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Comment by nope96 | Hacker News Reader

The TurboGrafx and the Sega Master System were both hurt by terrible, terrible package artwork.

I was googling some examples but I see someone else has already written an interesting article on this very topic - http://timewarpgamer.com/features/tg16_box_art_disparity.htm...

Why didn't they just use the Japanese artwork? As a kid, the TG-16 looked amateurish to me because of the box art.

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I'd like to know this myself.

Sega of America was really tiny at the time. I wonder if they just didn't have the resources to do the little bit of localization that would have been needed to reuse the Japanese box art. So maybe somebody just got their cousin who could kinda draw to sketch a few things on grid paper, and boom, done.

The reason was most likely because they justified their existence (and funding from the parent company) by saying there was a need to adapt the artwork to the tastes of the local market. That may or may not have been true. The reality, however, was that a lot of the artists they contracted with had tight deadlines and were not well-informed about the games they were making cover art for.

There was an interview somewhere with lots of the street fighter 2 team, including marketers in America, the snes Japanese box art is really cool the USA and euro is awful. They felt that the manga style jap art work would put USA kids off. These days kids are used to manga style art, back then they wouldn't have been. I'm assuming similar reasons apply to pc engine and master system

I used to scour the list of screenshots on the various boxes, and the ones that came on the back of those VHS size game boxes, the plastic ones you could cut onions with. That is how I found out about Vectorman, a game which to this day, I still wonder who picked the golden cartridge that was the winner of that contest they had where you had to beat the game to see if you got the right cartridge. Golden Axe and I think Altered Beast were also games I found this way.

I have a Turbo Graphics and had the Turbo Express Portable (blew it out with a variable voltage adapter accidentally set too high... Still have the TV tuner though). I blame the quality of games themselves, not the art work.

Aside from the slight novelty of Bonks Adventure or hype of R-type, the games we played on the TG16 were pretty generic platformers, side scrollers, shooters or adventure games. They just didn't have the library to compete with the NES. Walking down the video game aisle of Toys R Us you'd see 20 TG16 games and what felt like 100 NES games. I have no memory of great game play from the TG16 and I don't even think we tried beating Bonks adventure, let alone care about Keith Courage, Splatterhouse or a lame racing game, Monaco something I think. Maybe it had good games, but we never crossed paths with them.

If you didn't like shmups, it was not the right system for you, and the shmups were very close to their arcade counterparts too. There were still some great games though, off the top of my head, Splatterhouse, Devil's Crush, Neutopia 2, Ys, Cadash (which was better than the Genesis port!). Most of the classics weren't brought over from Japan, though (and you couldn't play them on an American system).

The TurboExpress was really ahead of its time. In the same era when Nintendo and Sega had portable consoles that played smaller, less detailed games built just for their portable systems, NEC's handheld could play the same full-sized games as its home console. And anecdotally, it wasn't much more of a battery eater than the Game Gear.

The express was an awesome little system and the fact that it played the same games as the console was a great idea. The TV tuner really enhanced it and featured two 3.5mm jacks: external antenna and AV input. You could hook a VCR, cable box or other console to your turbo express and use it as a tiny video monitor. I distinctly remember hooking my NES to it and playing SMB 3 for a few hours while my parents watched a movie on TV.

Agree. There was almost no RPG's or puzzle games.

However - the Japanese library was significantly larger. I would recommend buying an everdrive or similar which supports Japanese ROM's and exploring that catalog. The Japanese catalog is massive.

Welcome to marketing... on the one hand you do need local offices to get a hand on distribution etc, on the other somebody shows up to work and tells you that magical girls as the theme of a puzzle game in America is no good so now you're putting Yoshi in.

I think localization work tends to be a full package deal (because sometimes it _is_ a good idea to tweak stuff) but it means you're up to the nuances of whatever team got built up. Especially given that the late 80s were all about trying to not end up like Atari & co.

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