![]() ![]() The original PC Engine is the smallest console ever made, and the marketing team thought (rightly, I would guess) that Americans would assume its small size meant it lacked power. ![]() ![]() The PC Engine, made by Hudson Soft and sold by NEC, released in Japan in late 1987, but took a while to come to the US, after a rebranding that emphasized its 16-bit graphics processing unit (its central processor, however, was still 8-bit, which led to some complaints of false advertising) and a larger chassis. For that matter, I had only ever heard of the PC Engine/Turbografx-16, with or without its CD add-on, and have still never seen one. CDs didn’t seem to really kick off until the next generation of consoles hit, in particular the original Playstation in 1994 (1995 in the US). I heard about some of the earlier consoles to use CD drives, like the Sega CD, but I never knew anyone who had them. I remain shocked that there were games made for CD as early as 1989 (1990 for the US release). I remember when I first tried playing games on CD-ROM, on my family’s PC, and having my mind blown. CD-ROMs were, if you will excuse the term, game changers. No longer would developers need to write music as a set of instructions for an onboard sound chip to synthesize, they could simply record high quality audio and have the game play that. Even if music takes up the majority of the CD-ROM, there’s still plenty of room left to make a game many times larger than cartridges at the time. CD quality audio, in fact, as defined in the Red Book. There’s not just room to make games longer, with more levels and art, but also to store vastly superior audio. A CD-ROM could hold 650 MB (or even more), which is roughly 1700 to 5000 times more data. As a comparison, Famicom/NES cartridges typically held around 128 – 384 kB of data, with the largest ever at 1 MB. You see, the PC Engine version used the CD-ROM add-on, and was in fact one of the first games developed for CD-ROM.įor those who might not remember the introduction of the CD-ROM, it was a big deal for games. But by playing the 1989 remake instead of the 1987 original I’m making a fairly big jump in terms of technology. This was actually the only time (again, not counting modern remakes) that Ys II was officially localized in English, which made my decision about which version to try a bit easier (although I’m waiting to play the second game until my timeline reaches its original release date). But the version universally regarded as best among fans - not counting more modern remakes, like the 2013 version currently sold on Steam and GOG - is an enhanced remake (credited to Alfa System) from 1989 for the PC Engine (rebranded in the United Staes as the Turbografx-16) that bundles together Ys I: Ancient Ys Vanished and its sequel Ys II: Ancient Ys Vanished – The Final Chapter in a single release. Nihon Falcom released the first Ys game in 1987, a few months after Esper Dream (the subject of the last entry in this blog series), on NEC’s PC-88 home computer system, although ports quickly appeared for other Japanese home computers such as the X1 and MSX2, as well as Famicom and Master System ports a year later. I’m cheating a little bit with the timeline. And of course, we got Ys IX: Monstrum Nox in 2019, which traces its lineage all the way to Ys I: Ancient Ys Vanished in 1987. #RETROARCH PC ENGINE SYSCARD3.PCE DOWNLOAD SERIES#Tales of Arise was a big hit last year, the latest entry in a series that started way back in 1995 with Tales of Phantasia on the Super Famicom. Digital Devil Story: Megami Tensei, which released in 1987, spawned the Shin Megami Tensei series and its spinoff Persona series, which had new entries in 20, respectively. Everyone knows the behemoth Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy franchises, which have been running for more than thirty years, but there are so many others too. One of the reasons I wanted to play the early Japanese console role-playing games is that so many have become enduring series. As always, you may click on images to view larger versions. If you’re looking specifically for console games, those are here. Other History Lessons posts can be found here. ![]()
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