I never owned a TurboGrafx-16 during the system wars of the early 1990s. I doubt I was alone in this. The console was a constant third-placer in the market, and, to be honest, most of us didn’t want one that badly. Sega Genesis kids might’ve begged for a Super NES as their second system while Super NES kids begged just as doggedly for a Genesis, but the Turbo rarely entered the picture unless mom and dad spoiled you with
three current game systems. Even when Toys R Us clearanced out the consoles for fifty bucks, I decided that a Super NES game was a better investment. I can't remember which game it was, possibly
Alien 3 or
Cybernator, but I preferred it to the poor ol' TurboGrafx.
No, I didn't have a TurboGrafx-16 back then. But I owned a TurboGrafx fold-out pamphlet, and for a little while that was almost as good. At some point in 1990, NEC reps showed off the console at the air-base commissary where my parents shopped, and I got to sample
Bonk’s Adventure for a few minutes. My mother was adamant that I wouldn’t get a TurboGrafx, not when I’d just gotten an NES, but she couldn’t deny me some of the fine literature they were handing out.
A credible piece of marketing for adults and kids, the entire pamphlet is preserved at Chris Bieniek’s excellent
Video Game Ephemera. The booklet does a good enough job of emphasizing the TurboGrafx’s capabilities while downplaying its negatives, such as the lone controller port or the asking price of the CD system. Yet the best part is the poster formed by the back of the entire booklet. It’s a huge panorama of TurboGrafx games presented like a slice of the Sears Wish Book and filled with adorably outdated taglines like “CD Challenge!” and “So-Real Sports!”
Some part of me must've known that I’d never get a TurboGrafx until nearly a decade later, when I paid an eBay charlatan twenty-five bucks for a stained system with a broken controller. The best I would get in 1990 was this free reading material, so I pored dreamily over the expanse of games. It didn’t take too long for me to pick out my favorites, the five ones I’d definitely try if ever I laid hands on a TurboGrafx of my own.
Now I can play them and measure them against my youthful expectations, and because I can’t leave well enough alone, I’m going to do just that.
R-TYPE
Then: In the dim, distant days when arcades still mattered,
R-Type was a blockbuster, a shooter touchstone for anyone capable of grasping the intricacies of holding down a button to make an energy bullet larger. The booklet’s careful to show things any
R-Type player would recognize: we all knew the hideous scorpion eye fetus from the end of the first level, and we knew those huge mechanical claws, the ones that looked like futuristic gynecological stirrups and always seemed ready to close in and crush unwary ships. They never did.
R-Type was a highlight of the TurboGrafx-16’s first years. It replicated the arcade version very well, and it would stay an exclusive throughout the system wars. The Genesis never had an
R-Type, and the Super NES had the slower, uglier
Super R-Type and the superior-but-different
R-Type III. NEC positioned their star prominently, and
R-Type very nearly became the pack-in for the system instead of
Keith Courage. No one really liked
Keith Courage.
Now: R-Type is still an enjoyable shooter, but the TurboGrafx port’s fallen behind the times. You can get nice, arcade-perfect
R-Type very easily on modern systems, and the TurboGrafx version suffers from terrible flicker as the system tries to process a game it was never built to handle. In fact, you can see this in that larger screenshot—a good chunk of the player’s R-9 starfighter is missing. That bothered us a lot less twenty-three years ago.
