Comparison Lynx vs Turboexpress

[DracIsBack]

Are you kidding me!?!? Either you have really poor tastes in games or are completely ignorant of the TG16 library

 

While I disagree with him, you do realize your response basically amounts to:

 

"my personal subjective opinion is more valid (and accurate) than your personal subjective opinion"

[malducci]

I owned a TG16 for many years. It's a nice little system, and it had ok audio if you had the Turbo booster. I prefer arcade games to platform and rpgs, so that's why my bias is heavily in favor of the Lynx, because that is the strong point of it's game catalog; Top notch arcade ports. There were a few good ports that I had on my turbo, like Sidearms and Raiden, but if you wanted the 'real' good stuff you have to get the Japanese CD console. I can't believe someone would even argue that, unless you consider the Bonk series to be the climax of the library, then you could suffice with just the US system.

 

You said "Kisado hucard converter, or just buying a PC Engine to play the 'good' library of Japanese games.", nothing about CD softs. I agree with you about the CD part though. The system moved on to the CD format as the dominate game media fairly early in its life span. Something I don't think I've seen anywhere else gaming history like that. Then again, that was NEC's plan the whole time. PC-Engine by itself was just release as the 'core' system. The CD addon was in development at the same time as the PC-Engine and was planned to be a more complete setup.

 

If you absolutely are madly in love with platform games, then the Turbo would definitely be the better choice, I wouldn't argue that, even though most of those are pretty shallow, even the vaunted Splatterhouse or Bloody Wolf. Shallow as those may be, I can't back up the Lynx' pitiful selection, as it's platform games are pretty much horrendous in comparison.

 

Bloody Wolf is a top view Run'n'Gun game. In no way is it a platformer. Splatter House is a side view Hack 'n Slash action game. Neither of those are 'platformers'. Bonk series is action-platformer, which is about as close as you'll get on the TG16 library. Actually, JJ & Jeff is a pure platformer. I've never heard anyone refer to Bloody Wolf or Splatter House as shallow. What's shallow about them?

 

The turbo just can't compete on arcade ports next to the Lynx overall, save for one direct comparison (Raiden).

 

The number of arcade ports? Probably not, but there's more than just Raiden for arcade ports:

Ninja Spirit

Bloody Wolf

Side Arms

AeroBlasters

R-Type

Dragon's Spirit

Ordyne

Tiger Road

Fantasy Zone

Legend of Hero Tonma

Splatterhouse

Vigilante

Space Harrier

Samurai Ghost (Well, it's the sequel to the arcade game. But in the very same fashion/design)

 

You mention arcade ports and Raiden in the same sentence, from my list of game and completely ignore R-Type? R-Type is a fantastic port of the arcade game, and the game itself destroys Raiden (arcade or otherwise) any day

 

While I disagree with him, you do realize your response basically amounts to:

 

"my personal subjective opinion is more valid (and accurate) than your personal subjective opinion"

If he really knew the TG16 hucard library, I highly doubt he would refer to it as 'weak'. And that was comparative to itself, at that (as in general). Just because it's an opinion, doesn't automatically make it immune to criticism. And an opinion can be formed of ignorance.

Edited February 23, 2011 by malducci

[Cobra Kai]

Splatterhouse is absolutely a platform action game. All you do is walk right, avoid obstacles, jump obstacles and swing your 2x4. One, that's why it's shallow, because what I listed is exactly all you do. Two, it is the very definition of a platform game. Bloody Wolf, not a traditional side scrolling platformer, still has the basics of a platformer, except its a top down version. I owned both, and found both shallow in gameplay, and quite boring. The best platformer I owned was Ninja Spirit.

 

I'm quite familiar with the Turbo's library, as I owned about 30 titles. But, I'm not going to sit here and poopoo all the crappy ones I had, because no matter what you say, I'm never going to cede that I prefer games on Turbo, compared to the Lynx because Lynx has tons of my favorite arcade games on it, Turbo doesn't.

[TailChao]

I'm not going to side with either machine, portable-wise I'd take a GameBoy over both.

But I do have to note-

 

You mention arcade ports and Raiden in the same sentence, from my list of game and completely ignore R-Type? R-Type is a fantastic port of the arcade game, and the game itself destroys Raiden (arcade or otherwise) any day

I just popped this in my Turbo last night, and it seriously is a great port. Half the reason I bought the machine in the first place.

I wish the sprite tearing was a little less severe, but I guess it's using one of the higher resolution modes (looks like it)? It's also one of the few PC Engine shooters that actually bothers to keep the objects in correct perspective with a panning background.

But yeah, props to the team that worked on this, there's usually not as much attention to detail with conversions.

 

Also regardless of how good the original arcade version of Raiden is, the Lynx port is just unfinished garbage. It would probably still be garbage even if it was finished.

 

 

While the Lynx seemed to have no problem replicating one of the best Turbo games with Zaku, which is inspired on Air Zonk, right?

I am saying this based on my playing experience, i really dont know how to interpret hardware specs.

Zaku is absolutely inspired by Air Zonk, but the two games are very different in terms of architectural design. There is no way to have the Lynx keep up with the PC Engine in terms of general object processing, and Zaku has a very poor object management system.

 

The architectures of both machines are completely different even though the CPUs are similar. You can't even compare them technically since when designing software for both you have to play to completely different strengths.

[malducci]

Splatterhouse is absolutely a platform action game. All you do is walk right, avoid obstacles, jump obstacles and swing your 2x4. One, that's why it's shallow, because what I listed is exactly all you do. Two, it is the very definition of a platform game. Bloody Wolf, not a traditional side scrolling platformer, still has the basics of a platformer, except its a top down version. I owned both, and found both shallow in gameplay, and quite boring. The best platformer I owned was Ninja Spirit.

 

Just because a game might have some platforming elements, doesn't make it a 'platformer'. There are sub genre names specifically for these type of non 'pure' genre games. Run'n'gun is a very valid term. Bloody Wolf is nothing but an overhead Run'n'gun. Splatterhouse is not the very definition of a platformer. It has very little emphasis on 'platforming'. The game doesn't even scroll up or down, and relative to the huge size of your character and enemies - there are no platforms to jump to (it's not like Downland where there's no scrolling, but it's a platformer game). The relatively few holes you jump over in Splatterhouse, is about as close as you get to anything relative to a platforming game. The game puts almost all emphasis on attacking and dodging and almost nothing 'platforming'. I can't think of a single higher level platform in the game that you have to 'jump' to. The very definition of a platformer, it is not. You have a very simplistic/generalized way of looking at game genres. To the point where you're incorrectly describing their genre types/categories.

 

I'm quite familiar with the Turbo's library, as I owned about 30 titles.

 

All the more reason why your original statement is confusing then about the Kisado adapter and JP hucard games.

 

Zaku is absolutely inspired by Air Zonk, but the two games are very different in terms of architectural design.

 

Now we just need a homebrew Zaku inspired game on TG hucard Speaking of which, what system are you moving to next? 65x cpu based?

[TailChao]

Now we just need a homebrew Zaku inspired game on TG hucard

We could just pretend that Coryoon is close enough substitute for now, albeit not "new."

 

Speaking of which, what system are you moving to next? 65x cpu based?

I think I'd like to do one more thing on the Lynx before I completely move off it, but right now I've been playing with the PCE and SNES. So 65x either way. No reason to leave an architecture I like

[johannesmutlu]

Well we can equalizeeach system for what they are, the lynx can only view 16 colors atonce as opposed to the 480 colors from the turbo, but by using color dithering blur or ham color, you can get impressive results.

Also the turbo has 6 10 bit dac soundchannels switcheble to psg mode, the lynx has only 4 8bit dac soundchannels, but by streaming audio or digitized fm or psg sound, you can impressive sound.

The turbo has 240x256 while the lynx has only a resolution of 160x102, but by carfully down scaling the graphics to such low resolution and zoom out possibly blackborders will give impressive results.

The turbo 8bot almost runs twice as fast as the lynx, but when squeezing all the speed out of the lynx will result in enough speed in many games.

The turbo has 8KB off sram while the lynx has 64KB of Dram, to make up for the lynx slow speed Dram,it's recommanded to only transfer 16KB of data per time to keep up with the speed.

The turbo has only 1 scrolling layer of background while the lynx has i guess 2 or more scrolling layers, however,on the turbo, you can render render the first background trough software by the cpu while the second background is done by the gpu chip, another way is to devide the single layer background into strips and let them move individualy with the main sprite onscreen, to achieve a multi scrolling effect too.

With bankswitching, you can make roms as big as you like,also since memory chips are now DAMM cheap.

You see it doesn't much matter with wich system you are working aslong you know how to overcome limitations from each system.

[sd32]

I loved that the Lynx featured parallax scrolling in many games. So whats the limitation for the Lynx when it comes to layers of parallax, does it work like the Neo Geo, and build the backgrounds from sprites?

 

Also, its said that the Lynx is capable of "unlimited" sprites. Judging from games, we can see it kicks the GameBoy and GameGears ass in that department. I wonder how it fares againts the Neo Pocket Color and Wonderswan Color.

[Lamer Deluxe tm]

All the graphics you see on the Lynx are sprites (of almost unlimited size and amount, only limited by memory and performance), there are no tiles or backgrounds, it is all just one big list of hardware scalable and compressable sprites. So in theory the amount of parallax layers on the Lynx is endless, just limited by the target framerate.

Edited May 14, 2015 by Lamer Deluxe tm