Deep Blue is a garbage shoot 'em up that's often considered one of the worst games on the TurboGrafX-16. It deserves that reputation. But the way it handles damage is unique for the genre. It's the only shmup I know of where you have regenerating health. This only happens when you're not shooting, a mechanic that theoretically could lead to interesting choices like "should I take a risk and keep going for score even though my health is low?" or "Is it worth waiting, or would it actually be safer to take that boss out as fast as possible?" But it doesn't work great here, as you're just constantly bombarded by enemies moving in sin wave patterns, and it's hard to actually avoid them for long. And it's not communicated as well as you'd hope: you don't have a health bar, with your health instead being shown by the color of your fish's eye, and what causes it to recharge isn't obvious just by playing the game. There's one old guide out there where the author thought you healed by mashing the start button (which I guess technically works, since you'd probably take your hand off of the fire button to do that).

Still, ever since I played this, I've been wondering what we'd get if a more competent developer made a shmup with a health mechanic like this. If there's one out there that I missed, let me know.

This giant thing is the Power Console, a hyped add on for the failed SuperGrafX console, which was actually supposed to slide into this unwieldy thing (the console is what's sticking out the back). Why the fuck they thought anyone at all would want to have a controller that forced you to basically put the console on your lap in 1990, I don't know. You might think "Oh, with all of those features, it must have had to hook up to the expansion port, and that's why they did that," but no, it just hooked up to the one controller port on the console. There is literally no reason for this to not have just used a regular ass controller cord. Between that, the specialized flight yoke, the throttle, the big number pad, the dial, and the LCD and LED readouts, I can't see many games ever making much meaningful use of this monstrosity. Certainly not enough to justify the 60,000 yen suggested retail price. But this thing is so over the top and ridiculous I'm wondering if the point was more to get the press talking with a prototype than to actually release a product. Either way, I feel like you won't forget this once you spend a minute thinking about it, and I'd love for someone to find a functional prototype.

These controllers were primarily made for Japanese PCs, but there was an adapter to use them on the PC Engine. The former is wider than most flight sticks, but isn't that strange a design overall, though it does let you swap both joysticks. The XE-1AP is bizarre, yet very much ahead of its time. It came out in 1989, but it has two analogue joysticks (though the right one can only move on one axis, though you can rotate it to pick what axis that is), 10 face buttons, and not only is this probably the first controller with shoulder buttons, but it has four of them. These are both compatible with a grand total of five PC Engine games:

Afterburner II
Forgotten Worlds¹
Operation Wolf
Out Run
Thunder Blade

So the Power Console mentioned above was originally due out in spring of 1990, and four of those games were released in the latter half of 1990, with Forgotten Worlds being the only outlier with a 1992 release. The Power Console appears to have all the functions of these already released controllers, and I'm wondering if they based it on the same underlying standard. If so, it wouldn't surprise me if the original intent of those four 1990 games was to be compatible with that add on, and it just worked out that adding that feature also brought compatibility with these controllers.

One last note: that second controller, the XE-1AP, was also compatible with the Sega Megadrive/Genesis without an adapter, and not only are there a handful of games on that console that use it, but there's three Sega CD games and two 32X games.

1. This one doesn't really have analogue movement, but it lets you use the throttle to rotate your aim.

This giant thing is the Power Console, a hyped add on for the failed SuperGrafX console, which was actually supposed to slide into this unwieldy thing (the console is what's sticking out the back). Why the fuck they thought anyone at all would want to have a controller that forced you to basically put the console on your lap in 1990, I don't know. You might think "Oh, with all of those features, it must have had to hook up to the expansion port, and that's why they did that," but no, it just hooked up to the one controller port on the console. There is literally no reason for this to not have just used a regular ass controller cord. Between that, the specialized flight yoke, the throttle, the big number pad, the dial, and the LCD and LED readouts, I can't see many games ever making much meaningful use of this monstrosity. Certainly not enough to justify the 60,000 yen suggested retail price. But this thing is so over the top and ridiculous I'm wondering if the point was more to get the press talking with a prototype than to actually release a product. Either way, I feel like you won't forget this once you spend a minute thinking about it, and I'd love for someone to find a functional prototype.

Super Albatross was the first sports game ever to come out on a CD-ROM, and it sucks shit. Rather than the usual three button press swing mechanic, you hold down the button and release, with more power the longer you hold it. But it's really unclear how much power you're putting in. And I think it's more accurate if you do release the button rather than just keeping it held down, but the feedback is so bad that I honestly can't tell for certain. In story mode, you instantly game over if you fall behind one hole, though it at least does let you continue at the beginning of the match with your last opponent. But due to the awkward, imprecise gameplay, winning usually means lucking out and getting a match where the CPU gets caught in a tree for a few swings.

But it's not all misery. If you're playing this, you're playing it for that story mode. The fully voiced anime cut scenes of the over the top and nonsensical plot are just a delight. It's a good thing there's a cheat code to just watch them so that you don't have to put up with everything else on the disk.