling those commitments and still getting time to delve into a game like I did in my younger, single days is still elusive. Mad props to those that pull it off in this lifetime. It ain't me.

My hope now is to keep playing, keep writing about playing, and retire comfortably with a massive multi-generational backlog of games to enjoy. I love my new career, don't get me wrong, but the concept of having twenty years after that to dive into the backlog I'll have by then is enough to keep me going, even as the world outside today portends otherwise.