PC Engine Mini hands-on preview – the original mini console

The latest mini console is the most obscure yet, but Konami’s PC Engine Mini is a treasure trove of classic Japanese retro gaming.

The PC Engine was originally released by NEC in 1987 in Japan, but it and many of its games were made by Hudson Soft, who were bought up by and merged with Konami in 2012.

So we recently went along to Konami’s UK offices to try out the PC Engine Mini, which has three different forms depending on the region. The Japanese version is the original white one, the US one is called the TurboGrafx-16 (and gives the American SNES a run for its money as the ugliest console ever made), and in Europe it’s called the PC Engine CoreGrafx Mini, after one of the later hardware revisions.

Comparing the Mini to the original version it’s only a little smaller than it used to be, but as Senior Brand and Business Development Manager Richard Jones points out, ‘We’d already made a mini console in 1987. We kind of felt we had to reduce it a little bit, to fit the name, but you can’t do it by too much or otherwise there’s nothing there to hold in the palm of your hand.’

In basic terms the PC Engine Mini works just the same as other mini consoles, with a full-size controller and four save states for each game, to help cope with the high difficulty of many games of the era. Importantly, the emulation work is done by the peerless M2, whose involvement in any retro game is always a guarantee of quality.

M2 seem to have particularly relished their work with the PC Engine though, which can be transformed from Japanese to American incarnations at the press of a button and has not only a CRT filter, to emulate old school TVs, but also a number of screen ratio options, including the ability to make it look like you’re playing the games on the tiny screen of a portable PC Engine GT (aka TurboExpress).

It all seems to work very well, but it is of course the games which are most important feature and the PC Engine CoreGrafx Mini has 57 of them – an almost identical line-up to Japan. That’s a mixture of titles localised for America and those that were only ever released in Japan, which works out as 25 games in English and 32 in Japanese.

The full list is below, and as you can see a few of the games are doubled-up, but the only Japanese titles missing from the UK PC Engine Core Grafx Mini are dating sim Tokimeki Memorial and role-player Tengai Maikyo 2 (part of the Far East Of Eden franchise), which would be unplayable unless translated, and the Japanese version of Splatterhouse.

In return the Western versions of the console get the English language version of Splatterhouse and the Japanese edition of Salamander – which just so happens to be one of our favourite 2D shooters ever (and Bayonetta creator Hideki Kamiya’s, as we discovered when we met him once).

Since most of the games are action titles the Japanese text is not an issue for most of them, although there is one special case: Hideo Kojima’s Snatcher. Predictably, Konami hasn’t used the translation from the Mega CD version, although Jones indicated that they were also worried that, ‘the intended humour in the game would get lost in translation and spoil the experience for both existing and new fans.’

It’s a shame, but translating such a text heavy game would be difficult, as the game is essentially a visual novel, but just watching it play out with its state-of-the-art 1992 2D visuals is a fascinating experience, especially given how brazenly the game rips off visuals from the likes of Blade Runner and The Terminator.

One of the core arguments surrounding the PC Engine has always been whether it counts as an 8-bit or 16-bit console, since its innards are a mixture of the two, but many of the games on the Mini are very impressive from a graphical standpoint and hold up just as well, or better, than contemporary SNES games.

We had a few minutes on a range of different titles, including the near arcade perfect R-Type and Ghouls ‘N Ghosts to the glorious, and long forgotten, Rainbow Islands sequel Parasol Stars and five-player Bomberman ‘94.

Then there was Castlevania: Rondo Of Blood, a key title in the evolution of the franchise; Ninja Gaiden; a number of platform titles featuring mascot Bonk (aka PC-Kid); racing games such as Victory Run; role-players such as Ys Book I & II; and pinball game Alien Crush.

Another that took our fancy, that we’d never heard of before, is Appare! Gateball, which turned out to be a sports sim based on a Japanese variation of croquet and which we had an enjoyable time playing in two-player mode with another journo, as we both struggled to work out the rules.

Although the absence of Capcom’s Street Fighter 2 was unsurprising, the only other notable omissions we noticed were Alien Crush sequel Devil’s Crush and Lords Of Thunder predecessor Gate Of Thunder. We asked Jones why this was and he answered that it was an attempt to balance the genres on the console, adding: ‘If we have an opportunity to add them in the future, we will reconsider it.’