Quote Originally Posted by Steve W View Post
I think that the Turbo was fully capable of competing fairly well with the Genesis in terms of power, but a lot of the games released didn't show what it could do. There was the issue of the cover art on the games, which notoriously sucked and didn't make people want to get the system. I'm guessing that they only brought over games that had virtually no Japanese in them for convenience, if they had only licensed some better games from other publishers and some translators to rewrite the text rather than waiting for someone like Working Designs to do it, they could have really competed in the marketplace. I just got a PC Engine and I've been ordering a few random games for it from Japanese websites based solely on the cover art. Some are pretty cool looking, like Out Live (high-tech dungeon crawler in a space station) but would need translation to make any sense of it. Is translating Kanji to English so difficult that they couldn't hire a small staff to enable them to bring the best games over rather than the easiest?
But was releasing a bunch of niche titles really a way to mass market success? While you and I and some other more dedicated gamers may have loved obscure Japanese RPGs or quirky action games, I just don't think the market was there for them in the early 90s in the US. It's only been in the last ten years or so that mainstream gamers have been supporting more niche titles and part of that is just that the number of gamers has increased and so a company like Atlus or NIS or Aksys can sell 30K - 50K copies of a game and still make money.