Did anyone else neglect Hucards back in the 90's?

[kamiboy]

You know, when talking in general you shouldn't just consider just the good stuff, but also all the rubbish in their wake.

Perhaps the Duo fared better than other early CD systems given that I find the PC Engine had pretty weak music to begin with. On average I can dance to a NES chip tune I never heard before much harder than one from a TC.

As for the better sprites on some later era Duo games, I cannot say wither it is the extra space of a CD or the advantage of veteran programming and the additional memory of the CD system card that made that possible. I suspect it is more the latter than the former.

[Necromancer]

As for the better sprites on some later era Duo games, I cannot say wither it is the extra space of a CD or the advantage of veteran programming and the additional memory of the CD system card that made that possible. I suspect it is more the latter than the former.

I think not.  In the case of Dracula X (similar arguments can be applied to many other titles), Konami was surely not using neophytes for Super Castlevania IV, Bloodlines, or SNES Dracula X (the latter two coming out after PCE Dracula X), and the amount of system card ram is far more limiting than the much larger storage space on the cartridges.

[kamiboy]

That a fact... Well just for curiosity, what is the ROM size of Dracula X minus the audio tracks. Could be interesting to compare that to the largest known ROM size of a TC game, and the size of both SNES ADX and Bloodlines.

I suppose what you say does make sense from a purely economical perspective. When paying to print a CD you got ~600 megs of storage space that you could use 10, 100 or all 600 megs of without any extra cost. In contrast bigger capacity carts cost more to manufacture per unit purchased so I believe a hard limit was put in place early in the development phase by the powers that be.

Looking at Wikipedia I see that the TurboGrafx and SNES had about eh same sized VRAM, so all the extra memory from the CD cards was all gravy.

[SignOfZeta]

Since you mentioned the Turbo List, I'm guessing that you got into the Turbo after it was discontinued.

Did the Turbo Mailing List actually exist before the Turbo was discontinued? When I got on it the newest games were Sapphire and Working Love. It was dead in the US, or as good as dead. I guess I really don't know how far back it went, but I was assuming 1994 or so.

As for the OP's question, yeah, big time. My first system was a US Duo. I bought it for CD games so I played CD games.

Eventually I realized that the transition to CD was more than just the medium. To me there are three district periods of PCE games:

1) The Salad Days: mostly action games and many are arcade conversions. Mostly HuCard. There are a lot of really basic games from this period, but also some extraordinary awesome stuff like CRUSH!

2) The Renaissance: The PCE really finds its legs. Dracula X, Tengai 2, Spriggen. Mostly Super CD with a few Hu and ACDs. A huge shift towards sims and RPGs, but still a fair amount of shooters. Not a lot of HuCards.

3) The Otaku Ghetto: An almost total focus on sims and RPGs, mostly sims. Almost no HuCards (far to expensive to manufacture at this point and the few PCE fans all had CDROM2s by now).

So basically, as the system got older, things moved more to CD. This lead to more games that were better suited to doing things with CD that SFC couldn't do with cart (play Emerald Dragon or Flash Hiders on SFC, seriously, they are shadows) but that led away from action. By the time the PCE died it had become...well, its no secret as to why the PC-FX turned out the way it did. It wasn't a good sequel to PCE in 1987, but it was pretty spot on for a sequel to PCE circa 1994. (i.e.: you push I to advance the text...a lot).

So while I appreciate the "multi-media" content of CD games, if I want a quality action game I need to consider HuCards. The entire Soldier series for example, and all the "real" Bombermans are only on HuCard. You absolutely need HuCard, big time, for the entire PCE experience...although I didn't see it when the stuff was new.

[vestcoat]

...and the late, great, Games to Go in Richfield, MN.

Well, we can relate on that at least. Without Games to Go I wouldn't have been able to start buying PCE imports in a time  when trading on the Net was still in its infancy. I owe a lot to them.

Yeah, they were great.  Almost no one was interested in the Turbo back then and I remember Paul always saying "oh, we'll probably get a copy of such-and-such in soon... we're the only place in the country that buys this stuff!" 

I see the 16bit CD days as a sort of dark age for the technology. You lost the benefits of carts, such as no load times and chip tunes were made passe and you got very little worthwhile in return. 16bit consoles didn't have the processing power to take advantage of all that extra space anyway, so it was too much, too early.

The same can be said for the first generation with 3D graphics. I think with consoles such as Saturn and PSX we lost more by beautiful 2D pixel art going away than we gained by the crude clumsy 3D graphics and experimental awkward gameplay that replaced them. It wasn't until a generation later on the DC, PS2, Gamecube that 3D graphics really proved its mettle.

The earliest CD games were a cool twist on the 8-bit experience, it wasn't until '94-95 that FVM went to seed on the 3DO, Sega CD, and Jaguar.  I'm not as familiar with the Sega CD library, but the Duo really hit its stride with the SCD - the RAM was big enough that games didn't have to stop and load ALL the time (like CF2), but the buffer still filled quickly (unlike the Arcade Card).  As for the games, there were a couple FMV titles like Sherlock and ICftD, but they were a tolerable minority and the PCE-CD library is really solid overall. 

Early 3D graphics, now that was dark age!

[Black Tiger]

You know, when talking in general you shouldn't just consider just the good stuff, but also all the rubbish in their wake.

Perhaps the Duo fared better than other early CD systems given that I find the PC Engine had pretty weak music to begin with. On average I can dance to a NES chip tune I never heard before much harder than one from a TC.

As for the better sprites on some later era Duo games, I cannot say wither it is the extra space of a CD or the advantage of veteran programming and the additional memory of the CD system card that made that possible. I suspect it is more the latter than the former.

If you're counting the rubbish as well, then the most popular consoles have the worst libraries.

The base PCE hardware is better suited to fast animation than the MD and SFC. There are many MD and SFC cart games that also have great animation. Dracula X's stages are <2 megs each without audio. The bosses probably average <1 meg each. With sll of the enemies which are repeated, I think that an average of 2.5 megs per stage would translate well to HuCard. So a nice 6 stage version could be done on an 18 meg HuCard.

The quality of HuCard compositions wasn't what made the PCE CD a success, it was the software, pricing and hardware options. HuCards have amazing soundtracks, even if you only like dance music. I'm guessing that you haven't played through enough games to judge yet.

[kamiboy]

I have sampled a few TC games and so far all of the sound tracks have been very forgettable. So far nothing to even approach the perfection of even one track from any NES Castlevania or Mega Man title.

To me, for older generation games, the catchy chip tunes are half the experience.

Are there any TC games with a similar musical repute of the aforementioned series?

[Necromancer]

Try tunes from Legendary Axe and Dungeon Explorer; if you find those forgettable, you suck. 

[RegalSin]

Okay as of now in USA, videogames are no longer deemed as a class of media. About Hu-cards, well nobody really knew about it, and when I did find out, it was an alien thing for me.

About sound from cassettes/cart games. I 100% regret nothing at all, I will admit that many musicians for various machines, did make great music, but for these systems the internal volume level was low ( like it should be for even CD music ). However the ability to make computerized music and record it to CD is what really made the PCE amazing. You had CD/record sound on a videogame console, years before the SNES did.

[kamiboy]

Well, well, what do you know, one title I have and the other one is on my list.  Looks like my next TG game is going to be Legendary Axe. Lets see whether it changes my impression of the chip library music.

[Obfuscate]

No, Dungeon Explorer and Soldier Blade are some of the best games/tunes/all around awesomeness ever created. I had a Duo as a kid and most of my favorite games were Hucards. Plus, as a kid the Hucards were less expensive to buy.

[roflmao]

And the Crush games have excellent tunes!

[Samurai Ghost]

I have sampled a few TC games and so far all of the sound tracks have been very forgettable. So far nothing to even approach the perfection of even one track from any NES Castlevania or Mega Man title.

You haven't even heard truly great 8-bit Castlevania music until you've played the Famicom version of Castlevania 3 which has the extra sound chips in the cart. The NES version is crap in comparison.

As far as HuCARDs go, can you really get any better than Air Zonk/PC Denjin?! Some of the best chiptunes ever in my opinion and they match the game perfectly.

[SignOfZeta]

Aeroblasters stage 2. If that doesn't impress then...whatever. You so crazy.

[esteban]

Aeroblasters stage 2. If that doesn't impress then...whatever. You so crazy.

Black_Tiger had a link to an mp3 of this... damn it, I can't find it.