I’ll start with some bitching about…
The Official TurboGrafx-16 Game Encyclopedia.
It’s personal
In the Summer of 1992 my best friend and I both saved up money from our paper routes and bought TurboGrafxes…grafxi…whatever. Because we weren’t spoiled bastards with rich parents who’d buy us toys at the drop of a hat, we decided to conserve our pitiful $30/month paychecks by each buying one of the two TurboGrafx hint books on the shelf at Barnes and Noble and sharing the information. So my friend bought the first “Secrets of the Games” series and I bought the “Encyclopedia.”
Fast forward one week: my friend beats Dungeon Explorer, Keith Courage (with the debug code), and Bonk’s Adventure. (Of course, I’m getting phone calls every other day as he brags about these accomplishments.) Meanwhile, despite owning four games in the Encyclopedia - Pac-Land, Deep Blue, Keith Courage, and Victory Run - I’ve gotten nowhere.
On to the review…
The Good
Quantity: the main positive is that, being an “Encyclopedia,” this book covers a lot of games. There are 2-to-6-page sections on what were probably the first 43 games (each accompanied by a single screenshot) plus previews of upcoming titles.
Easter Eggs: The TG, CD, and Express hardware specs and info weren’t widely available at the time and are interesting. The $5 Turbotap rebate was nice. The then-current list of CD+G titles is cool. The previews and screenshots for the games Camp California and Discis Books that were either never released or changed substantially are sweet.
Manuals: The contents of game manuals are mostly summarized (also see The Bad, below) so if you somehow found used TurboGrafx games in the early Nineties (without manuals) you were in luck. Even today, it's a useful “peak under the hood” if one wants to see how a game is actually controlled before purchasing it.
Ratings: For better or worse, each game is rated on a graphics/sound/response/fun rubric. This is rather strange as an official, NEC-endorsed hint book allows little room for objective criticism and is probably a holdover from other unofficial, crappy, “Game Mastery” books Bantam published.
The Bad
Format: The format sucks. Space is wasted for every game as large, bold headings and paragraph breaks for “who?”, “what?”, “turbo switch setting”, and other useless topics eat up space. Every single game in the book has a heading for “Resetting the Game” that wastes four lines with instructions on holding select and pressing run. Full control pad instructions are also included; these and most of the game strategies themselves are just summaries from the manuals. Basically, if you already own the game and aren’t just checking out potential buys, one can simply skip to the last paragraph of each title in hopes that either the “Secrets of the Pros” or “Tell Me How” sections (neither of which is always included) _might_ contain a useful nugget of original content.
Original Content: For many games there’s no new information to be had. The entry on Double Dungeons boils down to a list of controller instructions, items already explained in the manual, and a final “Secret of the Pros!” to “Get your password and record it regularly in case you are killed.” Some entries are moderately useful: an end-of-game password for Dungeon Explorer, player stats for Takin’ It to the Hoop, and quick, one-paragraph overviews on each sphere for Neutopia. Still, considering the resources NEC put at their disposal, authors Corey Sandler and Tom Badgett didn’t get much in the way of secret codes. Most of the strategies and tips are either painfully obvious or misleading – Sandler and Badgett not only didn’t tell my twelve-year-old self that I could regain life by not shooting in Deep Blue, but they explicitly instructed me to “keep shooting!” in the strategies section…What a bunch of scumbags.
Ratings: The rating system is arbitrary and has little rhyme or reason. Bonk scores a 21. Timeball scores a 24. JJ and Jeff a 28. Dungeon Explorer 20. Alien Crush 29. Furthermore, with the heavy oversight from NEC, the authors don’t have the much wiggle room in their ratings. Which brings us to...
Censorship: Most of the book is essentially Nintendo Power-style propaganda; the first chapter is spent bragging about the CD-player, comparing specs to the NES, comparing the TE to the Gameboy, and otherwise hyping the system. This sets the tone for the whole book. Of the 35 maximum possible points for game ratings, almost all of them are in the twenties. No game gets a worse than 4 out of 10 for Fun. The worst overall rating, for Fighting Street, is just below average at 16. Sometimes the authors can almost be heard grinding their teeth as they dig for neutral ways to describe terrible games. They say the following regarding Super Volleyball: “Volleyball is one of the fastest and most physical of sports. Super Volleyball does a decent job of translating that action to the small TurboGrafx-16 screen.” Ouch.
Overall
Buy if you’re missing a lot of manuals for early Turbochip games. No walkthroughs here. There are a few codes but they can be found online these days. Otherwise, The Official TurboGrafx-16 Game Encyclopedia is only useful as a time capsule – look into a bygone era when money was spent on getting kids excited about the TurboGrafx-16.
Finally, the offer for a free Acemore Freedom 16 “Bonk Head” is awesome. This thing has got to be the rarest TG16 collector’s item ever produced. If anyone has one, please post a picture! If any collectors out there want to buy one: please go after just this one thing and stop inflating the prices on all of our games. Thanks.
Topic: Reviews of printed material and other media (Read 174 times)
