TurboGrafx-16 Review

The TurboGrafx-16 is two different consoles depending on which country you bought it in. In Japan, where it is the PC Engine, it launches early, beats the Super Famicom to market by three years, takes a real share off Nintendo and gathers one of the deepest catalogs of its era, particularly once the compact disc add on makes it the first console in the world with a disc drive.

Bonk, the Bomberman games, a run of shooters collectors still pay heavily for, and arcade conversions that embarrass the Genesis in places. The hardware is clever rather than brutal: an 8 bit processor doing the thinking and a 16 bit graphics chip doing the work, in a case the size of a paperback. North America is where it goes wrong.

NEC arrives two years late, prices it against a Genesis with far more recognizable games, ships it with a single controller port and a bewildering menu of add ons, and sells it as a 16 bit machine that plainly is not one in the way buyers understood the phrase. The library that carried it in Japan mostly never crosses the ocean. What is left is a lovely console almost nobody outside Japan got to appreciate while it was alive.