Last year, I undertook an investigation into the mysterious back-catalogue of the ill-fated TurboGrafx-16 console with a screenshot LP series named TurboMento-12, which eventually culminated in Octurbo; a far breezier daily series that stopped after about an hour into each game. While the NEC TurboGrafx-16 enjoyed more than moderate success in its home nation as the PC Engine, the TG-16 did not fare quite as well in the US. NEC didn't even try to sell the console in Europe and as a result the TG-16's been something of an enigma to me, a UK videogamesman. Wanting to better understand what I missed out on, I endeavored to look into its history, its high-profile games, its low-profile games, its low-brow games (that Lady Sword incident...) and a few PC Engine exclusives that didn't make the cross over to the States for (usually) explicable reasons.

However, what I didn't do last year was check out the console's CD library. NEC is famous for developing the first console with a CD-ROM drive in 1988: the creatively-named TurboGrafx-CD (and, in 1992, the Turbo Duo, which played both CDs and the original system's HuCards). The PC Engine equivalent is the even more creatively-named PC Engine CD-ROM². This edition of Octurbo will look at as many of these CD games as possible or, to be a bit more realistic, about twenty-four or so. As before, I'll be taking a scenic route through some of its best-known (and lesser, forgotten) titles. It's worth noting that while the TurboGrafx-CD only saw 45 official releases (to the PC Engine CD-ROM2's 400+), the CDs were not region locked. You still had to know Japanese to play any of the text-heavy stuff like adventure games, visual novels or RPGs, but the few lines of backstory at the beginning of any number of great JP-exclusive shooters and action games for the system were an acceptable casualty (though the import fees were probably more of a dealbreaker). Just from a historical perspective, it's interesting to see how those early CD-ROM console developers handled having several magnitudes more memory space to work with but the same limited computing/graphical power. At least the music was better. Redbook audio did a lot for VGM.

I've brought it up before, but there are some amazing resources out there for TG-16/PCE games and the discussion thereof. There's Hardcore Gaming 101, which is usually the best place to look if you need a lot of info on some obscurity or other; there's Chronturbo -- the sister series of Doc Sparkle's excellent Chrontendo -- which is an ongoing video series that explicates on every video game released for the TurboGrafx-16 and PCE in chronological order; The Brothers Duomazov, a trio of guys who are systematically challenging everything for the system and writing up their experiences; and I <3 The PC Engine, an intermittent and presently defunct series from video game historian VIP Magweasel a.k.a. former GamePro editor Kevin Gifford, who goes into detail about individual games and the history of the console also in chronological order. There's more, of course -- it seems the TG-16's mystique inspired more than a few people, especially those who followed its far more plenteous and varied PC Engine output -- but that's probably more than enough reading material. Hell, you still have all of the below to get through first. Chop, chop.

At any rate, I'll be using this blog as a contents page of sorts, adding new items to the table below and linking back to this page after every entry. Thanks for checking out some weird 16-bit CD games with me, everyone. Hope you like anime cutscenes.