Well, I went to the game store and dropped 3,000 yen on five issues of PCE Fan. I got one from each year, 1992 to 1996. It is sooo much better to be able to hold an actual magazine than it is to flip through a PDF file on my tiny-ass laptop (although I am nonetheless grateful for PDFs of mags).
From July 1994:
Pages 16, 17
The PC-FX is previewed at a special event, which is later revealed as a developers conference. It was on May 5th, 1994, exclusively for the PCE, and that's where they announced the FX system and price. They reiterate that the system will have a fax machine adapter. Additionally, there is a neat little picture of a Duo-RX hooked up to a PC-98 as a CD drive.
Interesting point - They not only say that the PC-FX will have a similar cable to connect to a PC-98, but that PC-FX will cost as much as a typical 2X CD Drive, or about 50,000 yen, so the cross compatibility is a major selling point. This was heavily stressed at the event.
They even mention a PC-98 with an FX built into it as being in consideration, foreshadowing the PCFXGA.
Actually, it's not the PC-FX yet. It's just being called the FX. The specs appear locked in, though.
18
Battle Heat is previewed. They stress both the animation and the changing perspectives in the battles. However, they say that it's difficult to judge how to react since only one character can be on the screen at once most of the time. They say it's "undergoing revision".
The unreleased FX Fighter is previewed. Lest anyone be confused, this is also an FMV game. They talk about how it uses a crazy-high number of polygons everywhere so that you never see any jagged edges.
They even talk about how the FX can display polygons well thanks to its MJPEG chip, and how it doesn't even tax the CPU to do it. Yes, they are literally trying to say that streamed, prerendered FMV is competitive with real time polygons.
Interesting: They are already saying that they may not release FX Fighter. Apparently it takes so long to output the prerendered footage that development is very slow.
At the bottom, you can see comments about the hardware/software.
On Battle Heat:
1. Girl says the access times are low and the animation is smooth. But she wonders why the first thing they use that for is VS fighter. A digital comic would be better. I agree.
2. Guy says it feels like an old Laserdisc game.
3. Next guy says 30FPS video is awesome and better than the competition can hope for, but he's worried about having to use the internal sound chip for music during playback.
On FX Fighter
1. Girl says "Oh, so it can do polygons? Um, they don't seem like real polygons". Also, she says that FX Fighter is basically unplayable at the moment.
2. Guy says he thinks the 3D looks great, but he wonders if there will be a game that can play like Virtua Fighter.
3. Next guy says they could do 3D if they added a processor.
20
Team Innocent is basically still in the beginning phase of development and is unplayable.
21
Hello Saturn and Playstation! The competition is introduced on this page.
Interesting: This makes the 3rd or 4th time I've seen the Saturn referenced in Japanese publications as 64-bit because of its two 32-bit CPUs. Goes to show you how dumb the whole bit thing is.
Interesting that the Saturn is silver here. My eyes aren't playing tricks on me; they even say that it's silver.
The Playstation is touted as having 360k polys per second and being easy to make 3D games on. Also, they talk about how the system already has 164 companies signed on as third parties. That has to be a little inflated, but still, there's a list of games on the side slated to come out on the system, which I'm sure would be interesting to Playstation fans.
22
Tokyo Toy Show 94.
So, the FX debuted to the public at the Tokyo Toy Show on June 4th and 5th.
They keep advertising the Duo-RX as a budget version of the Duo-R
More to come...
