Exile

Telenet/Working Designs - 1992 - U.S.A.

CD-ROM

Hit and miss effort from the venerable Telenet, localized for the US by Working Designs. Exile is an adventure RPG where most of the game is played out in sidescrolling action areas that are linked together by world/town maps. The game has nice, bright, well-shaded graphics, some parallax where it counts, good to great music and an easy to navigate and use menu system.

This guy offers lots of helpful commentary throughout your journey. Pay very close attention to his words.

You can't help but ponder the thought process that led up to this comment.

The game falters in the one area that really counts, though-- the gameplay. I played through this game for the first time in about 4 hours and never once really felt challenged. Some of the level designs are kind of nice and maze-like (I liked that aspect), but on the whole the game felt very short and perhaps somewhat rushed during the design and planning phase (although what IS there, looks nice and polished). Leveling up is pretty quick and painless, and you are usually always strong enough to defeat your foes without much effort whatsoever. After such epic adventures like Anearth Fantasy Stories and The Legend of Xanadu, this game almost feels like a joke, but at least the superficials keep it a bearable one.

Exile isn't a total disaster. It's a mildly fun game capable of providing a nice diversion for a lazy Sunday afternoon. But it's hard to get really excited about a game like this when the vast Duo library, rich in RPGs, has so many other fantastic adventures awaiting your attention.

Download

NEC Avenue - 1990 - Japan

HuCard

Download is about as good as it gets for a cartridge-based horizontal shooter on the Turbo. It's up there with the likes of R-Type, Air Zonk, etc. Rockin' chip tunes as you blast your way through a futuristic city being overtaken by a cybernetic brain. I couldn't put it down 'til I conquered it. One of my personal favorites, and I'm a tough room when it comes to shooters. Download is the epitome of a perfect balance of fun and difficulty.

Features a unique powerup and life system you won't find in any other shooter.

Great graphics with lots of parallax are just icing on the cake. Download features some pretty bad-ass cinematic cutscenes, which is a rare thing for a non-CD game. As a matter of fact, Download's cutscenes are actually better than a good number of CD games.

Possibly more famous than the game itself however are the hilarious GAME OVER blurbs. Just when you thought it was, this review IS NOT A OVER YET.

KLAX

Tengen - 1990 - U.S.A.

HuCard

I got this game recently as a gift over the Christmas holiday. I've never been a big fan of KLAX, but it was a necessary acquisition in my seemingly neverending quest to acquire all the TG-16 US releases.

The TG-16 port is actually a really, really good facsimile of the arcade original. As far as TG-16 arcade ports go, KLAX is up there with the best of 'em. "Great," you're probably thinking, "KLAX must be a home run." Well, KLAX's arcade-perfect blessing is also it's biggest pitfall.

See, the trouble is that KLAX is a lousy fucking game to begin with. Keep in mind I'm probably the biggest puzzle game whore on the face of the Earth. KLAX is inane, it's slow, and it's boring. The most excitement in KLAX comes when you meet certain criteria that allows you to "warp" ahead a certain number of stages. That excitement is short-lived however, as soon as you actually reach the stage you're warping to and the doldrums of the gameplay set in once again. Audio in KLAX consists of "clicks", "clacks", "beeps" and "bloops." There is actually a "sound test" option available from the option menu where I was able to "test" all four sound effects and a couple poorly-digitized speech effects. This would be all well and good, except the game actually lacks any sort of in-game music. It doesn't take long before the clicking and clacking gets reaaaaaaaaaaaaaalllllllllly fucking old.

The silver lining, if you can call it that, is that the game "options" screen really lives up to it's name. Just about every aspect of gameplay is adjustable, from the screen resolution right down to how random the colors of tiles you are given are. Unfortunately, there is no switchable option available in the options menu to toggle ass suckage, so despite the configurability factor, KLAX still remains a first-class KLUNKER.

I was a little excited about picking up the TG-16 version of KLAX, since I've seen many-a-gamer rave about it. Let me just say that unless you already know yourself to be a big fan of KLAX (in which case I'll say you ought to expand your horizons), you're better off spending your money on Puyo Puyo or Implode. You'll have a shitload more fun and get a fancy soundtrack to listen to while you play (imagine that!). Fuck, even Hatris has in-game music.

What an honor.

I'm pretty disappointed that this was the domestic effort we got from Tengen, though they did a fine job with what they had to work with. I would, however, have been much more excited to see the rumored port of Marble Madness come to fruition than this pile of crap. I'm a major Marble Madness fan, and I bet a Turbo port would've been just awesome.

Shanghai

Activision/Hudson Soft - 1987 - Japan

HuCard

For what's essentially a launch title, Shanghai brings the goods. It's lean, it's mean, and Shanghai lovers will find all the essentials here.

(Tune 3 is the best.)

Music is impressive chip fare, all of it very fitting and atmospheric. You have a choice of 3 different heavily Asian-inspired tunes to match tiles to. For a cart that came out in '87, the soundtrack still holds up technically well against many later titles.

Graphics are no-frills, but they get the job done and are crisp, clear, and easy to read. Unfortunately the background is a never-changing green color, but it's pretty nondescript and inoffensive.

Gameplay is classic Shanghai action. You can access the in-game menus at any time and an on-screen counter informs you of how many tiles you have left to clear. There is only one tileset in this first installment, but there are dozens of different board sequences available to conquer. There is also a "HINT" option in the in-game menu in case you get stuck, but only dirty cheaters would use that.

Victory is mine.

Somebody had the brilliant idea to create a patch that translates the in-game menus because, you know, Shanghai is extremely text-heavy. Either way, the patch is out there, and if you've got a flash cart for your Turbo there really isn't any reason NOT to download the patch and play the game with English menus.

Asuka 120% Maxima BURNING Fest

Fill In Cafe - 1995 - Japan
Super CD

Fucking retarded, doubly-retarded fighting game. I can't believe anyone actually likes this shit- Flash Hiders completely and utterly obliterates it on every level. The graphics especially are heinous; the characters all have super spindly limbs and teensy little faces that you can't even see, and they look about as high-res as a fucking NES game's sprites. There's a nice title screen and some slick presentation to trick you into thinking you're about to experience a sweet fighting game, but the actual fighting is BLEH to the max. I played this on PSX and THAT version was good since they completely re-did the graphics and added a ton of stuff to the fighting engine, but why anyone would bother playing this shit when there's Flash Hiders or Fatal Fury is beyond me and my loyal dog.

Genesis game that is better than this game rating- Deadly Moves AKA Tongue of the Fatman.

Bubblegum Crash

Bubble Gum Crash
NAXAT
HuCard
1991 or something, not like it matters- go look it up, retard.

I played through this game in one sitting, and it was mildly fun-- not the best digital comic I've ever played, but definitely worth playing through for any Turbo fan.

The game plays out like an episode of an anime show-- it starts out with a bank robbery and it's up to your chick (and her friends) to get to the bottom of what's going on. The story is predictable and the digital comic parts really hold your hands, but you can interact enough that it doesn't feel like you're just watching the proceedings. Everything unfolds like a typical game in the genre; you move between locations talking to people and uncovering clues, showing items, solving a few simple puzzles, etc. After an hour or so of that you are treated to a weird motorcycle chase thing where you have to catch up to a mech. The game concludes with the classic Wizardry-style maze (which seems to be standard issue for any digital comic made between 1985 and 1995) where you are attacked by robots as you try to hunt down the last boss. This was really the only annoying part of the game since you can't save in the maze (set aside at least an hour or so to beat it) and you get attacked literally every two fucking seconds sometimes. Fighting is completely pointless too since you can't upgrade any stats so it makes every battle that much more irritating.

Bubblegum Crash conforms to the Digital Comic Act of 1986 whereby tits & ass shots were made mandatory...

The graphics are decent enough for a HuCard, although it does have that NES look to some of the backgrounds (I assume they were saving memory for the bike chase part and the fight scenes later on). One thing that the game could have used is some more art of the main girls or at least bigger portraits, I felt like I barely saw them by the time I had finished. The maze part has the nicest graphics in the game and actually looks pretty cool, although it could have used more than 2 different robot types to fight and maybe a palette swap or something on the different floors.

...along with first-person dungeons as the final part of the game.

I also feel like I should mention that the music is pretty bland. Not a single song stuck out, they were all very generic and sounded like they came as examples with the PCE dev kit sound library or something. They weren't offensive or anything, just forgettable.

You'll do this about 1000+ times before finding the right path.

Genesis game that is better than this game rating- Spellcaster on Master System literally uses a bow and hand socket to treat this game like a rubbing stick and smoke it, Boyscout-style.

Youkai Douchuuki

This is an odd little platformer that is interesting mainly because half the fucking screen is taken up by your status bar. Literally half. It shows a little map that sort of gives you an idea of where you are in the level, but basically only by telling you how far you are away from the end since its just a crude drawing of the level. The control is decent, and it does everything ok in a 1988 sort of way, but the game as a whole is just archaic and not any fun. First of all you only get one fucking life, and that's IT, no continues or anything (at least not that I could find). You can buy stuff from an old lady in a store, but only health power ups and some status enhancers like new shoes that make you jump *slightly* higher, and other things nearly as worthless. Plus the collision detection is a little odd, it's one of those games where the edge of platforms and enemies isn't precisely defined (like donkey kong country compared to mario bros), so it can be ultimate frustrating. The boss fights are kind of cool though, your character prays at a shrine and his spirit comes out and you get to control it as it flies around and fires projectiles off, all the while your little guy is praying super hard.

Overall the game isn't exactly horrible but it's close enough that they share the same personal space. The few frustrations will over ride any fun you might possibly have; like when you have to stop at a shop (they aren't optional) and the screen takes 10 unbelievably-long seconds to change, you only get one life and no continues, and there are various extremely cheap parts that rival The Addams Family for frustration. I will say, though, it's leagues better than fucking JJ and Jeff or Impossamole, but what game isn't (besides Blodia)?

Genesis game that is better than this game rating- Wardner, by at least 7 Phantasy Star lengths.

Vanilla Syndrome

~ VANILLA SYNDROME ~

Nichibutsu

CD-ROM / Super CD-ROM

1991

When I think of Nichibutsu, I think of those F1 Circus games that a few folks adore and most of us despise. Having mastered the art of crafting polarizing racing games, the company decided to try their hand at the very similar genre of anime-girl mahjong. Vanilla Syndrome, the product of their experimental endeavor, has you play a goober who struts around in a pink vest. He's on his way to meet his girlfriend at an amusement park when he opens up a random door and gets sucked into another dimension where strange women want to play mahjong with him. Let's see what we've got here...

Well, we've got shops run by bunny girls. You pay with carrots, of course. I've never needed to purchase anything.

I won. "Cherry" seems angry about that.

The map parts suck. Basically, you can move the cursor around and click on every single spot hoping to set off an event, or you can make life easy for yourself by using a walkthrough that tells you exactly where to click and use items. This one is good: http://whss.biz/~mrx/game/pce-cd/vanillas/vanichart.html.

That's about all there is to the game. Mahjong is mahjong, and the map parts are painless if you use the guide. VS hopes to hook you with its weird girls; if you're looking forward to the next bizarre encounter, you'll keep on playing. Some of the artwork is subpar, and some of the character designs are goofy/unimpressive, but here are a few of the finer portraits:

Ah, a rare moment of peace amidst the mahjong wars...