TurboSaga 2020 AD: The TurboGrafx Mini Library, Part 1

In which Captain JLS expounds at length about the NEC TurboGrafx-16 and introduces you to half the lineup for Konami’s mini console version of same.

Putting this together took a LOT longer than I expected, so to make it up to everybody, you, the viewer at home, should expect the new This Robotech Thing video within the week. Time permitting, this week should see an action figure review tomorrow and the This Robotech Thing covering 1-8 of the Titan comic series (as well as news items from the past couple of weeks) on Wednesday.

One whole night of producing this was entering passwords for Ys Book I & II I found on the web to try and capture footage from later in the game (the only save file I had from the last time I was working my way thru the game was from within Darm Tower, during the back half of Ys I), and finding out the passwords didn’t work. The problem I found with a lot of the passwords was that the lowercase L and the number 1 look nigh identical on screen, and whoever jotted them down missed which was which. I really wanted to get Thomas Haden Church going, “Don’t you forget about me! I am the bandit, Goban!” in there, but alas. If you want to hear that for yourself, this link goes right to Alan “Skeletor” Oppenheimer as Darm and Haden Church as Goban in the last big scene before the final battle of the game. That conversation — yes, the English version — is also sampled in the Provincialism Ys arrangement of “The Last Moment of the Dark,” which you can listen to here.

As for next time, I only own eight of the remaining games on the TurboGrafx mini, so the next installment of TurboSaga shouldn’t take nearly as long to hobble together. I’m looking over the list to see if there’s anything I could afford to snag beforehand, and there’s maybe one game I might go after (even with the mini system dropping in about three weeks), but by and large the later in the platform’s life you go, the more expensive the games get. (I did overstate the price Soldier Blade goes for in the video; a boxed copy is nearly a month’s rent, but the single cart has sold in the past couple months for only, oh, nearly two Turbo minis. More than half a month’s rent if I wanted the manual with it, tho.)

Here’s some of my favorite TurboGrafx resources, some of which I used to source screenshots and data for the video, if you want to dig into the history of the console a bit more:

The PC Engine Software Bible
TurboGrafx-16 & PC Engine Magazine Scans
Dr. Sparkle’s Chronturbo playlist
MagWeasel’s I ♥ The PC Engine