Many many months ago, Konami decided that it was going to join in on the trend of scaling down classic consoles by announcing the TurboGrafx 16 Mini. It was supposed to launch March 19th, just a day before the world release of Nintendo's biggest Switch title of the year, Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the factory manufacturing it had to close, so it was delayed. Originally, Amazon had forecast its new release date somewhere in January of next year, but luckily, it didn't take nearly that long. It arrived today, so lets start talking about!
If you read my blogs on the Sega Genesis Mini, you'll know that I did it in parts. I spen at little time each day with a handful of games until I played each one. I'll be doing the same here. So let's start with talking about the physical aspect.
Now, as far as Mini consoles goes, this is the largest of the five I own (NES, SNES, PSOne, Genesis, T-16). It's about as wide, maybe wider, than the NES and SNES side by side, and about as thick. I never owned a T-16 until many many years after it went defunct when I bough a brand new Turbo Duo off eBay for a few hundred dollars, so I have no idea just how big the original T-16 was.
The first thing I noticed after taking it out of the box was the back cover. It's a removable plastic shell where you thread your HDMI and power cable through, and I believe the original console had this as well. Regardless, I hate it. It's cumbersome, and I wish they forwent this bit of nostalgia and just let me plug the cords directly into the back. Speaking of cords, I was disappointed to learn that it uses a different USB power cord than my other Mini systems, which means I'll have to keep the other one nearby instead of keeping this one in its box.
The controller also feels nice and solid. It's been many years since I held my Duo controller, but based on my very sketchy memory, it seems to be a 1:1 replication. Select and Run buttons are soft. I and II buttons are clicky, and the turbo toggles are nice and firm. That's the one thing I always appreciated about the T-16 was having built in turbo toggles as a standard in their controllers. Now, let's turn it on!
The first thing you'll be greeted with when you turn the system on is the language select. You're given six languages: English by default, Japanese, French, Italian, German, and Spanish. Once you select your language, you're brought into a nicely presented game select screen with some catchy 16-bit music. The game covers look like they're rendered as CD boxes, but maybe that's how the game cards came in? It's been too long for me to remember. You can also sort the titles by the year they were released, alphabetically, or by game format. There's also two different game select screens: one for US TurboGrafx games and the other for EU/Japanese PC Engine games, which has its own music. Lastly, you can select the menu graphics when you're in the PC Engine side of things to either PC Engine (which is white) or PC Engine Core Grafx (which is black). It's really nice to see a way to customize your game select screen for a mini console.
With all that said, I'm going to start my way alphabetically through the T-16 games and then go into the PC Engine games. Let's begin!
Note: When I started my first game, I was treated to a nice little animation of the game cart being inserted into the machine. Really cool!
Air Zonk
So the first to get played is Air Zonk! What happens when Bonk gets bored and decides to go airborne and turn himself into a shoot 'em up? You get Air Zonk! Now these cartoony shooters are the type of shooters I really love. Full of charm, clever power ups, colorful cartoony bosses. I also love the friends system that lets you get drone support in the form of another cartoon character or transforms you completely. It's a hard game, though. I ended up using save states several times just to get to level three. When I return to my T-16 Mini, I'm going to make it a point to finish this game. Really a lot of fun! I love Hudson Soft's work!
Alien Crush
When I was shopping for a Turbo Duo, I was asking a friend of mine which games I should get with it, and Alien Crush was one of them. I don't remember if I actually did play it back then, but as the game stands now, it's a decent 16-bit pinball game. It only has one board so far that I know of, but there's a lot going on with it. It has two levels, and each has at least a couple bonus levels that you can find and start racking up bonus points. I played a few times, stopping after getting a score of over 3.5 mil. There's also a couple different music tracks you can select, and they're both pretty good. The thing is, it could be my imagination, but I think I detected some input lag as the flippers seemed just a little sluggish. I got used to it over time, and could probably get a much higher score if I played it again.
Blazing Lasers
This was another game recommended to me by my same friend. I do remember playing this game on my Duo, and I remember it being pretty hard. I don't think I really got very far at it, probably due to a lack of patience, but ah, the miracle of playing on mini systems: save states! So I used a few and kept on going. I stopped after Stage 3, because I felt like I could spend the whole day playing this game until I beat it. There's always a sign of playing a good space shooter, and that's when you get those "Holy shit, how did I survive that!" moments, and I've had a few in just the first three stages. I love the game's variety of weapons and support systems. Music and graphics are pretty solid for a game of its time as well. Just a very good game overall.
Bomberman '93
What can I say? It's Bomberman. Drop bombs. Blow up walls. Don't get caught in your own explosion. Obviously, it looks better than the NES game, but from what I can remember, the SNES version is the far superior version. Better graphics, better sound. Probably better controls. I played through the first world and killed what looked like a teleporting goomba wizard. It had a cute little picture at the end of it. What's interesting is that in the title screen, there's the option to play COM-LINK. Not surprisingly, COM-LINK doesn't work since I'm pretty sure there's no way to connect two T-16 minis together. So, you're stuck at a screen that shows two Bombermans connecting each other's TurboGrafx Expresses together, which I thought was pretty cute.
Bonk's Revenge
I just noticed something. Aside from Air Zonk, this is the only Bonk game on here. Mario is Nintendo. Sonic is Sega. Bonk is NEC. You would have thought that there'd be at least two of the mainstay Bonk games. Now, I remember the first Bonk as a kid, and I'm not sure I ever played any of the others. I own Bonk 3, but I don't think I ever played it. I have to stay, this is not really my kind of platformer. Mario has really spoiled me when it comes to platformers, and in my opinion, Bonk just doesn't have what it takes precision-wise to be a fun platformer. For instance, I hate the timing on the springy flowers. I get very frustrated with them! I know Bonk is adored by many old school gamers, but I guess he never clicked with me. Maybe it's because I didn't grow up with him like I did with Mario and Sonic. Who knows? Maybe I'll come back to it and give it another shot.
Note: So, watching the demo mode run, I happened to notice it does have what looks like the first Bonk, but it's Japanese on the PC Engine side, and it's called PC Genjin? Yeah, weird. Anyway, I'll get to that later when I start playing the PC Engine games.
Cadash
This is one I'm just not going to bother with again. It's a side scrolling action RPG, which is actually a port of an arcade game, so the cheap gameplay actually makes sense. You have to endure many a cheap shot. Very early on when you enter the cave, there's a slope you have to go down and there are skeletons coming up. Well, I could not figure out any safe way to engage them, and the game spawns off-screen enemies, so there are skeletons coming from where I left. I could go back up the slope and and fight off the skeleton that came up at me, but there'd only be another on the way back down. I tried with all four characters and ended up meeting the same fate. I thought, "Naw, couldn't be me. Couldn't be this bad, can I?" So I go look up a gameplay video on YouTube, and the player's solution? Get hit and just keep moving. Wow... fucking... wow. Fuck this game.
Chew Man Fu
So I'm guessing the "chew" part of the title indicates these giant colored balls I'm moving around is gum. If that's the case, you're using your kung fu to take out baddies by kicking giant balls of gum at them. The ultimate goal is to roll all four different colored gumballs onto the respective colored tiles. Once you manage that, a new level begins. In a way, I can kinda see Bomberman influence in this game, which makes sense as a it's a Hudson Soft title. I actually had a lot of fun with this game as I enjoy the puzzle element of moving things around while not getting cornered.
Dungeon Explorer
Dungeon Explorer, as its title suggests, is pretty generic. It's a top down dungeon crawler where you can select from a surprisingly large number of jobs, and then you proceed to get overwhelmed by enemies pretty quickly. I think it's designed to be played primarily with other people, which makes playing by yourself rather disadvantageous and ultimately not that much fun. Plus, the music's rather obnoxious and doesn't really fit the style of the game very well, and the text is just atrocious. "The bridge to Water Castle is broken. Come back after more battle." Also, they spell gnome "knome", which I'm not sure if they did that on purpose or if it was a mistranslation. Anyway, I won't be coming back to this one.
There will be more to come. I'll try to do eight games per entry Thanks for reading!
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