Way back in 1989 the PC Engine finally came to North America with a new look and a new name. See how crazy I am for this awesome machine:
Happy 27th Birthday Turbografx-16!
Way back in 1989 the PC Engine finally came to North America with a new look and a new name. See how crazy I am for this awesome machine:
I love the Turbografx 16. I've told my personal story of the first time I played one in the SNES anniversary thread, but I didn't own one until 2000, and how I got it is one of my favorite stories for a console.
I worked at FuncoLand at the time, and we didn't carry Turbo stuff. It was getting close to Christmas, and my buddy Tim, who also worked for Funco, was helping out at the Northwest Plaza store for a day with this super cool guy named Ryan. Somebody abandoned their TG16 when the store wouldn't buy it, so Ryan claimed it and was boxing it up to take home. Tim saw it and asked if he could buy it off of him, as for years he had heard me talk about loving the system, and wanted to get it for me. Ryan said no, as he wanted it. Tim said something to the effect of, "Aw, man, I was hoping to get it for Mike for Christmas." Ryan said, "It's for Mike? Take it." Gave it to him for free so he could give it to me. The story makes me even happier than having the system.
My earliest purchases were a pile of loose HuCards I paid 5 bucks a piece for and a boxed Turbo Stick for $5. Stuff like Bravoman, Order of the Griffon, Yo Bro, Ninja Spirit, Tiger Road... it was a fun mix. I have around 115 Turbo and PCE games now, 55 of which are US releases. No, I don't have Magical Chase, but I do have a big chunk of good stuff like the Star Soldier games and BlazingLazers, Cadash, Air Zonk, Exile, Cosmic Fantasy 2, Splatterhouse, Sinistron, the Neutopias, and loads more. Super fun arcade flavored stuff.
I love the shooters, but my favorites are Gate of Thunder and Gradius II... but the dirty truth is that my favorite game on the system is Keith Courage in Alpha Zones. It was the first Turbo game I played, the first I owned, and I still play it to this day. Other favorites are The Legendary Axe games, Samurai Ghost, Ninja Spirit, World Court Tennis, R-Type Complete... I could go on. It's a very good quality to crap ratio in the US library, though I do own a few duds like Timeball and Drop Off... and I have barely even acknowledged the PCE side of things, which is great.
It's become a bitch to collect for, but I'm grateful to have gotten in cheap, and it's a console that has aged very well. My second favorite of the 16-bit consoles... but they were all great. Love it.
Yeah, that's the good thing about finding games sometimes at a few years ago. Many sellers just didn't know or care about the Turbografx and I was able to get some titles cheap too...... not so much today though.
Wow, nice Turbo collection.. WHY DID U SELL YOUR NES GAMES?!?!
Originally Posted by celerystalker
I diddnt own one until like around 2003; I remember finding a system at a flea market. It was funny because I was leaving the flea market for the day, and it was on the very last table near the parking lot.. it was like 15$ for the system and motoroader loose. TurboGrafx games have always been very rare finds for me, only one other time have I ever bought Turbo stuff locally. All my other Turbo purchases have been online. Anyway I quickly became obsessed, and after collecting Turbo games I became obsessed with PCEngine games. My credit cards were constantly maxed-out from buying Japanese games from Hit-Japan and SupurbArticlesfromJapan.
Yeah, anything Turbo or PCengine related has become really hard to collect for. Im glad I collected so much back in the day because its a really cool system.
Last edited by bb_hood; 08-30-2016 at 06:21 PM.
Happy Birthday indeed for anyone owning one at this point, or love their emulators.I miss my Duo very much and the lovely CDs I had, US HuCards too.
Waves wand -- bottomusmarketusdropouticus!
I remember loving certain games so much, and some the soundtracks were so insanely good I'd find rips of the audio (Ys Book) or I'd due to format make my own (Dracula X.) The gameplay with the right game (talking outside of the shooter fan base) was very very good. Even if it was more or less a faux 16bit system you wouldn't know from some of the crazy quality that thing put out as it really felt on par with the Genesis but could outdo it as well in the visuals and on screen craziness department.
For HuCard games, you can get a flash card for like 80$, and it plays both US and Japanese games.
The disc games are another story, they can be burned but the cd systems are prone to problems.
Yeah I'm aware, the first I just tend to avoid flash kits as I tend to load them up, and the other I'm schooled in what all can go wrong with a TGCD let alone the Duo (caps, etc.) so you factor in the inexplicably insane pricing on the hardware and the games it's just a big red flag.
I actually bought a license to Magic Engine back when it first came out in the 90s, it's still an active KEY. I figure if I ever get comfortable with my mountain and make it a mole hill or less of a pile of games I need to get to or sell off, I'll dust it off. And if not that, krikzz awesome GBA Everdrive + PCE Advance as it loves ISOs. I had Drac X, Gate of Thunder, Ys Book1+2, and a few others I'd tinker with on that a good decade ago. Very fun, runs fantastic, and not tethered to a TV so no excuse not to play.
I got my TG-16 (with box) for $20 from a place called Floppy Joe's that operated in Plano Texas. I was also fortunate enough to get a boxed Turbo Booster for $19 as well. Floppy Joe's was a pretty cool store. They let you rent Amiga games (ahem, restocking fee) for something like $5 for 3 days. They also rented games for just about every console that was available at the time.
I never got around to buying a lot of titles for my TG-16 though. The small handful of titles I have for the console are Keith Courage in Alpha Zones, Alien Crush, Galaga 90', Military Madness, The Legendary Axe, Klax, Sidearms and Dungeon Explorer. They're all great games though.
Hmm I know I paid under $200 back in the day, but I bought it from NEC themselves via Turbo Zone Direct back in the 90s when they ran it as a web store along with all the other cool fluff on there and it was a refurb/return item complete in the box. I picked up quite a few nice games through the site both local and import stuff like Ninja Spirit, Panic Bomber, RayXanber 2, Macross 2036, and other stuff I fail to remember. I had a nice local hookup a formerly cool game shop that had pretty much whatever in some amount for any system from around the 2600 forward but primarily NES forward and there was a full on couple rows of those jewel cases loaded with HuCards and JP+US CDs all complete, then a couple 10"~ stacks of hucards loose too. All the stuff was so cheap it was fun just to experiment, and even the $10-20 stuff was a safe enough gamble even using some early net resources which were few for such a system in the pre 2000s.
Pretty much all of my loose HuCards came from a guy I met at FuncoLand who had a ton of them he'd bought at a thrift store at some point around 2000. He had a big stack, and asked $5 a piece. I remember for sure getting Bravoman, Tiger Road, Ninja Spirit, Samurai Ghost (found a case for that a decade later), Legendary Axe I & II, Aero Blasters, Power Golf, Order of the Griffon, Alien Crush, Battle Royale, and Yo Bro from him. My entire US collection of around 55 games was found entirely locally save Exile. Everything else I scrounged up here and there from stores or people, though it's always been few and far between. St Louis has always been a good marketplace, though. The garage sale scene is dead, but even today I saw Turbo stuff at a store, though it wasn't cheap.
As an aside, anybody else here like Silent Debuggers? It's a game I've really liked for a long time, but I always see it getting trashed like it's as rough as something like Gunboat, but it reminds me of like a 16 bit Enemy Zero or something. I like the thing.
Nice on that move with the HuCards, I can't make the claim, close to it but not entirely. The wall of HuCards I had access to I bought a lot of them from there, but probably 10-20% of what I got came from NEC direct through Turbo Zone Direct. I never actually relied on ebay or other sources for HuCards. almost all CDs for that matter too. It's cool when few people care about something so you can have the pick of the litter. Had I not been picky about loose HuCards I could have had 2-3x the games I did end up with.
I loved my Turbografx-16, I bought it fairly early after going to a friend's house and watching him play Y's on his. I also know the sadness of going to game stores and only seeing a few Turbo games because nobody there cared enough to order them. There was a cool game rental store chain (can't remember the name) I used to go to and buy old rental copies of games (no box, just the HuCard and manual). One location was in North Dallas right up the street from Valley View Mall, and the closer one was in Duncanville near Redbird Mall. I just remember that the Redbird location had a couple "smash and grab" burglaries within a year of each other, and all three locations closed right after. I wish I had known they wouldn't be around for very long, I would have bought a lot more games.
Speaking of Redbird Mall, the GameStop inside there didn't move Turbo stuff too much, so they marked them down regularly. I bought the CD attachment there for something crazy, later I bought my copy of Bonk 3 marked down to $19.99. Good times.
Now I play PC Engine and Turbo games through emulation, and it saddens me to see so many good games that didn't come out in the US.
Happy Birthday to the most underrated console in north america at least in the 90's it was.I remember reading about it in magazines such as egm and what not.Shortly there after playing it at a friends and then the cd-attachment at a rental.Which lead me buying a TG16 after i sold the nes and it's games to have the funds for buying one.I remember buying the turbo-cd later on,working a part time summer job to able to afford it.Though by the time it died out in 94 i traded it away for store credit.Fast forward to 2005 i really missed it's games and the imports so i bought a duo-r and got a TG16+Turbo-CD,through a trade again to play with
It's a good thing i was able to buy most of the games i wanted before prices got to insane.Though there are the cheaper alternatives at least the turbo everdrive and there are reproductions of games on cd and even hucards now.Just recently i got a reproduction for the u.s version of magical chase and it plays fine on my duo-r.
Last edited by Tron 2.0; 09-01-2016 at 01:14 AM.
That has been a consideration definitely. If I ever jumped in I'd have to eat it on a Duo, and one that was re-capped as I'm not trusting that mess and I'd likely have to very strongly consider the turbo everdrive and burns, or stick with HuCards alone and a small box to rolodex them into I can flip to what I want. TG games were NES like -- 2 button function, not too hard to figure out like a manual is necessary. It would come down to ownership I guess, everdrive=reality.
I liked Silent Debuggers at first but the game gets insanely tedious by level 4 and 5.
The PC engine is just another whole world of gaming, we had luck to have Turbografx released on the US, I knew about the system only trough EGM and another gaming mags and had the chance to own it until 1998 ... blew my mind.
Las calles no son basurero, POR FAVOR TIREN LA BASURA EN SU LUGAR !!!!
I was lucky to find the system in 1989 in my local Radio Shack stores but most other main stream stores wouldn't carry it sadly so I know how tough it can be to find anything Turbo related.The PC engine is just another whole world of gaming, we had luck to have Turbografx released on the US, I knew about the system only trough EGM and another gaming mags and had the chance to own it until 1998 ... blew my mind.
My introduction to the TG-16 was at a cousins house. We were there for a family function. I had never even heard of it up to that point. KCIAZ blew me away. I went home and found a retailer in EGM (small Kansas town, no local stores) and bought/shipped it to me a short time later. I still have it to this day, although it doesn't get much play anymore unfortunately.
Hah yeah I remember that too. It was a situation where stuff like fledgling Target and Walmart of the later 80s didn't carry anything but Nintendo and some Sega as it was money in the bank, but it came down to stuff like off beat bigger box of that era stores like Toys R Us, Sears, Montgomery Ward, and Radio Shack which had a spread of expensive electronics to bank against oddball stuff like third tier no name consoles or their own handheld LCDs.
Back when it was released my friend's cousin had it. I remember playing Bonk's adventure, I was amazed.
later on I had a choice between it and the Sega Genesis at my local Toys R us. I chose the Turbo.
My favorite game I got back then was Galaga 90. I remember another friend was a big fan and told me he had a few games, including Military Madness, in my head I assumed it was something like Metal Slug which came out years later.
When the SNES was released I sadly lost interest for a while, I remember getting a bunch of adverts from TZD/TTI, same friend told me his cousin got a Turbo CD and how great it was, sadly it was pretty expensive, later on in the 90s I started to collect for it again when I got a used system with Bravoman from a swapmeet, I then acquired an almost complete boxed collection most of which I got from Game Dude for very cheap before it got popular. I'd go there once a week and buy all the boxed games I didn't own, the guys up front would look at me weird for buying Turbo games most people didn't want. And also The Recycler, got a bunch of games from there for cheap. Love the Turbo.
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