May Day! May Day! Is Anyone Out There? Playing Ordyne for the first time on TurboGrafx-16

Listen closely. There isn't much time.

The latest game in my TurboGrafx journey is Ordyne.

Ordyne is an arcade shmup developed and published by Namco (of Ridge Racer and Tekken fame). It was first released in arcades in 1988, but only in Japan.

Ordyne was ported and released on the TurboGrafx-16 in February 1990.

Of course, anyone familiar with the TurboGrafx knows that it has a vast library of high-quality shmup games, many of them being practically-perfect arcade ports.

From an arcade port perspective, Ordyne follows in this illustrious tradition, and delivers another quality shmup to the TurboGrafx library. 

Like many TurboGrafx games, the graphics are colorful and well animated, there are a lot of enemies and bullets filling the screen with action, and there are several large boss characters that try to put an end to your quest. 

Ordyne is mostly similar to other shmups, but instead of collecting power-ups directly, you collect floating balloons of money which can be used to purchase temporary power-ups, ranging from different kinds of bullets to speeding up your ship to extra lives and more. It adds a different dimension to the gameplay, and can even make you want to forego a power-up to save money for a more powerful one later on.

Other than that, most of the gameplay is very similar to other side scrolling shmups, but that's not a bad thing. Ordyne looks great, controls well, and has boppin' tunes that keep the action moving along. 

Ordyne can be played by two players simultaneously, and even though I wasn't able to try it out like that, I can imagine it would be a lot of fun with a buddy.

And like a lot of shmups, Ordyne has large well-animated bosses that try and put an end to your journey. The first two are pretty easy, but the third one took me quite a few tries to defeat.

The first boss is a large ship that flies by you a few times during the first level (and can kill you if you run into it accidentally), and the second boss is a giant fire turtle that looks very cool.

You can see some of my gameplay in the YouTube video below:

Back in the days of the Wii, there were several TurboGrafx-16 games released on the Wii's Virtual Console as downloadable games, and Ordyne was one of them. As a result, IGN reviewed Ordyne in 2007, and you can still read their review today, courtesy of the Wayback Machine.

IGN gave Ordyne a 7 out of 10.

Overall, I enjoyed my time playing Ordyne, and it is certainly another solid shooter in the TurboGrafx library. While I may prefer other titles like Blazing Lazers, Ordyne is certainly fun to play, and I could see playing it from time to time.

Now that I've played Ordyne, the next game I'll be playing on my TurboGrafx journey is...

Now, of course I've played several versions of Space Harrier before, including the original arcade and Genesis versions, but I've never played the TurboGrafx-16 version before. I'm excited to see how it compares. I may need to go back and replay a few other versions for comparison.

Until next time...

(Oh! I almost forgot. If you want to see what some of arcade version's gameplay looks like, you can check out my video below)