So I Bought… A TurboGraphx-16–16 Mini
I tend to start my blog posts with a confession, so why change now?
I don’t really care about mini consoles, like the NES, SNES and Genesis minis. They’re overproduced glorified ROM-playing emulation boxes that cost way more than they should and have way fewer games than they could. So far, I hadn’t bought a single mini console* that I got dirt cheap, nor did I feel the need to buy one. For the record, my original SNES is still hooked up to my TV.
(*Okay, I did buy a PS Classic but I got it dirt cheap and it’s still sealed in its box, likely to stay there.)
But the TurboGraphx-16/PC Engine Mini is a different matter. This is a console that was never released in Europe, and it’s a console that I spent my young teenage years reading about in the gaming press, this magical and elusive console that could play games my SNES would never hope to get. When it did, with Castlevania Rondo of Blood, everyone unanimously agreed that the SNES version was vastly inferior to the PC Engine version. This was the console that wouldn’t stop mocking me.
It was in late 2019 when the news broke that after the success of the other mini consoles, Konami of all companies would release a TurboGraphx-16 Mini. I knew I had to get one then, but the European release was still too far off (because even decades later, some things never change…) and with the outbreak of SARS-COV-2 it was delayed even more and I kind of forgot about it in the meantime.
But this past Christmas, I finally got my hands on one. Was it already too late to play games from the early 1990s in 2020?
One thing I have to hand to the mini consoles in general is that aesthetically, they’re fantastic. This thing barely weighs more than a kilo, and it just looks cool. There’s something about having such a small thing that is able to play the games you never had in your childhood that makes it very unique.
Something that I hadn’t quite kept in mind, not dealing with mini consoles, is that there’s no goddamn power adapter in the box. It’s… ridiculous. I don’t care if this is the industry standard by now (yet another bad trend started by Nintendo) and I don’t care if it’s easy to just plug it to your TV’s USB slot. It’s stupid, and not all adapters work with this thing. The first adapter I used didn’t agree with this thing, so it kept resetting at random intervals which ended up erasing my Castlevania save. Fucking bullshit, if you ask me. Just add an adapter to the thing already, this is beyond silly.
Going back to aesthetics, having interacted a bit with the SNES mini of a friend (and almost bricking it in the process, shit), I really like the job they’ve done with this console’s menus. Every game has its original cover shown in a big, vibrant image, when you boot a game you see a small cutscene where the cartridge or the CD is inserted into the console (the CD even makes the “CD is being read” sound, which was cool) and then the game actually boots. It’s a small thing, but it’s this attention to detail that really wins you over.
I would also like to make a special mention to the music in the menus. Menus plural because there’s two different menus, one for the Japanese games that were released on this machine but never left Japan during its original lifetime, and one for the Western releases of its games that are fully translated into English. There’s two different menus for each mode, and each comes with its own music. I still haven’t been able to decide which of the two is better, because both are delightful. They have this happy-go-lucky feel that all 1980s and early 1990s Japanese chiptunes had, the kind of that makes your day better just by listening to it, the kind of music that makes you want to embark on a fun adventure and discover something new and magical. Which, shocking I know, is what playing videogames felt like back then.
All this is fine and all, but what about the games themselves? My understanding is that the games collected here are the vast majority of the best games that were released for the TurboGraphx-16 back in the day.
There’s two problems here:
a) Some of the best games in this machine are on the Japanese side, but they’re really text-heavy yet are not translated into English. Why tease us with Snatcher when the game is a graphic novel and it’s all in Japanese? Why does G_d hate us?
b) Some of the games are really old, they haven’t aged well and they’re actually way worse than similar games that were released around the same time on the SNES and the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis, contrary to what I used to believe back then. It’s almost as if your understanding of the world isn’t really fully developed when you’re 13–14. Incredible, I know.
Still, what’s here is great. At first, I was grumpy over the fact that like half the games in both modes are shooters, and I’m really not a big shoot ’em up guy, but that only lasted until I actually got around to playing them. Some I recognized as names of famous shoot ’em ups I’ve heard about before, but like 90% of what’s on offer here is fantastic. Shoot ’em ups kinda died off after arcades everywhere closed down, and it always felt like they were a product of their time, but damn. I see the appeal again.
They’re easy to pick up and play, lots of fun and there’s no need for a time commitment. You just play until you lose, and then you pick it up again at a later day. And they’re not actually that hard, if I am still fast enough to navigate several stages of each level without prior knowledge at 40 and with carpal tunnel syndrome in both hands, then so can everybody else. This genre is actually great for the super-busy world of today, and I could see it making a comeback if some company picks up on this thing.
My favorite of the lot would definitely be Lords of Thunder, which I booted first if only because I’m such a Thor fanboy, but then I stayed for the awesome metal soundtrack. Seriously, if I knew about this game back when I was 16, I would have sold a kidney and my liver to buy a real TurboGraphx-16 16. That’s not to say the gameplay isn’t excellent, even though it’s a sidescroller and not a top-down scroller (the latter being better by all objective standards), the deep customization system and the tough but fair difficulty keep making me come back to this whenever I have 30 minutes to spare. Though I haven’t finished it yet because, duh, I’m 40.
At 110 Euros through Amazon (its exclusive retailer as far as Europe goes), the Graphx Core 16 is a bit more expensive than its competition, which says a lot since these are, at the end of the day, just bits of plastic that run the same ROMs you first downloaded for your Pentium III in the early 2000s, so they’re always going to be overpriced.
However, mini consoles are also great nostalgia trips, a good enough excuse to revisit a game you used to love as a kid but hadn’t played in years. Or maybe to find a game from that time that you always wanted to play but never had the chance to. I see their value, and for me personally it feels good to finally own this goddamn console, even if I may or may have not first downloaded Rondo of Blood, the full CD version, back in 2004. Being able to play it in the original console, or its closest equivalent, is still kind of a unique experience.