Star Trek Picard Originally Planned to Reveal Even More About the Enterprise-E’s Fate

The third season of Star Trek: Picard did not want for nostalgia, as the final season saw the former Enterprise captain finally reunite with most of his original bridge crew. The high point of the nostalgic final season occurred in the penultimate episode “Vox,” when La Forge revealed a reconstructed and restored Enterprise-D. Amidst explanations […]

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Quality and success do not always go hand in hand. Sometimes a fantastic movie will bomb at the box office. Sometimes a great TV series does not get picked up for a second season. Sometimes a beautiful music album will fall under the radar. Just because something is deemed a failure does not mean it wasn’t worth looking at. Such is the story of the PC Engine, otherwise known as the TurboGrafx-16. While it did well in Japan, its attempt to get a share of the North American market crashed and burned.

It wasn’t even the fault of the console’s performance. Sure, the controller was a bit lame, and the system needed better third-party support, but what was there was usually pretty damn good. It was simply overshadowed by the war between Nintendo and Sega. Now it’s looked back on fondly, seen as a treasure trove that did not catch on as much as it should have.

Let’s take a look at the games that truly defined its faded footprint in video game history.

Bikkuriman World (1987)

There were two PC Engine launch titles in Japan and one of them was a mahjong game, so I don’t really have much to say about that one. Instead, there’s Bikkuriman World: the sword-swinging platformer that itself is a high-quality arcade port, but also not really.

See, the game is based on the arcade game Wonder Boy in Monster Land. While that game would be ported to both the Sega Master System and the Famicom, the PC Engine version would reskin and rename it, tying it into Bikkuriman: an adventure series spun out of wafer snack mascots. Same basic gameplay but with redrawn sprites. This is similar to how the initial Wonder Boy got ported as Adventure Island due to weird legal issues.

Bikkuriman World throws some RPG elements into the platformer setup as you stab monsters for gold, level up weapons and armor, and gain magic abilities. The game goes deep into the use of secrets, both in terms of finding items, but also for finding hidden doors. All in all, a pretty basic, but fitting launch title for the system. While this would never come out for the TurboGrafx-16, that console would get the next Wonder Boy game, Monster Lair.

R-Type (1987)

The shoot ‘em up genre was the TurboGrafx-16’s bread and butter. Those games were to this console what fighting games were to the Neo-Geo, what games with “Super” in the title were to the SNES, and what buyer’s remorse was for the Wii-U.