Skip navigation.

#

#

### Tongueman's Logic Demo [NEC TurboGrafx/PC Engine]

#### http://disgruntleddesigner.com/chrisc/

#### Previewed By J. Monkman

Tongueman's Logic Demo is a promising puzzle game coded for the PC-Engine/NEC Turbografx-16 game system by Chris Covell. The game is in essence a remake of Mario's Picross, in which the player's goal is to determine logically the tiles to select within a grid by interpreting the given numerical clues. However, the tiles that the player is tasked with finding aren't randomly selected - they always represent a familiar icon (be it in the shape of an alphabetical character or a popular game sprite), which makes things a little easier once you get started.

It all sounds very dry, but in practice the game is both enjoyable and addictive to play. It's true that Mario's Picross wasn't very popular when released in Western games market, but the fact that in this day and age everyone seems to spend hours playing tedious Sudoku puzzles, Tongueman's Logic Demo has seemingly arrived on the scene at just the right time.

As it stands, Tongueman's Logic Demo is still very much in development - the number of levels is quite limited and there's currently no audio (contrary to what the recent YouTube video of it may lead you to believe). Nonetheless, the production quality is very slick and professional, featuring some excellent old-school demo effects built into the game and an easy to follow series of tutorial levels.

However, aside from the lack of audio (and Chris has advised that there's currently work underway to port a module tracker across to the PCE) the only problem with the game isn't actually with the preview itself, but with the currently available emulators. Unfortunately, most of the PCE emulators (including commercially available ones) are unable to correctly emulate the screen resolution of the machine, meaning that eight rows of pixels are missing from the top and bottom of the display. So although the game runs perfectly on real hardware, some of the larger puzzles are rendered unplayable through emulation because you cannot physically see two rows of tiles (without resorting to scaling or scrolling the view window via the in-game settings screen).

The main concern I have is that as there aren't a huge number of PCE owners out there with flash carts, the majority of people will rely on emulation to play Chris' excellent game. Ideally, the best solution would be for the emulator development teams to update their work - but unfortunately I can't see that happing in the near future. On the other hand, Chris could compensate for this by extending or changing the screen layout so that the 'missing' pixel rows don't contain game tiles - which would understandably a pain in the arse for him to implement, but it would make the game's larger puzzles accessible to a wider audience.

Anyway, I don't mean to rant. In conclusion, Tongueman's Logic Demo is a fantastic game and Chris gets serious RGCD bonus points for choosing such a relatively unsupported games console to develop for. The WIP screenshots on his website are looking very promising and this is definitely a release with massive potential.