Kaze Kiri: Ninja Action (TurboGrafx-CD)

Developer:

Naxat Soft

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Release Date:

1994

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Systems:

PC Engine Super CD-ROM²

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This week on Super Adventures, a game called Kaze Kiri: Ninja Action that came out in Japan and nowhere else.

I'm not sure I've played a Naxat Soft game before so I've no idea what to expect. Maybe it'll be an incredibly slick showcase for what the humble PC Engine can do in the hands of experts, maybe it'll be an unplayable piece of crap, I can't even guess. It's a Super CD-ROM² game so it has the potential to be at least as good as Castlevania: Rondo of Blood, but I won't be getting my hopes up.

One thing I know for sure is that I hate how long it takes to get to the title screen. First you have to wait through a flickering five second movie countdown and then another ten for the title to form. C'mon game, I've got ninjas to kill or maybe play as!

Renny Blaster (TurboGrafx-CD)

Developer:

J-Force

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Release Date:

1995

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Systems:

PC Engine CD

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Today on Super Adventures I'm ticking another title off my inexhaustible request list. It claims to be called Renny Blaster and I don't see any reason to doubt it. Maybe Lenny Blaster would've been a better way of reading the katakana on the box, but the title screen is pretty adamant it starts with an R.

It says 'TurboGrafx-CD' in my post title and labels for the sake of consistency (I strive for the highest standards of presentation for my jokey video game blog), but it'd make more sense to call this one a PC Engine game, as it never made it out of Japan. Just out of curiosity I did a quick calculation with the limited info I could find online in 3 minutes of half-assed searching, and it seems that less than a third of the console's library got a release on its American cousin. European fans of the console got it even worse, or to be more precise they got absolutely nothing. We may never solve the mystery of how the SNES and Mega Drive managed to outsell it four or five times over worldwide.

Oh right, I'm supposed to be writing about Renny Blaster. Uh...  it came out in 1995, so that's pretty late for a PC Engine game, even a CD one. Castlevania: Rondo of Blood pre-dates this by a whole two years, and I always assumed that was one of the last of them. The game's also likely to be entirely in Japanese, being a Japanese game and all, but I'm hoping there won't be much text to wade through this time.