[I ♥ The PC Engine] Turbo Pad

Turbo Pad (ターボパッド)

Maker: NEC Home Electronics (NEC-HE)
Release Date: 10/30/87
Price: 2680 yen

The PC Engine’s Standard Controller

The Turbo Pad controller was originally released separately as an option for the PC Engine, which came standard with a PC Engine Pad equipped with just the I, II, Run and Select buttons. The Turbo Pad comes with two turbo switches with your choice of three speeds, and NEC marketed it as a controller upgrade at first. However, with only 200 yen of difference in the price of both systems, the “optional” Turbo Pad quickly found itself the standard choice of controllers among PCE users.

This was actually the first peripheral ever released to use the word “turbo” to refer to a device that triggered button presses really fast for you. (Until this point, the native Japanese words renda or rensha were used.) It’s entirely possible the word was chosen because it matches well with the “Engine” in the console’s name…and it’s also not beyond the realm of possibility that this influenced NEC’s American department when they decided to call the console “TurboGrafx-16″.

So why did NEC release a turbo pad separate from the console on the day of the PCE’s launch? To answer this, think about the Japanese game marketplace in the mid-80s. What sort of games would create a demand for turbo devices? It was, of course, the shooter genre, which was hitting massive proportions over on the Famicom. It was an age where the speed at which you could fire off shots, in many ways, dictated how good of a gamer you are. This was symbolized no better than by Hudson’s Master Takahashi, an adman and PR guy who became a virtual god to the Famicom generation because he could push a button 16 times per second. Not everyone can be Master Takahashi, sadly, and eventually “cheaters” across the land figured out how to modify their controllers to do that 16-button-press trick for them.

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[I ♥ The PC Engine] AC Adaptor

AC Adaptor (Original) (ACアダプタ)

Maker: NEC Home Electronics (NEC-HE)
Release Date: 10/30/87
Price: 1200 yen

Even the best game system is useless without power — and given that this was the mid-1980s, consoles still came with gigantic, heavy external AC adaptors that you had to balance very carefully as you plugged them into the wall.

I’m not necessarily sure if this deserves a separate entry given that any console is going to come with one of these out of the box, but the adaptor was sold separately, and since different PCE models have different electrical requirements, it’s worth bringing this up as the “original,” so to speak.

This adaptor, part number PAD-105, was included with the original white PCE, the Shuttle, the CoreGrafx and CoreGrafx II, and the SuperGrafx — in other words, any PC Engine that didn’t include a CD-ROM. It cannot be used with the Duo series, nor with the PCE GT or LT.

[I ♥ The PC Engine] PC Engine Pad

PC Engine Pad (PCエンジンパッド)

Maker: NEC Home Electronics (NEC-HE)
Release Date: 10/30/87
Price: 2480 yen

(I called NEC-HE “NEC Home Entertainment” in the previous post. How embarrassing.)

The First Standard Controller

This is the controller that was included with the PC Engine, the white one, that came out October 1987. The standard one, in other words. They were sold separately as well in order to take advantage of the Multitap, one of the PCE’s top selling points at the beginning.

Arguably, one of the main reasons that Nintendo’s Famicom was so successful in Japan was its controller, a simple mix of two buttons and the control pad borrowed from their Game & Watch series that served as the basic interface for all of its games. The PCE both learned from the FC and hoped to surpass it, so it’s perhaps little surprise that the system’s pad sticks to the FC controller’s basic blueprint: a pad and two buttons, marked I and II instead of A and B. The FC pad’s Start and Select buttons are on here too, labeled Run and Select and located in nearly the exact same place. The pad itself is flat like Nintendo’s, lacking the ridges seen on later game systems that made it an easier fit to the hand.

The main difference from the FC pad is the fact that the pad is built on top of a plastic disc. The Famicom control pad is shaped like a perfect plus sign, making it both tough on the fingers and somewhat difficult to push in diagonal directions, and the PCE’s pad improves on this. Otherwise, the basic construction is identical. (Some of the PCE’s third-party controllers use a Nintendo-style pad, if you really insist upon it.)

One unique feature of the PCE pad is the reset function, accessed by pressing Run and Select at once. Nearly every other system (including the FC, SFC and Mega Drive) put the reset button on the console itself, but with the PC Engine, NEC decided to put that functionality on the controller instead. I really can’t say why they went for this, but I remember reading somewhere that it was a side effect of NEC’s “Core Concept,” making it easy to reset the console no matter what kind of stuff was attached to it. This Run/Select reset function made its way to the PC-FX later on as well.

The Run and Select buttons are largely meant for starting a game and selecting menu items, but some later games (usually fighters) use them as attack buttons.

The original Famicom’s controllers were hard-wired into the console, requiring you to open up the system to remove them (a pretty easy procedure, actually). The PC Engine, meanwhile, has a single control port, meaning that only one player can use the system out of the box. You can insert and remove controllers quickly and easily, at least, and buying a Multitap allows up to five players to join in at once, not that there was much for five players to enjoy for another few years.

Your choice of controller was also available from the very beginning, starting with the Turbo Pad that was sold separately with the PCE on launch. That controller’s exactly the same as the PC Engine Pad in shape and color; the only difference is the turbo switches on top of the I and II buttons. Hudson and Hori had already released turbo controllers for the Famicom by this point, given that Master Takahashi was making “turbo” a buzzword among Japanese kids at the time, and it makes sense that Hudson would make it a part of the PCE’s design from the start. The Turbo Pad was meant to be an upgrade from the regular pad, but at 2680 yen, it was only 200 yen more expensive than the standard model, making the PCE Pad seem needlessly expensive and the Turbo Pad the obvious choice when buying extra controllers. As a result, the Turbo Pad became the standard pretty quickly, getting packed in with the hardware starting with the Shuttle and CoreGrafx at the end of 1989. This makes the non-turbo PC Engine Pad surprisingly difficult to find in modern used-game shops.

Protection for wife beaters

[I ♥ The PC Engine] PC Engine (White)

PC Engine (PCエンジン)

Maker: NEC Home Electronics (NEC-HE)
Release Date: 10/30/87
Price: 24,800 yen

I’ve been meaning to fully explore NEC’s PC Engine for years now. It, and the Amiga, are the only major game platforms I’ve never honestly researched. I’ll be fixing that through weblog posts that I’ll eventually string together into an honest website. Hope you enjoy them.

To begin with, I want to talk about the very first PC Engine, the so-called “white” PCE that kicked off the whole line in the first place. This is the only product that ever had the exact name “PC Engine” applied to it, though if I’m going to talk about the white PCE, I suppose I’m going to be talking about the history of the entire console, whether I want to or not. Hmm.

Where should I begin, then? The console was released October 30, 1987 in Japan, following a development period that apparently lasted at least two years. In an interview with Japan’s GameSide magazine (March ’07), Hudson marketing guy Toshiyuki “Master” Takahashi stated that “initial development on the custom PC Engine chipset began somewhere around 1985,” which would place the project’s origins right at the point Nintendo’s Famicom was becoming an explosive hit and monpolizing the entire game marketplace. Hudson, themselves the first third-party licensee that ever worked with Nintendo, had already released a bunch of FC games by this point, some of which (such as 1986′s Ninja Hattori-kun) were selling deep into the millions. At the same time, though, they were developing a new console to surpass the Famicom.

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“The Phantom of Akihabara,” Chapter 1

“I don’t care what it takes. I want to play Teitoku no Ketsudan from Koei. The first one,” the man said, as if confessing his darkest desires. “I’m not talking about the console port, either. The PC-8801 one. First printing.” With that, he fell silent. Now I knew why that envelope was so thick. I had heard stories about that one.

The Phantom of Akihabara: GAME OVER is a serial novel written by Yoshitaka Ohsawa and published in 2002-04 over eight issues of YuGe, a Japanese magazine devoted to games old and new (now called GameSide). Illustrations were provided by Aki Shimizu, a manga artist who I don’t think has done anything that’s attracted a Stateside fanbase yet but is still a pretty talented dude.

This is almost certainly the only apocalyptic SF novel themed around used video games that has ever been written, and its mere existence shocks and enthralls me, and so I’m translatin’ it, starting with this first installment. I’ve included a decent amount of links and footnotes so you’ll be able to understand all the Japan- (and Akihabara-) centric references. If something still seems obtuse to you, please let me know.

Happy readin’.

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I have zero desire to write about the Texas Rangers

Wizardry (NES) Done Quick

Nicovideo account req’d. How to get one. Click that “…” word balloon on the bottom to turn off scrolly comments.

Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord is, of course, a classic RPG and one of the top inspirations for every game in the genre, including Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy. The NES port, released 1990, was not noticed by most gamers — Nintendo Power all but ignored it, apparently having had enough of pushing RPGs after spending all of last year publishing Dragon Warrior features. This port, though, was three years old by 1990. It was released in Japan in late 1987, not long after Dragon Quest II, and it was a huge hit — very much with the times, and just as revolutionary to the Famicom’s grade-school audience as it was on the Apple a few years back.

The FC Wiz is of particular note because of the people behind it. ASCII gave development duties to Game Studio, the independent outfit Masanobu Endo (Xevious, The Tower of Druaga) founded after leaving Namco. He headed a team that spruced up the wireframe RPG dramatically, throwing in monster graphics by Jun Suemi (who did design work for Game Arts and illustrations for about a million Japanese novels) and music by Kentaro Haneda, an extremely prolific TV scorer who also did the soundtrack for Suikoden (1).

It’s Haneda’s BGM that I like the most about this port — it creates that perfect sense of dark, dreadful adventure that Wiz is all about. Take the “Your party is dead” theme. It’s so…final. It makes you feel like the lives of your six adventurers were worthless, lower than dog scabs. I enjoy it to bits.

Anyway, the above video shows the US version of Wizardry being beaten in…er…45.82. Not 45 minutes and 82 seconds, 45.82 seconds. That’s one quick TAS, considering that gamers used to spend weeks roaming the dungeons. Click on to find out exactly what’s going on in the flick.

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I felt personally insulted.

From Banjo Kazooie, Mario Galaxy and the death of the platformer

By the way, IGN gave Banjo-Kazooie an 8.0 and Banjo-Tooie an 8.5. I would classify this as pretty good considering that we all stopped playing “collect five million bananas” platform games half a decade ago. (Nuts & Bolts scored 8.3.)