And so does Pam from her KZfaq channel, Cannot Be Tamed.

Thanks man. I'll keep them coming.

It's a shame the second game never got a Saturn port.

My English is awful these days. I live in a city with next to no English speakers so the only English I get is when I go drinking every other week.

It all depends upon who's programming the YM2612. Every American based game sounds awful in my opinion. Every single one. European can sound good but only the Japanese really knew how to use it.

Retro Core I definitely agree with you. Even though I was born and still being raised in America, most of my family is Scottish and a little German. I only met one game music composer Tommy Tallarico in my birthplace, and he is somewhat from mediocre to excellent in composing music, most notably Cool Spot, some Earthworm Jim games and the Sega Mega CD Terminator. He is cousins to Steven Tyler, who Steven Tyler of Aerosmith was one of the judges on American Idol Season 10 that Lauren Alaina from my hometown area was involved with. I went to same high school as Lauren, but graduated before she entered, but I met her twice and she remembers me. Most recently, she was in Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade 2017, while this past late March, Reba McEntire phone called Lauren Alaina to let her know that she has won the Academy Of Country Music Award For New Female Vocalist & everyone starts crying. I just felt like sharing that. Sorry if unnecessary.

Tommy Tallarico has some excellent scores on CD based systems as he's not limited to the awful sound engines used by some developers. I do love his Terminator CD work.

The tempo in the MD port was a mistake and the composer apologized.

Vludi Arcade ost is superior

Jon Campos Maybe to lull the player into a false sense of security that the game would be easy? If so, it was rather clever.

If you want to watch Tatsujin with clean music and video, almost without shot noises, I have it on my channel in the PC Engine playlist

Truxton is a pretty long game for a shmup. A full run of all 4 loops is maybe 2 hours. The music in my mind is more of a journey type music with just how long the game drags on, and on, and on, and on. The pauses in between enemy waves tend to be really long and it's a game where you'll spend more time staring into empty space than shooting things. The fast paced music doesn't fit at all.

Err, okay 😁

@@RetroCore I've been binging you videos for the last two weeks. Great stuff!

Speaking of the Mega Drive port, I read that that version made its debut on the Mini 2, courtesy of Sega and M2.

Thanks! I put quite a bit of time in to the videos so I do appreciate the positive comments. Please tell your friends about the channel or post about it on forums to help spread the word.

Thanks for watching many videos.

Pc Engine games are stupidly expensive these games, even where I live in Japan.

I checked around places in Fukuoka, and I'd go so far to say as there might be a bubble for PC Engine games currently. Even PC Genjin is around 4000 yen pretty much everywhere.

Ooh, I look forward to seeing an Amiga version sometime in the future. I think the Amiga should be able to pull it off.

It will be a tough one though, multiple layers of background, lots of colors and sometimes large animated sections of the screen will be a challenge. ;)

Laurent Giroud but at least no parallax scrolling to deal with.

The Amiga would easy port this .

I can't disagree with that 😁

To late!!!

supersonics5000 I made the comment when there was only one other comment about CGR and it wasn't typical "OMG LORD KARNAGE RULZ! style spam.

There's a sequal too!

Nice!

It sure does have a squeal but it wasn't really that wide spread unlike the original. Maybe that's why not many people know about it?

Because in Japan it was published by Toaplan, not Taito.

Good info. Thanks for the input.

No worries :)

It was very successful in Japan.

@@RetroCore Yes but not in europe unfortunatly.....

Yeah, I've noticed on a few occasions that CGR's Mark loves this game :) Even Game Sack covered it when they did a parody of him.

I think k I've done that one. I'll have to take a look at the list of shows I've made. If not I'll add it to the to do list.

The PCE port has more saturated colors but that's not accurate to the arcade, the Genesis port overall has more accurate colors.

I agree Marcel, PC Engine colors look satured and rather bad imo, same happens with Columns or the Supergrafx port of Ghouls 'n Ghosts (the grass at least which looks like NES colors). Mega Drive version of Truxton not only has better colors but also much more enjoyable sounds!

You wouldn't be wrong with that statement :) Yes, Toaplan were behind the Fire Shark series.

Yeah, I agree. I've never liked the name Truxton. Tastsujin sounds much nicer to me. I'm afraid work will be crazy in August and I'll be away from home a lot! I'll try to keep the videos coming though.

I think the X68000 version is the second game. I know for sure the Marty version is the second game. The first was only ever released on the Mega Drive and PC Engine.

Retro Core oh the sequel...yeah, totally forgot, thx for the reply!

Mario G Hernandez Welp,there's exist fba

Yeah, in the UK there were not that many shooters officially released so the Thruxton box was quite common to see in stores.

As do most Toaplan shmups.

It's a good game but be prepared to die a lot.

That was kind of the trend back then.

That reminds me. What other shooters tried something like that?

The are so many great Toaplan shooters for the Mega Drive. Maybe try hellfire if you're looking for a hardcore challenge.

Thanks for the advice👍

I don't know., sorry.

Both

That's a great suggestion but unfortunately I'm really busy in July and August so I don't have the time to do Arkanoid. The are so many versions I'd have to cover. In the future though it can be covered.

Put it in the pipeline for the future!

Easy to mistake between Tatsujin and Grind Stormer.

Yeah, we're all getting old but what great times we've had.

Mine too :)

Unable to reach a fully upgraded five-way lightning gun before dying haunted my childhood, since because of it's latching ability it looked like the coolest weapon on any game back then. I was so young I couldn't read, so I didn't know the name of the game back then. But I never forgot what I witnessed. +Ten years later I got a full mame library and hunted the game from a to z just to finally get my hands on the lightning arcs. Goddammit that was satisfying, but also left a bit empty feeling. I actually tried Truxton II first while trying to find the game of my childhood memories. It felt very familiar, so for a moment i thought maybe it was the game I was looking for. But I identified Truxton I right from the opening screen when I tried it

It's very funny in a way because I'm the opposite. I normally think the MD version is best. Zero Wing, Hell Fire, Aero Blasters and Devil Crash are all superior on the Mega Drive in my opinion but this one.... Hmm... Forgotten Worlds is also far better on the PC Engine too. Probably because its a CD title. The Mega Drive game suffers from being on a small cartridge.

@@RetroCore Aero Blaster, is the perfect example. .. MEGADRIVE version, maybe shows more graphics, but that's it, PC ENGINE , have better animations, better explosions, and better frame rate too, and more vivid colours. ... which gave me more the feeling of playng a real port from coin op, even if graphic is slightly worst than MD... Rainbow Islands, another example. .. MD version, even if had ( maybe ) better graphic has "sterile" gameplay, very boring compared with PC ENGINE... Street Fighter 2, is for me another perfect example, the PC ENGINE, catch the most important thing from this game, which is the atmosphere, that is for me, the closest to the coin op... after all anyway opinions ☺

@@enricomazzarellosimracing6502 For me the very chiptunesque musics of the PCE port of Street Fighter 2 is the exact the opposite of "catching the atmosphere" of the arcade, on the other hand The Mega Drive sound track is extremely close to the original.

@@kathleendelcourt8136 that's a matter of power of the sounchip of the machine, (Megadrive 16 bit, PCE 8 bit, better than this, it was no possible on PCE ) but the colours and the animations of Megadrive version, are so ugly, PCE version remind me too much the colours of the summer, when i look that game running, remind me too much of those moments, when i was play coin op... Megadrive, so sterile... (I only owned MD version back in the 90's, and technically, was perfect to play, but still feel like PCE version, give more magic feeling when i look at it )

Sprites are no bigger on PC Engine. The definition of this version is lower than the Mega Drive version. So we can say that we are closer to the sprites, but they are not bigger. We are rather on a smaller window, which still makes the game more comfortable on Mega Drive. Too bad on the latter, the music is too loud...

It's a matter of market appeal. Truxton has a very Germanic sound to it, which appeals to a western English-speaking audience, while Tatsujin is very East Asian / oriental, and would seem foreign to them. The game itself doesn't display much by way of Asian theming to justify the name in a western market, like games such as Ninja Gaiden did, so the name change was likely to assuage unfamiliarity and deflect cultural stereotyping for the sake of sales. Besides, Truxton is cool. I'm glad the name was used.

I guess so. The "tsu" sound is not so easy to pronounce for many westerners. It's why Matsuda was changed to Mazda.

Really? We 'tsu' each other all the time over here. Gives lawyers something to do.

Thats "su" not "tsu" :p

Yeah, it is a bit loud but I think that maybe a side effect of having no drum track to balance everything.

Also the speed of the music is faster by mistake on the MD

Marcel Weber Interesting. Why is that?

Zillion Taborda because they programmed it for 50Hz I remember reading. So on a Pal system it should be fine but a little too fast on an NTSC system.

Retro Core How odd, considering how Japan uses the NTSC standard!

It's one of those things I thought too but apparently not.

I like to think that by 1990 the PC Engine's hucard games were pretty much considered the low budget/portable lineup. Since they had the CD add-on in like 89 and made a bunch of systems with the CD drive built-in, the PC Engine was pretty much a CD system by 92. So don't think of it like the MD vs. the PCE in a 92 game. Think of it like a Turboexpress playing Tatsujin on the go vs. Gameboy or whatever could compete from Sega. It's kind of hard to imagine that they'd still even be releasing hucards that late into the CD system's life unless they were marketed specifically because they were portable and/or cheaper for people who refused to upgrade.

Your reasoning is wrong and lacks contextualization. First of HuCard games were supported up until 1994 and this includes some important releases such as PC Genjin 3, Bomberman '94 or Street Fighter II'. But the format was, indeed, not that great of a choice. It's the same kind of cards that were previously used by Sega for their 8-bit range of consoles (SG-1000; Mark III...) but while it worked well for 8-bit games (which needed less storage), it wasn't that fitting for a 8/16-bit console released in 1987 since games were obviously more demanding by that point and many PC Engine games have content cut or others fails due to HuCard size restrictions. Heck, even Street Fighter II which uses a HuCard bigger than usual still lacks content compared to the Mega Drive or SNES versions. NEC quickly released the CD add-on both to have access to bigger storage and to reduce costs since, apparently, HuCards were kinda expensive to produce. The CD add-on is said to be planned right from the start but still, it was somehow messy AND this forces consumers to buy two systems since the HuCards library is hardly up to par compared to rival consoles. And add to this the cost of a multitap (since the PC Engine only has one controller port), the cost of something to improve the picture quality (since the PC Engine doesn't output RGB natively) and the cost of the different System Cards to update the CD part and you realize that, overall, it's an expensive mess which ultimately still cannot compete. And better not talk about the SuperGrafx... (in short: two times more expensive than its competitors, still inferior in some ways and a joke of a library. I really feel sorry for those who bought one back then). And the PC Engine GT (TurboExpress) doesn't belong in the same category as the Game Boy, Game Gear or Lynx. It's a portable PC Engine meaning that, while it was a powerful handled for its time, on other hand it's not a dedicated hardware with its own games which automatically makes it different and also less interesting. NEC didn't want or didn't have the ressources to do handled games.

I'm gonna politely disagree with you on some points. I'll tackle the last section first. Since the Turboexpress was released in 1990, it had the same market as any other early gameboy or gamegear adopter. By 1990, only about half of the hucard games were even released yet so clearly people would've had more games to look forward to even if they were the same as the home console's games. Your interest in games is entirely subjective so saying that having one set of games being the same as the home console is a little irrelevant. If you were a portable gamer then you'd be looking at a catalogue of games, a lot of which were very technically superior to other portable games, regardless of whether or not they also happened to work on a home console. Just because it didn't have the marketing as a portable console doesn't mean it didn't exist as one. I distinctly remember growing up in the turn of the 21st century when other game systems came out to compete with the upcoming gameboy advance. I thought, as well as my friends, that if it wasn't Nintendo then it didn't have Pokemon or Mario and therefore was not a good system. Obviously I could've given the other systems more credit for their own catalogues, regardless of what my preferences were. Just like that situation, the Turboexpress might seem like it doesn't compete or doesn't have a unique catalogue, but it still has a catalogue and still is a portable system within what it offers. I think it's in the exact same category as the gameboy and gamegear, except that it just wasn't popular or reasonable in price. Now, for the rest of your post I don't quite get what you disagree with. My reasoning was just that A) the CD add-on already existed and was the superior format for PC Engine games. and B) Therefore the hucards would've been chosen as already indicated an inferior choice, but perhaps with the added benefit of being adopted for use on the Turboexpress. I'm just meaning that the hucard games, while still having newer releases and big name releases, would've been an inferior choice in a competition of power and flash that relegates them to a second priority in the home consoles, compared to the CD games on the same system. Yeah the hucards had good games past the release of the turboduos and their variations but at the same time they were missing a chance with each and every game for actually competing in the home console market when they weren't using CD. Therefore, they were using hucards for something else: As I pointed out in the first post, my opinion is that they were semi-budget and also portable for use in the Turboexpress, which are advantages that mean that those games weren't going to compete with the other 16-bit systems. I don't think we disagree on facts, I think we disagree on what they imply about the market and expectations.

Again that's mostly wrong. HuCards weren't "budget", the games I mentioned were *important* releases for the console. The overall user bases was bigger on cards than on CD. But they still mostly gone the CD route by some point since the PC Engine alone felt kinda limited in some ways (as I pointed out the storage in particular but also the sound which tends to sound "8-bitish", it's charming and works well for some games but not that much for others). But you know, in retrospect, I'm not that fan of the CD format for some genres, arcade-style in particular, since loading times can be annoying in such cases (PC Engine CD's Art of Fighting is awful in that regard). Later CD-based systems (Saturn for example) had faster CD drive and more cache meaning shorter loadings so it worked well in most cases. That might be why the Mega-CD focused more on RPG, simulation and such, where loadings aren't as annoying (and that's why I don't care that Sega didn't port its arcade games on Mega-CD but instead developed console-style games such as Sonic CD, Shining Force CD and such). As for the PC Engine GT, it's the same case as the later released Sega Nomad, it's a way to play your console games on the go but it's not real competitors for the Game Boy/Game Gear for the former or the Game Boy Color for the latter.

While the MD port is a bit better in some presentation aspects (less flickering, somewhat more accurate colors) I'd say the PC Engine port is the better port overall, it has a better balanced difficulty and no slowdowns afaik. Oh and having interrupted drums is better than not having drums at all or having the wrong tempo (MD port)

It's okay. Nothing too special to be honest.

Retro Core Which is better then?

The second one. The first one is only a cult favourite in the West because it was released widely there. Truxton isn't so special in the world of Toaplan shooters. I'm not saying it's bad but I am saying it's not this amazing game people make it out to be. It's just a good shooter.

Retro Core Then why was the sequel rarely ever seen outside of Japan?

I don't know. Same reason why most Toaplan games weren't.

Maybe but not a lot.

Retro Core Understandable

I did Hellfire 11 months ago. Please use the KZfaq search bar to find videos. Type Battle of the Ports followed by the game name kzfaq.info/get/bejne/gtygYNyhqZq6fpc.html

Retro Core Didn't know. Either that or I couldn't find it.

yeah, the 2nd game may look better but it's not a fun to play,.

It would be nice but I doubt they will unless there's a lot of money to be made from it. Sad but probably true.

Retro Core Well, if two of Psikyo's classics were brought back, why can't this be?

hahaha, and thats why I've paid over 250,000 yen to the japanese police in 8 years. thae again I think that's down to the pathetically slow speed limits of Japanese roads.

It's on the to do list :) thanks for the contribution though.

I know the genesis port since 1990 (when I bought the japanese version, Tatsujin). I find the PC Engine one more challenging with better gfx and sounds. For me there is really a big gap and I am really surprised by the review.

The PC Engine version is not fun with its horrible sound effects and saturated, NES-like colors. Also the difficulty is not very well balanced. Much prefer the Mega Drive game overall.

The skull bomb looks better though

Oh man, these days you could get some quality money for a Tatsujin PCB. Never mind, I've sold loads of stuff in the past for peanuts which are now worth so much more.

Don't even get me started on selling stuff for way too low. For me though, if I buy it cheap and get enough enjoyment out of it, I don't really care if I get top dollar for it on the way out. It feels wrong asking a multiple of what I originally paid. Also, if someone thinks that it's ok to buy something for $1000 that used to cost $50 a decade ago, it's probably time to get their head examined.

You're a good man.