
	Platform TurboGrafx-16 Genre Action Publisher Victor Developer Game Arts Released 1993
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Veigues Tactical Gladiator

From the first time I saw this game in a magazine, I simply knew I had to play it. The game had giant robots, and better still it didn’t look like absolute crap compared to similarly themed games to hit the consoles. Seeing the game come to North America had me completely dumbfounded, since seemingly 99.9% of the time any halfway decent mech games for consoles back in the early 1990s could only be found in Japan. Once it was confirmed that Veigues was coming to this continent I was ecstatic.

For some strange reason, during the early years of the TurboGrafx-16’s life, before the Genesis and SNES had firmly established themselves as the two juggernauts of the 16-bit era, it was very easy to find TG-16 games in Vancouver. You could walk into just about any major game shop and see a wall with a few dozen games for the console on it. Unfortunately these walls were largely littered with the likes of Legendary Axe, Ninja Spirits, and the “TV Sports” series which were great in their own right, but not what I was looking for. Hunting down Veigues was a little bit tougher, but eventually I got my mitts on a copy and took it home.

While the action itself made for a fairly straightforward action gaming experience, the main draw for me when I learned about Veigues was how players could customize their mech so much. Depending on how well one performed on a level, they would get a certain amount of points that could be used to level up various

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systems on their mech. There would be only so many points to go around, so players would have to pick certain areas to specialize in because the chances of collecting enough points to max out everything was slim and none. Of course, this may not seem like a big deal today, hell, this sort of customization is expected from a game these days, but players were able to do this in a nice little console game 15 years ago, and that was pretty damn neat at the time, especially for a 13-year-old Mr. Nash.

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But while all of this mechanized tweaking was fun, the game itself wasn’t exactly nirvana. The players’ on-screen robot was slow and clunky, guaranteeing that it would walk into a lot of enemy fire, wearing down its shields good and quick, and trying to shoot at the bad guys was incredibly sluggish. At the time I was playing Veigues, I remember trying to convince myself that it was all part of the realism of the experience. After all, giant robots must weight an awful lot, and because of this it would stand to reason that these brutes would be far from nimble. It was only months later that I finally came to terms with the fact that the game really wasn’t all that great overall.

Nonetheless, there was a decent assortment of enemies to fight, some nifty bosses, and the whole thing did feel a little bit like one was playing through an anime. One nifty thing that would happen in the game is that once your robot’s shields failed, it would slowly start losing systems as it took more damage. Over time, players would see the mech lose its arms, its head would be all but obliterated, and eventually the whole thing would just explode.

Veigues is one of those games that reminds me that sometimes it’s the memory of a classic game that is far more enjoyable than the title itself. It wasn’t the best of games, but nor was it the worst. Yet I occasionally find myself thinking about it, and then I realize I’m reminiscing more about reading the magazine articles about the game than I am about actually playing the thing.

Mr. Nash

(May 28, 2005)