The Best of X68000 Cover-Art - Part 1

The X68000 has long been a system that has interested me. As well as looking cool, it hosts some great games including some famously-awesome arcade conversions. I would like to cover it more here but, like most Japanese home micros, it's a pain in the arse to emulate and it's certainly not a realistic system to buy. Due to the high cost of the actual system as well as most games for it, and no doubt for numerous other reasons, it's not one that's popular with collectors, at least in this hemisphere. It doesn't seem to get mentioned much at all really, from what I've seen. As a result of all this, not only have I not played many games for it, but I haven't even seen many of the physical games, even online, so I found myself wondering what the cover-art was like for them. After a little effort, I have found some cover scans and have taken it upon myself to choose the most eye-catching ones! Here is the first of what will probably be four posts on the subject...

38 Man Kilo No Kokuu...

Air Combat...

Exploring the Sharp X68000 - Part 2

Crikey, things have been pretty busy here in RKS Land of late - regular readers may have noticed that the number of posts here has slowed down somewhat. I blame work for making me all stressed and not in the right mood to delve into the world of retro games as often!

One victim of this whole thing has been my X68000 feature, the first part of which was all the way back in March now, which looked at the legendary ability of Sharp's imposing system to cope with conversions of arcade games of the day. It turned out to be more than adept at this, as was already widely known of course, but it's always nice to see for yourself!

Something the X68k is less celebrated for, however, is the quality (or indeed the existence at all) of games which are exclusive to the system, or at least found on very few other formats. Having once again sought the advice of jolly helpful Retro Gamer forum buddy, Oli, I find myself armed with the names of some such titles. Here are the results:

Aquales (1991)

Many X68k games are a mystery to me (titles exclusive to the format, at least) but I was sure I knew at least something about this one. Of course, it turned out I was wrong, but what I discovered was certainly no disappointment! Aquales, you see, places you in command of one of those big mecha things the Japanese love so much. It's not the meanest-looking one of all-time but it's pretty agile as it can shoot a variety of weapons with one arm while the other is equipped with a grapple which can be used to swing around the multi-tiered stages which look gorgeous for the most part - filled with huge sprites, super-parallax scrolling, and all manner of special effects. The music is also fantastic which makes exploring the large, superbly-designed stages a pleasure in spite of a slightly inconsistent difficulty level.

Exploring the Sharp X68000 - Part 1

Sometimes it really is amazing to think of the differences between the Japanese game market and that of the rest of the world. There is of course some tremendous localisation of games, that happens all the time. There's also plenty of Japanese games that never even see the light of day elsewhere (and vice versa to a far-lesser-extent), but how about whole systems? Us European gamers missed out on NEC's amazing PC Engine console but it wasn't restricted to Japan - lucky American gamers also got a redesigned version of the console to which they gave a lukewarm reception. There was, however, a system which was not only released solely in Japan but which was powerful, successful, and jam-packed with quality games, and it would come to be the envy of the rest of us.

Only those of us who actually knew about it, that is. I was already well aware of the splendid Motorola 68000 processor - it was at the heart of my beloved MegaDrive after all - I didn't personally discover the existence of any system actually named after it until many years later and I bought nearly all the games magazines at the time so it must've received practically no coverage. Looking back, this was really strange - even obscure systems like the Sam Coupe and Konix Multisystem commanded many pages of magazines prior to their launch (or not, in the case of the latter). I've therefore had to do a bit of research to find out the secrets of Sharp's fancy computer system. I knew of an early 8-bit micro of theirs known as the X1 and the X68000 is apparently the successor to this quirky machine.

Thunder Force Series - Part 4

Thunder Force 2 (1988)
By: Techno Soft  Genre: Shooting   Players: 1  Difficulty: Medium-Hard
Featured Version: Sharp X68000   First Day Score: 30,710
Also Available For: Sega MegaDrive / Genesis

My quest to uncover the origins of the much-loved Thunder Force series has led me to some interesting systems. The next? The Sharp X68000. After having finally used one of these fabled machines, albeit under emulation, I'm unable to decide if Sharp were geniuses or idiots. For the X68000 is apparently a system of formidable power and impressive abilities. So how did they manage to keep it from everyone outside Japan? During the course of its life it was famous for the standard of its arcade conversions, but there were a few original games released on it too, and among them was Thunder Force 2. Contrary to popular belief, this was also the first system to see it too.