First time the Turbo / PCE made your jaw drop?

[Gogan]

Oh yea, blazing lazers, i was WTF Is this? You just move around and shoot things?! Awesome!!

Obviously, it was my introduction to vertical shmups. Very good stuff right there.

[Tatsujin]

Snes would have crashed!

And never ever recovered

[termis]

My experience isn't too unique either, but two titles clearly stand out in my mind as not just a "that's pretty cool" moment, but a genuine, jawdropping moment.

* Ys I & II - opening, then the rockin tunes of the overworld.  And like BT's, the end of Ys I/beginning of Ys II is also one of my favorite video gaming moments.  I must've watched that scene dozens of times back in the days.
* Sapphire - I can't believe someone hasn't mentioned this title yet, but it's hard to believe that this little machine from the mid 80s can crank out something that wouldn't look too far out of place as Playstation or a Saturn title.

Honorable mentions: Dracula X, Lords of Thunder, Fighting Street (no, really... To have a title this arcade-like with redbook audio bgm back in the 80s was pretty impressive), Gulliver Boy (with HuVideo).

[ccovell]

* Sapphire - I can't believe someone hasn't mentioned this title yet

Yeah, but this topic is about the first time the system made our jaws drop.  It's hard to believe someone was never impressed by the PCE/TG until 1995.

[Tatsujin]

lol, you would wonder how many have discovered the great awesomeness of pce/tg not until quite some time after its glory days.  but I do agree, I don't think that sapphire would have been their first jaw dropper as well.

[henrycsc]

I'd add that the Turbo Express would always cause jaws to drop back in the day.  It wasn't my first jaw drop for the system, but every place I took it, jaws would drop.  I bought it when Toys-R-Us cleared them out, about 1991.  But even then it was so far ahead of it's time people just couldn't believe it.
The other thing that caused jaws to drop was 5 player Bomberman.  I had an office when I was in grad school, and we would have afternoon bomberman tournaments.  It created a revolving door.

[thrush]

Well, I was late to the party, but for me it was the second level of Valis 3.  I had played games that allowed switching between characters before, but never one that handled it so smoothly or that used characters varying abilities to such good effect.  There was a lot of impressive graphics and sound on the Turbo but gameplay was always king for me at that age.  I was hooked.

[Zaki]

playing Gate of Thunder.

[esteban]

Well, I was late to the party, but for me it was the second level of Valis 3.  I had played games that allowed switching between characters before, but never one that handled it so smoothly or that used characters varying abilities to such good effect.  There was a lot of impressive graphics and sound on the Turbo but gameplay was always king for me at that age.  I was hooked.

I liked Valis III, too. Not a jaw-dropper, but certain levels were particulary fun to explore and solve.

On the topic of Valis, and to continue the spirit of this thread, the first jaw-dropping moment when I got the TG-CD would be some of the cinemas in Valis II: I particularly love the extra large static images (Emperor Megas portrait, various battle scenes) that scrolled on the screen whilst the sparse, otherworldly soundscape filled my ears. Ys I & II was purchased later, otherwise it would have been my first jaw-dropping CD-ROM.

[Liquid Snake]

When I bought my US Duo at launch and played both Gate of Thunder & Y's I & II.....................I was like..........DAMN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Dalder]

My first experience with Turbo Grafx 16 was at my friend's house he bought it when it was first released September 1989. I bought my Sega Genesis in August 1989.

He had these games

Keith Courage In Alpha Zones
Legendary Axe

We played these 2 games mostly Legendary Axe and I was very impressed with the system was in AWE! Then few months later on bought my own Turbo Grafx 16!

[roflmao]

I was impressed by the Legendary Axe ad as most seem to have been but, first WOW, Blown away moment....

"Ys the ideal utopia...."

I was hooked from those words on 

This. 

And Fighting Street - for about 5 minutes until I realized how frustrating the controls were!

But a lot of the Shoot-em ups were just plain awesome for the TG16 - Blazing Lazers, Super Star Soldier, Final Soldier, Aero Blasters, Air Zonk, Raiden, the list could go on...  A shmups dream console, even not considering the CD-ROM games (Lords/Gates of Thunder, R-Type Complete, Cotton, Hellfire S (Not as awesome but one hell of an intro and still pretty fun!), and who could forget the Spirrigan games!

[sunteam_paul]

YS I&II opening. Watched it in a local game store and was just amazed.

[Obfuscate]

The first time I played it. My buddy had a turbo and had Legendary Axe and Bloody Wolf and I was like whoa......this is way better than my SMS or NES.

[grahf]

OK. I'm a little late to chime in, but anyways.
The first game to make my jaw drop was The Legend of Xanadu II, on the first island. At that time I was just sampling the PCE CD library via emulation, before getting my own machine. I had already seem Dracula X and was blown away by it, but it didn't do anything that I thought was impossible on the machine. Don't get me wrong, it's a masterpiece and it raised my level of expectation through the roof. Xanadu II on the other hand, did things I didn't expect to see on the PCE.

I remember being fairly impressed by the boat scene in the beginning. It was the first PCE RPG I tried that seemed to match the graphical quality of the SNES RPGs. Still, since I was coming from the SNES world, I was expecting inferior graphical quality overall due to the lack of transparencies and other hardware effects on the PCE. Upon seeing the first area outside the village, I was shocked. I didn't expect to see things like the waterfall, and the seeming transparency of the slimes. I was again shocked once I got to the forest. The way the artists designed the trees is just amazing, and really captures the effect of walking under the leaves. Not to mention the flower petals blowing through the air... simply beautiful. I think this game is a good example of when good art design completely trumps technology.