Title: Telenet Shooting Collection
System: Nintendo Switch (eShop)
Price: $44.99
Release Date: 09/21/2023/

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Prelude

In this collection of four Telenet shooting games, we get to see some of their output from both the PC Engine and Mega Drive! And some of the usual bonuses (and issues) that entail with these D4E sets. I decided to go back to do this one to prep for the second collection, which Japan managed to get a little while ago. There’s good reason I held off on this one despite liking most of the games here… in other forms.

Presentation

The routine here is pretty much the same as most of the D4 Enterprise Edia sets. You have a pretty good song as the menu theme (the Title theme from Avenger), the four games to pick from on the game select screen, and fully scanned manuals for all four titles, with english translations of the necessary pages available for you to read. There’s also the usual cutscene viewer/music player, despite most games in this collection barely having any cutscenes to speak of. As a nifty bonus, both Avenger and Psychic Storm offer subtitled VHS rips of their promotional videos in the cutscene viewer.

Unfortunately, the emulation here is all over the place and follows in the same messy footsteps that the second Valis collection had. Two of the four games here are Genesis titles, and just like in Valis/SD Valis in that set, both wildly vary with their audio emulation. Granada has broken sound channels that completely butcher several songs in the soundtrack along with multiple sound effects, making the game sound like a hot mess, and to make matters worse, loading a save state during the middle of a song will make that song lose even more sound channels, as demonstrated below.

Yeah, that is just unacceptable and somehow makes the already terrible genesis emulation from Valis Collection II even worse. The sound effects of Granada had a great punch to them, and this bad audio emulation makes them utterly insufferable to the point the whole experience is tainted as a result of this.

Gaiares doesn’t fare that much better, with the music sounding a lot closer to the original soundtrack than Granada does, but the sound effects still suffer from various audio channel issues, with the WOZ’s capture noise sounding more like a squelch than the normal sound effect. It still sounds piss-poor compared to proper Genesis emulation, but at least I could see newer players tolerating this game via this set, especially since loading a state doesn’t seem to kill more sound channels.

Thankfully, the two PC Engine games sound just like they should, although unfortunately, that doesn’t mean all that much in this set. Avenger might just have the most generic as generic can be OST I’ve heard from the PC Engine CD, and that title theme you hear on the compilation menu is the best song of the entire game. The tracks aren’t bad by any means, just utterly generic and dull and you can tell they came from the same team as PC Engine Valis III, only without the memorable tunes that game had. The sound effects are also pretty dull, and don’t pack the punch they should.

Psychic Storm is a vast improvement in the sound department, with some actual energetic tunes to listen to here and pretty cool sound effects, but the overall OST still isn’t as great as some of Telenet’s other games. Still, of the four titles in the set, Psychic Storm has the best presentation.

Gameplay

The usual Edia compilation setup is here, so we just have the four games and their scanned materials to mess around with. Each game also has rewind and save states available, which come in handy for the tougher games.

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Granada (Genesis)- A tank based shooter, ported from the Sharp X68000 computer. In this game, you take control of the tank Granada as you set out to destroy a variety of enemies and the bosses on each level. You have a normal rapid shot, a directional lock, and a power show at your disposal, while you go around to hunt down the target enemies on your map.

Each stage has a certain amount of enemies to take down, and they’re indicated on your minimap as red dots. The controls are pretty tight, and the shooting is pretty solid, so hunting down and taking out the enemies is quite a lot of fun. Upon defeating the last normal enemy in a stage, the boss will be ready for you to take on, mandating that you put real good work in avoiding its shots in order to take it down with as little damage as possible.

All in all, a pretty darn good action game, and one of my favorite from Telenet’s Genesis catalog, even if it doesn’t hold a candle to the Sharp X86000 original. Even with some frustrating moments such as instant death pits that can really spike up the difficulty, this one is quite a lot of fun to play, which is why unfortunately, the abysmal audio emulation here really sours the experience big time. Part of the joy of Granada comes from its excellent soundtrack, and having it absolutely butchered even beyond what the Genesis downgrade did to it really makes it insufferable to listen to. Sure, you still have a responsive game, but when it lacks so many sound channels, and never ever got a patch to address that, is all that worthwhile to play on Switch? I say no, no it does not.

Avenger (PC Engine CD)- In this helicopter themed shooting game, you take control of the Avenger helicopter as you set out to recover a dangerous weapon from an opposing empire. Outside of the opening and ending, there really isn’t much plot here.

You fire a normal shot with one of the two main buttons, and drop a screen clearing bomb with the other. Holding them together or using the mapped shortcut button will lock your helicopter’s direction, allowing you to angle your shots. Before each stage, you can change up your weaponry for a bit of variety, with newer weapons unlocking the further in you go, and there are a few branching paths to take advantage of, too.

Unfortunately, Avenger has one fatal flaw; the game is incredibly boring. Generic CD music can’t save this one, and while the variety of weapons you get are neat to use, the level designs are just dull. Nothing really stands out, enemy placement feels a bit sloppy, and some of the bosses feel like abrupt difficulty spikes after otherwise generic levels. Outside of the title screen theme, I can’t even remember all that much from this game after finishing it, which says an awful lot compared to the other three games in this set. Easily the worst of the bunch by far, but at least it isn’t offensively bad, just really, really boring.

Gaiares (Genesis)– A horizontal shooter with a really cool gimmick. Using the power of the TOZ, you can shoot it out and copy enemy shots in order to use them as your own! Thus, you have a huge variety of weapons, all dependent on what sort of foes you stumble upon in each stage. Add in some pretty decent scoring, solid level designs and really fun bosses, and you have yourselves what should be the best shooter on the collection.

I say should, since you guessed it, audio butchering is back again. The TOZ sounds too much like it’s squelching anytime you fire it, and while the music doesn’t suffer as bad as Granada’s, (meaning if you’ve never heard the game on original hardware before, you might think it’s normal enough) this is still a miserable way to play this one. Despite that though, I found myself playing through more stages in this version than I’d like to otherwise admit, since Gaiares is still a great game with a cool gimmick that stands as one of the Genesis’s best shooters for good reason. It just is such a goddamn shame that the audio emulation here is utterly unacceptable, and tanks what should otherwise be an easy recommendation.

If they bothered to fix the audio emulation in this collection after several years, i’d even be imploring you to buy this standalone because Gaiares is just that good of a video game. Alas, with how it sounds, I must implore you to find other places to play this one.

Psychic Storm (PC Engine Super CD)- We’re back to the system that has good sound emulation, with Psychic Storm, an interesting shooter developed by Alfa System. In this game the main gimmick is each character has their own unique ship, with them being able to transform into a super powered form using the Psychic Storm phenomena.

Each ship has their own weaponry and all have their own unique advantages/disadvantages to make use of, and the cool thing is you can even change them between stages without having to continue, letting you experiment with a new one every stage, if you so wish. You can even play this in local co-op, which is quite a lot of fun. Of course, using the Psychic Storm form helps for dealing with tougher enemies or fighting the bosses, which can be a little tricky when trying to beat them without it.

Since you can’t outright die in the transformed form, only depower when hit enough times, you can arguably cheese the entire game by just timing your transformations right, and in co-op the game gets even easier. Still, it does lead to this being a gentler shooter, while not being braindead boring like Avenger was. Some pretty good music helps to keep this one a pretty fun time overall.

However, the one big flaw that keeps this game from being a bigger favorite of mine comes from the utter lack of score. There are no points, at all. Thus, you’re playing this for completion and with how easy the game is already, this is just a one and done experience, maybe a two and done if you want to play it in co-op with someone. Alfa System did pretty solid work here, and Psychic Storm ended up being my favorite of the set due to being perfectly emulated along with being the one PC Engine game here that didn’t suck, but don’t expect to be sticking around with this one for all that long.

Conclusion

Ultimately, I found Telenet Shooting Collection to be a very weak set of games, which is a big shame since three out of four of them are pretty great and should be an easy recommendation. Sadly, when both of the Mega Drive games suffer from atrocious audio emulation issues that’ll likely never get fixed, the usual asking price for this compilation is just outright insulting.

You’re seriously better off just buying Psychic Storm by itself from the eShop rather than dealing with the entire collection, even if you happen to get it on discount. Avenger is incredibly forgettable, Granada’s audio is butchered to the point of being outright depressing, and Gaiares doesn’t fare that much better, leaving Psychic Storm as the lone solid game that’s still ultimately just OK compared to the Mega Drive titles thanks to its lack of a scoring system.

But when the PC Engine was the system to have nailed the emulation here, and the best games on this collection were shipped out in such a sorry, sad state, not even some cool extras can save this collection. Truly a sad little set, and I really hope the second collection does things much better.

I give Telenet Shooting Collection a 4 out of 10.