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NEC TG-16/TE/TurboDuo => TG-16/TE/TurboDuo Discussion => Topic started by: galam on April 01, 2012, 12:16:01 PM
Title: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: galam on April 01, 2012, 12:16:01 PM
Does anybody else think that a big mistake was made when the Duo launched with all the killer apps? To give away Bonk 1 and 2, GOT, Y's, a chip (in my case Ninja Spirit), and pre-load Bomberman really was a nail in the coffin. One of those games, (my vote would be GOT) alone could have been packed in, but all those was just crazy. It's hard to understand what the purpose of the Duo was in the first place. Same tech as 4 years prior, the brand bleeding cash, and still nothing invested in localizing the games which I think ultimately posed too wide of a gap for the spoon fed "radical" generation of kids. Also, I HATE the damn coupon book. Too many turbo boxes hanging around out there with a cut out UPC. [-X
What else do you think accelerated the Duo's demise?
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: SignOfZeta on April 01, 2012, 01:23:15 PM
The SNES and Genesis cost $200 less. That's pretty much all that mattered.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: MrFlutterPie on April 01, 2012, 01:24:49 PM
Not to mention they were true 16 bit systems with a large 3rd party support.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: nectarsis on April 01, 2012, 01:26:45 PM
Not to mention they were true 16 bit systems with a large 3rd party support.
The former means nothing. The latter is important.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: motdelbourt on April 01, 2012, 03:52:08 PM
I think the Duo was actually a good idea. It eliminated any ambiguity about whether a game would work with whatever system you have, and eliminated the need to buy anything else, at least until the Arcade Card came out. It was made by and for Japan, where the PCE was successful and worth developing for. For America, it's fair to say they needn't have bothered releasing it, but at least they gave it a shot. They could have tried selling the hardware at a loss for a lot cheaper, and make it back on those games, but most of the pack in games were like "Greatest Hits" at that point, so they already made their money on those. With so many pack ins, you do have to wonder if it slowed software sales.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: kazekirifx on April 01, 2012, 07:17:53 PM
Although it was probably doomed from the beginning, and they did some things wrong, I think TTi also did some things right when releasing the Duo too.
Generally the rebranding was good. Look at the packaging for the Turbo Duo vs. the TG16. The slick grey and black box of the Duo was a huge improvement over those two smiling 80's dudes on the TG16. The design of the system itself looked less like a toy than the TG16 did too. As motdelbourt pointed out, the system being able to play all available software released the confusion to the uninitiated consumer. Having built-in AV and back-up support was obviously good (though another controller port couldn't have hurt either).
The mascot change to Zonk was intended to be more 'badass' looking than Bonk, but I think overall this wasn't such a good idea. Both Sega and Nintendo had highly recognizable mascots by that point, so TTi switching at that point felt a little bit like a cop out. Zonk, a relative of Bonk, looked similar, but the similarity to Bonk made him seem all the more confusing to me. "Is Bonk still the mascot, or is this similar-looking character now replacing him?" As an early teenager at the time, I honestly didn't know what was going on. By changing the mascot, they wasted any small brand recognition they had managed to build up with Bonk up to that point. Bonk wasn't exactly a household name known even to parents like Mario and Sonic was, but he was pretty well recognized by gamers - maybe more so than the hardware was. His character was a unique and recognizable concept that I'd always thought Hudson, NEC, and TTi could have taken more advantage of.
I think I will play devil's advocate and say that giving away so many good games as pack-ins was a GOOD idea. What TTi needed to accomplish more than anything was to expand the user base for their hardware. That's why they included such an enticing array of quality games with the system - to get people to just buy it in the first place. They knew that if they couldn't do that, they were certainly even more doomed than they already were. And, by showing the customers what their new system was really capable of from the beginning they instilled an immediate love for the hardware for almost every one who bought one. Just look how many fans are still here on this board today. By contrast, sadly I'm willing to bet there were more than a few who bought a TG16 with only the pack-in game, thought Keith Courage was lame, and neglected or sold the system to focus on Sega or Nintendo's products instead. Personally, my first experience with the Turbo was renting a TG16 with Keith Courage and Blazing Lasers in 1992(?). I thought both games were pretty ho-hum. I already had an SNES at the time, and was unimpressed by the graphics and sound. I love Blazing Lasers now (and Keith Courage is not bad either), but at the time I was uninitiated into the world of shmups, and wasn't exactly blown away. Anyway, I am fortunate that I still decided to give the system another chance soon after.
And, at least not EVERY killer app was included with the Duo. If the Duo customer liked GoT and Bonk, LoT and Bonk 3 were just around the corner (though in quantities much too low in the case of Bonk 3, of course). Obviously, most Turbo fans can list plenty of other non-pack-in titles that would make their list of killer apps too. TTi was also probably hoping that establishing a user base would also lead to plenty more killer apps being produced for the system in the future. Keep in mind that they still didn't know at the time how many more potential killer apps were in the cards for the system thereafter.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: PunkicCyborg on April 01, 2012, 07:57:29 PM
Honestly I like it better being the underdog and obscure. It adds to the allure of the console.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: esteban on April 01, 2012, 08:05:18 PM
I think I will play devil's advocate and say that giving away so many good games as pack-ins was a GOOD idea. What TTi needed to accomplish more than anything was to expand the user base for their hardware. That's why they included such an enticing array of quality games with the system - to get people to just buy it in the first place. They knew that if they couldn't do that, they were certainly even more doomed than they already were. And, by showing the customers what their new system was really capable of from the beginning they instilled an immediate love for the hardware for almost every one who bought one. Just look how many fans are still here on this board today. By contrast, sadly I'm willing to bet there were more than a few who bought a TG16 with only the pack-in game, thought Keith Courage was lame, and neglected or sold the system to focus on Sega or Nintendo's products instead. Personally, my first experience with the Turbo was renting a TG16 with Keith Courage and Blazing Lasers in 1992(?). I thought both games were pretty ho-hum. I already had an SNES at the time, and was unimpressed by the graphics and sound. I love Blazing Lasers now (and Keith Courage is not bad either), but at the time I was uninitiated into the world of shmups, and wasn't exactly blown away. Anyway, I am fortunate that I still decided to give the system another chance soon after.
And, at least not EVERY killer app was included with the Duo. If the Duo customer liked GoT and Bonk, LoT and Bonk 3 were just around the corner (though in quantities much too low in the case of Bonk 3, of course). Obviously, most Turbo fans can list plenty of other non-pack-in titles that would make their list of killer apps too. TTi was also probably hoping that establishing a user base would also lead to plenty more killer apps being produced for the system in the future. Keep in mind that they still didn't know at the time how many more potential killer apps were in the cards for the system thereafter.
Agreed. Including all those great games as a pack-in was brilliant.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: NightWolve on April 01, 2012, 11:55:29 PM
The SNES and Genesis cost $200 less. That's pretty much all that mattered.
What he said.
To attribute its failure in part to "too many pack-in games" is silly... That was a way to make up for the high price relative to the other systems on the market at the time - it was no detriment, it simply just wasn't appealing enough to get past the $299 price tag... I'll use myself for an example: When TTi was shutting down in '93 and running a closeout/clearance sale, selling whatever TurboDuos were left at $99 bucks, I did what I had to do to raise the money and bought one!! Dying system, yes, but 5 games all at $99 bucks, I'm sold! Changed my life, got hooked on Ys Book I&II, went on to fan translate Ys IV:DOY and the PC versions of the series, etc. ;) But yeah, every time I saw $299 or $399 back when the CD unit came out, I'd cringe... Even as someone who had loyalty to NEC (the result of winning a TurboGrafx-16 with Keith Courage and Bloody Wolf thanks to a Chicago Sun Times contest in 1990), who had done a lot of HuCard renting, who was very interested in seeing what the CD format could do after learning about their CD console system (the first), I still, even with that history, wasn't willing to spend up to $299 - I couldn't... They should've taken the hit on hardware as was suggested.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: DragonmasterDan on April 02, 2012, 12:55:26 AM
The six pack-in games was a repsonse to Sega who had priced the original add-on Sega CD at 299.99 and included six pack-in games (A 4 in 1 disc featuring Columns, Revenge of Shinobi, Golden Axe and Streets of Rage, Sol Feace and Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective). I don't think it hurt the Duo at all, if anything it was a nice incentive for people who didn't previously own NEC hardware to pick it up.
Added in edit: As far as what went wrong, the system came out at a time when video games in the United States were still largely regarded as children's toys. And at 300.00 the Duo was triple the price of a SNES or Genesis. The platform had very little domestic third party support, and by 1992 was limited in distribution under TTI compared to when it was run by NEC. It had become relegated to a niche, and there wasn't a large enough audience to keep it afloat in the US.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: Black Tiger on April 02, 2012, 01:07:15 AM
Does anybody else think that a big mistake was made when the Duo launched with all the killer apps? To give away Bonk 1 and 2, GOT, Ys, a chip (in my case Ninja Spirit), and pre-load Bomberman really was a nail in the coffin. One of those games, (my vote would be GOT) alone could have been packed in, but all those was just crazy. It's hard to understand what the purpose of the Duo was in the first place. Same tech as 4 years prior, the brand bleeding cash, and still nothing invested in localizing the games which I think ultimately posed too wide of a gap for the spoon fed "radical" generation of kids. Also, I HATE the damn coupon book. Too many turbo boxes hanging around out there with a cut out UPC. [-X
What else do you think accelerated the Duo's demise?
So are you suggesting that the pack-ins caused the Duo to fly off the shelves and the only problem was a lack of software sales in comparison to the record hardware sales, because there was nothing worth buying after the pack-ins?
But if the packed-in software was as great as you make it out to be, then wouldn't it make people interested in Lords of Thunder, Ys III, Bonk 3, Bomberman '93 and if DE was included, -Dungeon Explorer II?
If the coupons created a nuisance for today's uber collectors, that's fine by me. I never found that it affected the gameplay of the games and I can't see how it discouraged game/hardware sales.
Not to mention they were true 16 bit systems with a large 3rd party support.
Wouldn't their inferior graphics, sound and gameplay make them look that much worse in comparison then?
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: futureman2000 on April 02, 2012, 01:20:15 AM
I only vaguely recall the duo being released, and I was knee-deep in video game magazines back then. I think I remember seeing one on display at Toys R Us, but the fact that I already had a Genesis made a $300 console a no-go. I also remember being confused by it. At the time, the only other console that I knew of that used two kinds of media was my Master System, and I had never even used the card slot on it.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: soop on April 02, 2012, 01:33:39 AM
1) Compare the number of Japanese games to the number of Japanese games. Then the number of games that were made by American software houses. It's gonna be a problem. 2) The system is UGLY. Why they felt the need to change something that totally wasn't broken, I will never understand.
I have no doubt that some people would have bought into, say the Japanese RPGs if translated, maybe enough to give it a small niche, but not enough. And there are some OBVIOUS titles which should have been regionalised but never were, but the lack of American 3rd party support is probably the main problem. Why THAT occurred, is another kettle of fish, which is covered elsewhere (thread: What would YOU do differently)
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: turbokon on April 02, 2012, 03:39:56 AM
I agreed with the price killing it. I remember every time we went to the mall, the first thing we would do was go to EB just to see and hold the turbo duo box. I would fantasize about playing the games because that was all I could afford. We wouldn't even dare asking our parent for it!!! If they would have excluded the packin games, maybe except for one, and drop the price in half, I think it might of have a fighting chance.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: KingDrool on April 02, 2012, 05:30:40 AM
What killed it? It was too late. Period. I think it had less to do with price than it had to do with the fact that the Turbo brand had already lost the race in America. It was a sexy console, it had (then) cutting-edge media, and a killer pack-in deal. But, it wasn't Sega or Nintendo.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: GohanX on April 02, 2012, 05:38:31 AM
I agree with jlued. By the time the Duo came out here, the Turbo was done, and the duo with the packins was kind of like a hail mary that didn't work out. That doesn't mean I wouldn't have bought one if I had $300 at the time, but I was in high school.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: DragonmasterDan on April 02, 2012, 06:16:34 AM
Yep, TTI wasn't swinging for the fences like NEC was.
They realized they were marketing the platform to a niche, while the TG16 was trying to be like the NES and have a system in as many American households as possible. The Duo was really more of a "if you are really into video games, this is the hardcore system for you" product. Not to the degree that the Neo-Geo was, but really... that's a whole different business plan.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: thesteve on April 02, 2012, 07:35:27 AM
i could no more swing the $399 then the $250 for the express the TG16 was only $35 at the time and i bought a few.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: vestcoat on April 02, 2012, 07:44:42 AM
The Duo was: 1) too late, 2) too expensive.
The concept, aesthetics, and pack-ins were brilliant.
The mascot change to Zonk was intended to be more 'badass' looking than Bonk, but I think overall this wasn't such a good idea.
I think I got into this with someone else recently, but Zonk wasn't a mascot change. He looked like Bonk, rhymed with Bonk, was advertised as "Bonk's cousin from the future" or somesuch, and relied on Bonk's name recognition. It was nothing like Sega's changes from Opa Opa to Alex Kidd to Sonic. While Zonk was advertised heavily and featured on the Duo box, TTI never abandoned Bonk - they were busy with two different versions of Bonk 3 and were working on Bonk 4: RPG.
They realized they were marketing the platform to a niche, while the TG16 was trying to be like the NES and have a system in as many American households as possible. The Duo was really more of a "if you are really into video games, this is the hardcore system for you" product. Not to the degree that the Neo-Geo was, but really... that's a whole different business plan.
I disagree. The Duo was very much an attempt to remain competitive in the mainstream 16-bit wars. While the original CD-ROM2 attachment did initially cater to high-end gamers, technology was catching up by 1992, hucards were starting to look dated, and NEC needed their Super CD games to compete with the new SNES and the upcoming Sega CD. Consumers weren't interested in an unpopular, four-year-old system, an attachment, and an upgrade card, so NEC needed a sleek, all-in-one solution. TTI certainly hyped their fancy media and superior audio, but everyone does that - the SNES box brags about its 32k colors and the Genesis plastered "16-bit" across the deck. As for the price, again, $300 was too much, but I can see TTI's reasoning: it played two different media formats, CD players were still expensive, and it wasn't that much more than $200 for a SNES.
i could no more swing the $399 then the $250 for the express
The CD-ROM was $399, the Duo was $299.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: Black Tiger on April 02, 2012, 08:02:27 AM
I don't think that the TurboDuo or the Turbo brand died early or declined prematurely. It plateaued early on and continued on for a total lifespan of about one console generation. The Duo brand was just a continued support of the Turbo fan base. Even if the TurboDuo launched with exclusives of Super Mario, Sonic, SFII, etc, it was never going to shoot up and overtake the Genesis and SNES with a year or two.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: DragonmasterDan on April 02, 2012, 08:36:35 AM
I disagree. The Duo was very much an attempt to remain competitive in the mainstream 16-bit wars. While the original CD-ROM2 attachment did initially cater to high-end gamers, technology was catching up by 1992, hucards were starting to look dated, and NEC needed their Super CD games to compete with the new SNES and the upcoming Sega CD. Consumers weren't interested in an unpopular, four-year-old system, an attachment, and an upgrade card, so NEC needed a sleek, all-in-one solution. TTI certainly hyped their fancy media and superior audio, but everyone does that - the SNES box brags about its 32k colors and the Genesis plastered "16-bit" across the deck. As for the price, again, $300 was too much, but I can see TTI's reasoning: it played two different media formats, CD players were still expensive, and it wasn't that much more than $200 for a SNES.
By Summer 1992 (months before the Duo came out in October 1992) the SNES was no longer 200.00. Both the SNES and Genesis were 99.99 with core sets. Sega dropped Sonic out of the package and offered a Genesis core system for 99.99. Nintendo dropped the second controller and Mario World and countered with a 99.99 SNES shortly thereafter.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: NightWolve on April 02, 2012, 09:44:16 AM
Yeah, I'm pretty sure I bought my SNES for $99 with just Super Mario World. I don't remember ever seeing it for $199.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: DragonmasterDan on April 02, 2012, 09:46:48 AM
Yeah, I'm pretty sure I bought my SNES for $99 with just Super Mario World. I don't remember ever seeing it for $199.
At launch and until June or July of 1992 it was 199.99 with Super Mario World and two controllers. After that they released a core unit with one controller for 99.99 and I believe lowered the price of the Mario World unit.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: vestcoat on April 02, 2012, 10:35:59 AM
By Summer 1992 (months before the Duo came out in October 1992) the SNES was no longer 200.00.
My point is that $299 wasn't that much more than the standard set by the SNES for a new system at launch. (The Sega CD came out right after the Duo and was also $299, without a core console). Most likely, the Duo was fairly expensive to manufacture and TTI thought they could keep their profit margins up and justify the price by including a bunch of pack-ins, coupons, and the trade-in/rebate offer. In hindsight, of course, they crossed the line of affordability and it didn't work, but there's no way TTI was aiming for older or high-end gamers.
TTI was trying to pry kids away from the other 16-bit consoles. Here's proof: (http://i29.photobucket.com/albums/c256/ClarkJames/EPSON009.jpg)
Likewise, all of their software advertising was standard fair. If they were trying to appeal to a niche market in anyway it would have been obvious.
At launch and until June or July of 1992 it was 199.99 with Super Mario World and two controllers. After that they released a core unit with one controller for 99.99 and I believe lowered the price of the Mario World unit.
Correct. Mario World dropped to $130 or $150 or something.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: xelement5x on April 02, 2012, 11:23:04 AM
Was that trade in offer run by TTi? What would they have done with a bunch of SNES and Genny consoles if everyone had started taking advantage of this?
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: futureman2000 on April 02, 2012, 11:25:05 AM
Price points aside, there were no Turbo game rentals available in my area. That alone made buying the console a gamble, even if the price was close to a genesis/ snes.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: NightWolve on April 02, 2012, 12:37:08 PM
A videostore called "Ken's World of Video" in Illinois had most of the HuCard library available for renting. Can't say I ever saw the CDs available for rent anywhere, though...
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: BigusSchmuck on April 02, 2012, 02:23:45 PM
Price had nothing to do with it IMHO, just think not even 3 years later the Playstation 1 came out and it had a $300 dollar price tag and it sold like crazy. Again, as many people have pointed out, if we saw half of the killer apps the Japanese were getting we all would be singing a different tune.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: NightWolve on April 02, 2012, 03:31:38 PM
You can't go that far and say that price had "nothing" to do with it, but bringing up the Playstation is a good point I guess. Of course, I'm the guy that always waits around for the price drops, so I had to sit it out a few years before buying one. At this point, the TurboDuo had achieved underdog status in my eyes and I remember feeling a little jealous/surprised at how easy it was for Sony to just swoop down into the videogame market and become so successful in such a short time having watched the TurboDuo struggle. I believed in the CD format as the future as opposed to expensive carts (so I ditched N64 and stuck with Sony after years of loyalty to NES/SNES especially when I heard that Squaresoft would only develop for Sony), so why didn't the first CD console system do better? Why didn't NEC/TTi get that kind of marketing and 3rd party support that Sony got just as soon as they arrived on the scene? I suppose Sony's brand recognition had a lot to do with it, but this was their first entry into the videogame market and they handled it like experts, all the right moves right out of the batter's box!
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: spenoza on April 02, 2012, 03:59:27 PM
I suppose Sony's brand recognition had a lot to do with it, but this was their first entry into the videogame market and they handled it like experts, all the right moves right out of the batter's box!
They had also worked with Nintendo for a time. Sony's decision to enter the console market followed Nintendo's surprise decision to partner with Philips instead of Sony for a CD add-on (which never materialized). I doubt Sony was working with Nintendo without attempting to learn something from the experience.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: esteban on April 02, 2012, 04:14:59 PM
Was that trade in offer run by TTi? What would they have done with a bunch of SNES and Genny consoles if everyone had started taking advantage of this?
It was a very limited trade-in campaign (promoted via a couple of ads with limited audience).
Here are some of my thoughts (from eons ago): It's Like Getting 50 bucks to have fun (http://archives.tg-16.com/turbo_force_0003.htm#more). I won't repeat myself in this post, even though I'm tempted (http://junk.tg-16.com/images/hany_in_the_sky.png)
This advertisement originally appeared in TurboForce #3 (which had very limited distribution, to, essentially, the Turbo-faithful)).
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: Tatsujin on April 02, 2012, 04:19:05 PM
lol, the old US of A trade in your old used car and get a new one for cheaper sales strategy. I think it didn't quite work as well in the video game segment.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: kazekirifx on April 02, 2012, 04:33:59 PM
I can see why the price would be a limiting factor if comparing to the SNES or Genesis, but why would you compare it to those? I never saw the price as unreasonable. I was a kid at the time, but $300 seemed like the appropriate price to me. At the time, CD drives were still quite expensive to make; and I understood the hardware difference between a cartridge and CD rom system and was willing to pay a lot more for CD-rom technology.
After all, it was cheaper than buying the required TG hardware separately, or buying a Genesis and Sega CD. A combination cartridge/CD-rom unit from Sega had yet to be released, and when it was, the Sega CDX was priced at $399 (high price partly due to the compact size and portable CD player functionality). The CDX pack-in software was Sonic CD, Ecco the Dolphin, and Sega Classics Arcade Collection. JVC had also released a Genesis/Sega CD combo called X'Eye a bit earlier, and this was priced at $499.99 including only one game (Prize Fighter), and encyclopedia and karaoke discs.
Looking back, even taking inflation into consideration, I think the Duo was a steal at $299. And the included software is still the most appealing pack-in of any console ever made. If I had been an adult with a job at the time, I would have bought it on the release date. As a kid, I had to wait until Christmas and chip in my allowance to help Santa pay.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: DragonmasterDan on April 02, 2012, 10:36:04 PM
I can see why the price would be a limiting factor if comparing to the SNES or Genesis, but why would you compare it to those?
You would compare it to those, because those were the primary 16-bit era game consoles. I was reasonably fortunate in that I owned all three platforms, plus eventually a Duo and Sega CD shortly after both of those released. Most kids got A Genesis or A SNES. By the time the Duo was released the core hardware, regardless of what games it came with was triple the price of the core model Genesis and SNES. That was a big problem and greatly limited its appeal to kids who had parents with greater financial resources, teenagers who had jobs and their own money to buy one, and adult hardcore gamers who were at the time a much much smaller segment of the marketplace than today.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: thesteve on April 03, 2012, 05:08:51 AM
the price is definatly what kept me out of DUO, 3DO and NEO at the time. the TG16 was cheap, and much better then is comp
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: KingDrool on April 03, 2012, 05:55:22 AM
To expand upon the "too late" and "too expensive" thoughts, we can also look at it this way: The Duo took one product that nobody was buying (TG16) and combined it with another product nobody was buying (TGCD) and expected people to buy it...for a premium. Yes, it was "only" $100 more than the SNES (at least for a time), but it's still $100 more than the "it" item.
I'm not saying that the Duo wasn't awesome. It was. I had one right after it launched and it's still my favorite system. But I think even TTi had to have known it would be a niche product at best. I think they did a decent job with the resources they had, but there was no way the Duo was going to break out.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: DragonmasterDan on April 03, 2012, 06:09:12 AM
To expand upon the "too late" and "too expensive" thoughts, we can also look at it this way: The Duo took one product that nobody was buying (TG16) and combined it with another product nobody was buying (TGCD) and expected people to buy it...for a premium. Yes, it was "only" $100 more than the SNES (at least for a time), but it's still $100 more than the "it" item.
I think we already established this. By the time the Duo came out, the SNES was 99.99 for a core model. And at most 150.00 for a model bundled with two controllers and Super Mario World. So it was 2 to 3 times as expensive depending on which bundle you bought.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: SignOfZeta on April 03, 2012, 06:50:39 AM
Price had nothing to do with it IMHO, just think not even 3 years later the Playstation 1 came out and it had a $300 dollar price tag and it sold like crazy. Again, as many people have pointed out, if we saw half of the killer apps the Japanese were getting we all would be singing a different tune.
The PCE had no "killer apps" in Japan. What it had was a very diverse library of B grade titles. Unfortunately Americans in the days before FFVII were still very reluctant to read in a video game, and also had not developed the lolicon scene enough to appreciate most of these titles. Example: try selling one of those shitty WWII or Arab killer fps games to people in Saudi Arabia. They just won't want it. Another factor is that the PCE started out strong, but the popularity trickled down as the games got more otaku-based and the hardware improved. In the US the TG-16 was never successful, so asking people to pay more for a derivative of a 3/4 year old machine that nobody gave a shit about to begin with...wasn't going to work. All of those B grade RPGs and sims in Japan worked with each other to solidify a very devoted fan base. The audience got smaller, but it also became way more hardcore. We didn't have that here.
As for price...at the risk of conflicting with several hard core fans' reality distortion field, the Duo wasn't worth the money to most people. Bonk is not as technically impressive as Sonic the Hedgehog. The same can be said for Y's versus Chrono Trigger, Final Lap Twin versus Super Mario Kart, or Neutopia versus Zelda: A Link to the Past. Don't get me wrong, I actually did buy a US Duo in 1992. I loved it. I mainly bought it for the Japanese imports that none of my friends were interested in.
As for the PS being the same price three years later, well, come on. Are you just quoting wikipedia or are you only 20 years old or are you just senile? Don't you remember how much the the PS f*cking AMAZED people back then? "Three years later" was post-polygon. The PS was doing nearly arcade perfect version of stuff like Ridge Racer, which was still a nearly state of the art game and a top earner at a lot of arcades. The PS was the hottest shit on the planet from the time it was launched until the DC came out 5 years later. It was the first polygon-based affordable mainstream console.* You could also buy it at a lot more places. The Duo was never anything like that. You show people the opening for Kabuki Den and they go "wow!". Then they see the game actually begin and they say, "Um...is this a NES? Why is the sprite so f*cking small?" Lords to Thunder blew people's minds, but Ninja Spirit...did not.
$300 for a console you've never seen run in person was a lot. Minimum wage was $5.25/hour then. This was before everyone had a $100 monthly bill for their iPhone and the overriding lust for technology. Hell, people still paid for music back then, that's expensive. Twenty years of inflation ago...$300 meant more to teenagers then.
I love the PCE because its like a NES, but with no flicker, way more color, and endless storage capacity. The Duo was the ultimate 8 bit system, but that's all it was. I love it specifically because of that, but most people don't. People who had been playing Comic Zone, F Zero, Mortal Kombat, etc were not impressed by Exile or Parasol Stars. And its not just the big time games, its the small stuff as well. Wild Guns...Wild Guns is really beautiful. I'm sure somebody can show me an bunch of screen shots and write out some technical stuff about how Wild Guns could easily be done better on TG16, but it doesn't change the fact that it wasn't. Neither was FFVI (or FFIV, for that matter), Out of this World, Yoshi's Island, Virtua Racing, Phantasy Star IV, etc etc. I know you guys don't care about that stuff. That's why we are here. I know the SNES is "gay" or whatever, but that's irrelevant. What matters is that people won't pay twice as much for a system that appears to be half as powerful. They think Wonder Boy is f*cking SHIT.
The CDROM was amazingly underutilized. It might as well have been a 1TD HD since you can only hold one microscopic portion of whats on the CD in memory at any given time and then play songs of the CD, usually really bad songs.
I just don't see how there is any way the Duo could have succeeded in 1992. American's simply weren't into that.
* Shove it up your ass, 3DO fans. Nobody wants your garage sale piece of shit system. The controller sucks and the library is terrible.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: Necromancer on April 03, 2012, 06:59:39 AM
The PCE is nothing but a slight improvement over the NES and its library is entirely second rate, eh? Go f*ck yourself.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: DragonmasterDan on April 03, 2012, 07:19:19 AM
The PCE had no "killer apps" in Japan. What it had was a very diverse library of B grade titles. Unfortunately Americans in the days before FFVII were still very reluctant to read in a video game, and also had not developed the lolicon scene enough to appreciate most of these titles. Example: try selling one of those shitty WWII or Arab killer fps games to people in Saudi Arabia. They just won't want it. Another factor is that the PCE started out strong, but the popularity trickled down as the games got more otaku-based and the hardware improved. In the US the TG-16 was never successful, so asking people to pay more for a derivative of a 3/4 year old machine that nobody gave a shit about to begin with...wasn't going to work. All of those B grade RPGs and sims in Japan worked with each other to solidify a very devoted fan base. The audience got smaller, but it also became way more hardcore. We didn't have that here.
A lot of the reading part has to do with the audience video games were marketed to at the time. The perception was that video games were a toy for children. And outside of the Neo-Geo no one attempted to market at an older audience, platformers, fighters and action based games were more popular than RPGs at the time because RPGs required reading and there was a perception that grade schoolers didn't want to come home from school and homework and do more reading.
Quote
As for the PS being the same price three years later, well, come on. Are you just quoting wikipedia or are you only 20 years old or are you just senile? Don't you remember how much the the PS f*cking AMAZED people back then? "Three years later" was post-polygon. The PS was doing nearly arcade perfect version of stuff like Ridge Racer, which was still a nearly state of the art game and a top earner at a lot of arcades. The PS was the hottest shit on the planet from the time it was launched until the DC came out 5 years later. It was the first polygon-based affordable mainstream console.* You could also buy it at a lot more places. The Duo was never anything like that. You show people the opening for Kabuki Den and they go "wow!". Then they see the game actually begin and they say, "Um...is this a NES? Why is the sprite so f*cking small?" Lords to Thunder blew people's minds, but Ninja Spirit...did not.
Here's two other things about the Playstation, the target audience wasn't children. It was teenagers and young adults, I think when they launched the system the target audience was 18 year old males in the US. Also... the Playstation didn't sell fantastically that first holiday season, it and the Saturn were neck and neck in the US until that spring when it dropped in price to 199.99 in May 1996, that's when sales really started to rocket.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: spenoza on April 03, 2012, 07:59:37 AM
Need I remind you, Zeta, that there was a time when the NES was getting long in the tooth and the SNES wasn't yet out that the PCE outsold the declining NES? Also, regardless of how well Sega's titles sold the Genesis in the US, the Mega Drive never really stood out in Japan. In the 16-bit race, the Mega Drive was 3rd place. So even without a "killer app", it appears the PCE was more than enough to take on Sega.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: vestcoat on April 03, 2012, 08:03:56 AM
* Shove it up your ass, 3DO fans. Nobody wants your garage sale piece of shit system. The controller sucks and the library is terrible.
Damn. Zeta, that was one heck of a post.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: NightWolve on April 03, 2012, 08:20:17 AM
Good post, Zeta! I didn't think too much of this thread at first, it started with a faulty premise (too many pack-in games a bad thing) but it's gotten a bit interesting since.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: jeffhlewis on April 03, 2012, 09:06:45 AM
My 2 cents about the Duo's demise given that I grew up during the 16-bit wars.
For full disclosure I was a Sega child but I grew up with a Master System, so I can relate to the underdog status.
1.) Zero traction at retail. My local EB Games and Babbages' relegated anything Turbo to a small aisle in the back of the store that faced away from the entrance. You had to know where it was to even know it existed.
2.) Marketing that really only existed in gaming magazines and barely any TV spots. No visibility outside of the gamer demographic.
3.) Slightly pricey for the time and a lack of any killer apps. We all know how awesome the Duo pack-in deal was, but to your average joe - they had no clue what Gate of Thunder was or why they should care.
4.) There was already a general perception that the Turbo market was dying when the Duo was released. Seemed like a last ditch effort.
5.) Similar to my early days with my SMS, I literally knew NO ONE out of all of my friends between home, activities and school that owned a Turbografx of any kind. I never even saw one in action aside from Toys R Us, which had Keith Courage on display when the system was released. Kids buy the systems their friends have, plain and simple
But hey, we might not be here talking about the PC Engine if it wasn't an underdog here in the states!
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: kazekirifx on April 03, 2012, 02:38:43 PM
I agree with everything Zeta said, though yes many Turbo fans won't admit it.
I can see why the price would be a limiting factor if comparing to the SNES or Genesis, but why would you compare it to those?
You would compare it to those, because those were the primary 16-bit era game consoles.
I don't think TTi ever intended to take on the SNES and Genesis (sans Sega CD) with the Duo. That's what's important to me. It was produced and priced as what I would call a 'low-end premium' system. Premium because of the exclusivity factor, and the fact that it had a CD-rom drive, which was a big deal at the time (and personally the CD audio was enough to impress me at the time), and low-end because it used the same 8-bit technology as the TG16, and was cheaper and less powerful than the Neo Geo (the high-end premium system of the time). The Duo was marketed primarily at specialty stores and through mail order, which I think was appropriate since it had no chance of succeeding as a mass produced system available at every Target and Kmart alongside the SNES and Genesis. TTi knew who its audience was, and the audience knew who they were: serious gamer adults who could afford it, and spoiled rich kids. So where did TTi go wrong? I guess there weren't quite as many serious gaming adults and spoiled rich kids out there who wanted to buy this thing as TTi had hoped.
But hey, we might not be here talking about the PC Engine if it wasn't an underdog here in the states!
And there you go. The Turbo's underdog status is almost directly responsible for getting me into purchasing import games, and ultimately leading me to learn Japanese and move to Japan. The history of the Turbo is an integral part of my life.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: BigusSchmuck on April 03, 2012, 02:48:55 PM
Price had nothing to do with it IMHO, just think not even 3 years later the Playstation 1 came out and it had a $300 dollar price tag and it sold like crazy. Again, as many people have pointed out, if we saw half of the killer apps the Japanese were getting we all would be singing a different tune.
The PCE had no "killer apps" in Japan. What it had was a very diverse library of B grade titles. Unfortunately Americans in the days before FFVII were still very reluctant to read in a video game, and also had not developed the lolicon scene enough to appreciate most of these titles. Example: try selling one of those shitty WWII or Arab killer fps games to people in Saudi Arabia. They just won't want it. Another factor is that the PCE started out strong, but the popularity trickled down as the games got more otaku-based and the hardware improved. In the US the TG-16 was never successful, so asking people to pay more for a derivative of a 3/4 year old machine that nobody gave a shit about to begin with...wasn't going to work. All of those B grade RPGs and sims in Japan worked with each other to solidify a very devoted fan base. The audience got smaller, but it also became way more hardcore. We didn't have that here.
As for price...at the risk of conflicting with several hard core fans' reality distortion field, the Duo wasn't worth the money to most people. Bonk is not as technically impressive as Sonic the Hedgehog. The same can be said for Ys versus Chrono Trigger, Final Lap Twin versus Super Mario Kart, or Neutopia versus Zelda: A Link to the Past. Don't get me wrong, I actually did buy a US Duo in 1992. I loved it. I mainly bought it for the Japanese imports that none of my friends were interested in.
As for the PS being the same price three years later, well, come on. Are you just quoting wikipedia or are you only 20 years old or are you just senile? Don't you remember how much the the PS f*cking AMAZED people back then? "Three years later" was post-polygon. The PS was doing nearly arcade perfect version of stuff like Ridge Racer, which was still a nearly state of the art game and a top earner at a lot of arcades. The PS was the hottest shit on the planet from the time it was launched until the DC came out 5 years later. It was the first polygon-based affordable mainstream console.* You could also buy it at a lot more places. The Duo was never anything like that. You show people the opening for Kabuki Den and they go "wow!". Then they see the game actually begin and they say, "Um...is this a NES? Why is the sprite so f*cking small?" Lords to Thunder blew people's minds, but Ninja Spirit...did not.
$300 for a console you've never seen run in person was a lot. Minimum wage was $5.25/hour then. This was before everyone had a $100 monthly bill for their iPhone and the overriding lust for technology. Hell, people still paid for music back then, that's expensive. Twenty years of inflation ago...$300 meant more to teenagers then.
I love the PCE because its like a NES, but with no flicker, way more color, and endless storage capacity. The Duo was the ultimate 8 bit system, but that's all it was. I love it specifically because of that, but most people don't. People who had been playing Comic Zone, F Zero, Mortal Kombat, etc were not impressed by Exile or Parasol Stars. And its not just the big time games, its the small stuff as well. Wild Guns...Wild Guns is really beautiful. I'm sure somebody can show me an bunch of screen shots and write out some technical stuff about how Wild Guns could easily be done better on TG16, but it doesn't change the fact that it wasn't. Neither was FFVI (or FFIV, for that matter), Out of this World, Yoshi's Island, Virtua Racing, Phantasy Star IV, etc etc. I know you guys don't care about that stuff. That's why we are here. I know the SNES is "gay" or whatever, but that's irrelevant. What matters is that people won't pay twice as much for a system that appears to be half as powerful. They think Wonder Boy is f*cking SHIT.
The CDROM was amazingly underutilized. It might as well have been a 1TD HD since you can only hold one microscopic portion of whats on the CD in memory at any given time and then play songs of the CD, usually really bad songs.
I just don't see how there is any way the Duo could have succeeded in 1992. American's simply weren't into that.
* Shove it up your ass, 3DO fans. Nobody wants your garage sale piece of shit system. The controller sucks and the library is terrible.
Wow dude, take a deep breath. :P You can't really compare YS to Chrono Trigger as they were like separated by a few years between release dates and Chrono Trigger wasn't out until mid 1995. As for all the hype surrounding the ps1, yes I do remember that and my parents made the mistake of getting one (man that playstation broke down *even called upsidaisium playstation at one point* and repaired more times than I could count) in Christmas of 95. I vaguely recall the playstation 1 sold like 100,000 units the first month it was out here in the U.S, but I could be wrong. At any rate, saying that there was no killer apps for the duo is just wrong, if we saw Ys 4 and Dracula X come out in 93 here in the U.S this discussion would be over. But who really knows for certain? There are some who say a Mortal Kombat exclusive would have saved the system (as said many times over in other posts) but releasing Street Fighter 2 Dash here in the U.S probably would have at the very least had people picking up Turbos just to play that version of that game as many kids (while I was growing up) picked up a snes just for the original Street Fighter 2. Call me crazy, but I got my Duo back in 94 just to play Ys books 1 and 2 after of course, I read a old EGM review "The Best game ever just happened" (and smirked when it was in the top 100 games a few years later) and did some serious begging/convincing to my folks that the system wasn't a sinking ship and it would last me a lifetime. 18 years later, I still enjoy it and even went as far as repairing my old Duo so now I have a Duo of working Duos!
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: turbokon on April 03, 2012, 03:33:22 PM
The pce/tg16 is like NES except with better sound, more colors and bigger sprites. It's almost like 16-bit, hmmmm :-k. Edit: I say it's better then just a slightly improvement over then the nes.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: BigT on April 03, 2012, 05:35:30 PM
To expand upon the "too late" and "too expensive" thoughts, we can also look at it this way: The Duo took one product that nobody was buying (TG16) and combined it with another product nobody was buying (TGCD) and expected people to buy it...for a premium. Yes, it was "only" $100 more than the SNES (at least for a time), but it's still $100 more than the "it" item.
I think we already established this. By the time the Duo came out, the SNES was 99.99 for a core model. And at most 150.00 for a model bundled with two controllers and Super Mario World. So it was 2 to 3 times as expensive depending on which bundle you bought.
Yeah, and that was a huge difference at that time. I was in my early teens and chose to get an SNES because: * It was a much easier sell to the parents at that price. * The SNES had SF2 and Mario as well as various EA sports titles... if figured that if I got a Duo, I would be missing out on a large segment of games. * I already had a TG16, but could never afford the CD attachment... I think that by the time the Duo came out, the war was over... realistically, NEC should have been much more aggressive with pricing from the start.
When the Duo came out, they had no position of power... so their only small chance would have been to compete aggressively on price... $199 would have been doable and then they could have hoped that the games caught on so that they could make it up on software sales... Bringing over SF2 and Dracula X would have helped as well... also, if they wanted to brand it as a more mature system, more sports games would have been nice (i.e., a deal with EA - John Madden Duo Football showed that the system could handle these quite well!)...
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: kazekirifx on April 03, 2012, 07:29:53 PM
When the Duo came out, they had no position of power... so their only small chance would have been to compete aggressively on price... $199 would have been doable and then they could have hoped that the games caught on so that they could make it up on software sales...
I think they would have just lost more money then. As many here have been echoing, the battle had already been lost by the time the Duo was released. There was no point in taking on Nintendo or Sega. They could only hope for a respectable niche market of hardcore gamers at best. Their target was primarily people who already owned an SNES and/or Genesis, not kids who were trying to decide which one console to save their allowance money for. (Though I've known people out there who grew up with only Turbo hardware too. More power to them!)
There are lot of things TTi could have done better in marketing the Duo (especially regarding which games they should have released), but I have to agree with the direction they took regarding pricing and projected market penetration. In that respect I think they did what they could with the cards they had already been dealt.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: SignOfZeta on April 03, 2012, 08:14:11 PM
The PCE is nothing but a slight improvement over the NES
Oh come on now. You make it sound so negative. The NES is a great system! OK, well, the NES is actually pretty terrible, honestly, but the PCE is like the ULTIMATE NES. That's not an insult, its a compliment. NES games are fun by design, but incredibly ugly and flickery. Its easier (for me) to have fun with something when the sprites are more than four colors and they aren't %50 flickered out %75 of the time. Example: most PCE shooters are very fun, most NES shooters are zero fun, yet there really isn't much separating them, fundamentally speaking.
Even from a technical perspective, the TG16 is pretty much half way between the NES era and the SNES era. Technically, historically, chronologically, aesthetically. Have you ever played a SNES game as crude as Keith Courage or Energy? I haven't. I know, you like Keith Courage and Energy, thats fine, but seriously....JUST LOOK AT THOSE GAMES. Are they more like NES or more like SNES? Honestly. No bullshit. If you saw Blue Blink for the first time today would you assume it was for Neo Geo or CPS2 because of how insanely great the 16-bit visuals are?
Come on. Its OK to wall yourself off into your own little world. We all do it a little every day to stay sane. The problem comes when you fail to admit/understand that this is what you are doing. China Warrior is shite. It just is.
The Tengai Makyou games have hilariously puny sprites. They just do. Its OK though! Overall the games still go toe to toe with the best the SFC had to offer (and obliterate the offerings on Mega Drive). That's why the PCE is f*cking great!
Quote
and its library is entirely second rate, eh? Go f*ck yourself.
See, this, also, isn't meant to be negative. I'm a huge fan of B-grade games. I usually don't play Doom, Elder Scrolls, Xenosaga, Modern Warfare, Grand Theft Auto, Donkey Kong Country, Just Dance, Morta Kombat...all that shit. There is a lot of charm and character in second rate titles. If Startling Odyssey had the budget of Final Fantasy it might have sold more units, but it just wouldn't have been the same. Ys is fun because instead of drilling through a million menus and raising chocobos you just slam into shit and watch the story go by. Once in a while I need that. Most of the time I need that.
However, most people don't see things this way. They want Super Mario Kart. The Duo doesn't have a single racing game that comes anywhere near Super Mario Kart. Don't be offended, in 1992 nobody else had made anything better either. Probably still haven't. Don't get pissed of and jealous and build a wall of psychotic denial just because Super Mario Kart is awesome. Appreciate it for what it is, fantastic...but does it have an RPG mode where you can say, "I did it dad!!!". No, it doesn't, so it doesn't do everything. So you need Final Lap Twin as well, or rather I need Final Lap Twin as well.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: soop on April 04, 2012, 01:11:12 AM
But hey, we might not be here talking about the PC Engine if it wasn't an underdog here in the states!
Ah, I would. As a kid, in this country, a lot of magazines focused on the GT as a portable rather than the PC Engine, and what I saw was mind-blowing in a very non-underdog way.
As for the NES... the NES is a great system. There are some crap games, but for the most part, it's infused with a sense of adventure and fun. I've some good memories of that system.
As for B-grade titles... I'm sure there are some, but as someone that hates Mario Kart, I'd say there are more bad games on the SNES than on the PC Engine, and probably even less good titles on the SNES than the PC Engine.
But what Zeta is referring to as A-grade games, I think is a tad disingenious - the titles you refer to, and FFVII, are basically AAA platinum games, the kind that sell systems on their own, and the SNES does have more of these than the PC Engine does. In fact it has more than most systems, and in a very clever way for the first time.
I just had a quick look through my collection, and if the fact that I play my PCE more than my SNES doesn't say enough, I think that if I compared some of my favorite SNES games to the PCE games (Kirby, Mario Land, Yoshi's island for example) There are very few games that can hold a candle to that level of polished design.
But if I compare ALL my SNES games to ALL my PCE games (and I'd like to think I have good taste, no duds) the PCE games generally shine through.
Make no mistake, the PC Engine has A-grade games, it just doesn't have many once-in-a-generation genre defining AAA titles.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: SignOfZeta on April 04, 2012, 05:00:11 AM
Your grading system is more subtlety neuonced than mine.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: Necromancer on April 04, 2012, 05:55:09 AM
Oh come on now. You make it sound so negative. The NES is a great system! OK, well, the NES is actually pretty terrible, honestly, but the PCE is like the ULTIMATE NES. That's not an insult, its a compliment.
Give me a break; it's obvious you meant that as a dig, furthering your dismissal of the PCE as incomparable to the mighty SNES. You're a SNERD - loud and proud and willing to dismiss anything that doesn't fit into your preconceived notions of what the PCE can do ("it can't do transparencies without flickering!").
NES games are fun by design, but incredibly ugly and flickery. Its easier (for me) to have fun with something when the sprites are more than four colors and they aren't %50 flickered out %75 of the time. Example: most PCE shooters are very fun, most NES shooters are zero fun, yet there really isn't much separating them, fundamentally speaking.
But there's a huge difference between PCE shooters and Genny/SNES shooters, right? If the PCE is just a minor improvement over the NES, then what is the SNES with its substantially slower processor or the Genny with its slightly slower processor and washed out colors? I guess the only thing that matters to a fanboy like yourself is that the PCE lacks mode 7, loads of reverb, and blast processing.
Even from a technical perspective, the TG16 is pretty much half way between the NES era and the SNES era. Technically, historically, chronologically, aesthetically. Have you ever played a SNES game as crude as Keith Courage or Energy? I haven't.
Never seen Ultraman, Pit Fighter, or Home Alone, eh? Not that it matters, as only a fool would take some of the blandest looking games in the library and use that as an argument of what the system is capable. Plus, how many latter day PCE games look as crude as K.C. or Energy?
I know, you like Keith Courage and Energy, thats fine, but seriously....JUST LOOK AT THOSE GAMES. Are they more like NES or more like SNES? Honestly. No bullshit.
You do know that I'm not Ark, right? It's no secret that I think K.C. is bland and that Energy sucks.
Come on. Its OK to wall yourself off into your own little world. We all do it a little every day to stay sane. The problem comes when you fail to admit/understand that this is what you are doing. China Warrior is shite. It just is.
Yep, I'm still not Ark. China Warrior is more of a great tech. demo. than anything else.
See, this, also, isn't meant to be negative. I'm a huge fan of B-grade games. I usually don't play Doom, Elder Scrolls, Xenosaga, Modern Warfare, Grand Theft Auto, Donkey Kong Country, Just Dance, Morta Kombat...all that shit. There is a lot of charm and character in second rate titles. If Startling Odyssey had the budget of Final Fantasy it might have sold more units, but it just wouldn't have been the same. Ys is fun because instead of drilling through a million menus and raising chocobos you just slam into shit and watch the story go by. Once in a while I need that. Most of the time I need that.
However, most people don't see things this way. They want Super Mario Kart. The Duo doesn't have a single racing game that comes anywhere near Super Mario Kart. Don't be offended, in 1992 nobody else had made anything better either. Probably still haven't. Don't get pissed of and jealous and build a wall of psychotic denial just because Super Mario Kart is awesome. Appreciate it for what it is, fantastic...but does it have an RPG mode where you can say, "I did it dad!!!". No, it doesn't, so it doesn't do everything. So you need Final Lap Twin as well, or rather I need Final Lap Twin as well.
Unlike you, I'm not stuck in denial about anything nor am I jealous. I'll freely admit that the PCE has nothing like Super Mario Kart (nor a top notch brawler or a run and gun), but it certainly has A-grade titles (Gate of Thunder, Dracula X, Ys IV, etc.).
In conclusion: go f*ck yourself.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: KingDrool on April 04, 2012, 05:59:23 AM
Wow. Hostile!
I see what Zeta's saying, and as a giant Turbo fanboy/nerd, I don't begrudge him any of it. In fact, I agree with a lot of it. I think Soop nailed it:
Make no mistake, the PC Engine has A-grade games, it just doesn't have many once-in-a-generation genre defining AAA titles.
This shouldn't turn into a fanboy "This console is better than that" argument. But I will say that Bonk is my favorite game of all time. Is it nearly as polished and brilliantly designed as Yoshi's Island? Absolutely not. But that's okay. I still love it.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: SamIAm on April 04, 2012, 06:29:59 AM
I'll toss in a couple points from my perspective.
*It wouldn't have mattered if the Duo had Sonic AND Mario AND everything else. For the majority of gamers in the US (and, let's face it, the parents that funded them) a $300 console crossed the line. There was a perceived market value of video games in general, and it was $100 for a console and $50 for games. Nintendo and Sega would have given NEC hell no matter what. As it's been pointed out, even the Playstation, which IMO is perhaps the most perfectly executed console ever made and benefited from a maturing market, didn't take off until it got down to $200, and that was years later.
*None of the Japanese-only Duo titles would have made a big difference if they had been released here. They were too late, they weren't THAT amazing (sorry Dracula X), and most of them were in unpopular genres.
*1992 was just too late in general. Hindsight is 20/20, but I think the writing was on the wall. NEC had lost in the US by then, and that was just about that.
*To paraphrase Redlettermedia's Star Wars prequel trilogy reviews, I hesitate to even say what they should have done instead, because the answer is basically everything. Marketing, internal management, hardware, software, price...each one of these areas had a plethora of problems that kept the TG16/Duo down in the US.
*I love my Duo, but basically, I agree with SignOfZeta about the nature of the system and its library. Its best stuff gives it tremendous charm, and I'm awfully glad to have another flavor in my cabinet besides Nintendo and Sega. However, I feel absolutely no regret or sense of injustice about having bought an SNES in 1992.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: spenoza on April 04, 2012, 06:56:00 AM
I think all the consoles sit pretty comfortably on a sliding scale if you look at their ability to push around colorful sprites and graphic elements. The SuperNES, being the most recent design, does have some of the most formidable capabilities. The PCE, being the earliest of the 16-bit generation, has the least formidable raw capabilities. Some PCE programmers were clearly capable of overcoming the PCE's limitations just as some were ill inclined to even try. This is the same on all platforms.
Really, what I think this all boils down to is that the public perceived the 16-bit generation as an extra background layer prompting vast hori and vert platformers to show off that free-floating background layer. The PCE didn't have an extra background layer and didn't have as many of those massive platformers with that extra background lurking behind. To most folks, that was case closed. If only the PCE had been capable of an incredible AAA title like Bubsy!
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: Black Tiger on April 04, 2012, 08:53:41 AM
The PCE had no "killer apps" in Japan. What it had was a very diverse library of B grade titles. Unfortunately Americans in the days before FFVII were still very reluctant to read in a video game, and also had not developed the lolicon scene enough to appreciate most of these titles. Example: try selling one of those shitty WWII or Arab killer fps games to people in Saudi Arabia. They just won't want it. Another factor is that the PCE started out strong, but the popularity trickled down as the games got more otaku-based and the hardware improved. In the US the TG-16 was never successful, so asking people to pay more for a derivative of a 3/4 year old machine that nobody gave a shit about to begin with...wasn't going to work. All of those B grade RPGs and sims in Japan worked with each other to solidify a very devoted fan base. The audience got smaller, but it also became way more hardcore. We didn't have that here.[/quote]
The PCE had killer apps, but not so many games that would be killer apps for Western players.
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As for price...at the risk of conflicting with several hard core fans' reality distortion field, the Duo wasn't worth the money to most people. Bonk is not as technically impressive as Sonic the Hedgehog. The same can be said for Ys versus Chrono Trigger, Final Lap Twin versus Super Mario Kart, or Neutopia versus Zelda: A Link to the Past. Don't get me wrong, I actually did buy a US Duo in 1992. I loved it. I mainly bought it for the Japanese imports that none of my friends were interested in.
Unless you're only twenty years old and don't remember what it was like at the time, the Duo was a great value because it was also a CD player. Even by the time the Duo launched, I only knew of a few people my age who had any kind of CD player. Even when the CDX came out, I bought one immediately because it was the same price as the average discman.
Your game comparisons are funny though, just like that discussion on a French forum when someone compared a screen shot from Bonk's Adventure to one of the DKC sequels. Without commenting of FLT vs SMK, the Turbo games you mentioned are still technically superior in some ways to the games you comparedthem to. Just as they are not technically superior in others. Game mags started the trend of selective appreciation and so many people to this day are completely blind to various aspects in the favor of Turbo games. They just pick out anything that could favor either SNES or Genesis and ignore the rest.
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The Duo was never anything like that. You show people the opening for Kabuki Den and they go "wow!". Then they see the game actually begin and they say, "Um...is this a NES? Why is the sprite so f*cking small?" Lords to Thunder blew people's minds, but Ninja Spirit...did not.
Again, it sounds like you're unfamiliar with the 16-bit generation. Kabukiden was a FF style TM RPG. Those small sprites are better colored versions of SNES FF game sprites. FFIV and FFV are hard to distinquish from FFIII for Famicom. The main difference is the background art in battles. Pretty much every aspect of the aesthetics of FFIV/V was improved upon in Kabukiden, such as variety in background art, enemy animation, characters actually moving around in battles like FFVII, voice acting and animated portaits synced to those tiny sprites for all the FF style "cinematics" and so much more. It really makes SNES RPGs feel almost a generation behind. Even FFVII - FFIX lack voice acting and if I remember corretly, portaits.
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I love the PCE because its like a NES, but with no flicker, way more color, and endless storage capacity. The Duo was the ultimate 8 bit system, but that's all it was. I love it specifically because of that, but most people don't. People who had been playing Comic Zone, F Zero, Mortal Kombat, etc were not impressed by Exile or Parasol Stars. And its not just the big time games, its the small stuff as well. Wild Guns...Wild Guns is really beautiful. I'm sure somebody can show me an bunch of screen shots and write out some tpechnical stuff about how Wild Guns could easily be done better on TG16, but it doesn't change the fact that it wasn't. Neither was FFVI (or FFIV, for that matter), Out of this World, Yoshi's Island, Virtua Racing, Phantasy Star IV, etc etc. I know you guys don't care about that stuff. That's why we are here. I know the SNES is "gay" or whatever, but that's irrelevant. What matters is that people won't pay twice as much for a system that appears to be half as powerful. They think Wonder Boy is f*cking SHIT.
The CDROM was amazingly underutilized. It might as well have been a 1TD HD since you can only hold one microscopic portion of whats on the CD in memory at any given time and then play songs of the CD, usually really bad songs.
I just don't see how there is any way the Duo could have succeeded in 1992. American's simply weren't into that.
* Shove it up your ass, 3DO fans. Nobody wants your garage sale piece of shit system. The controller sucks and the library is terrible.
Can't comment further right now, but the SNES is more of a glorified NES than the PCE, with most games feature sparse and tiny sprites and often slowdown. Even hackers were able to faithfully reproduse Super Mario World on NES, but Hudson ported Bonk to NES themselves and it barely runs.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: SamIAm on April 04, 2012, 09:30:21 AM
Can't comment further right now, but the SNES is more of a glorified NES than the PCE, with most games feature sparse and tiny sprites and often slowdown. Even hackers were able to faithfully reproduse Super Mario World on NES, but Hudson ported Bonk to NES themselves and it barely runs.
"Faithfully" is being a bit generous, don't you think? In motion, this obviously is very different than the real McCoy. vs.
And while we're on the subject, here's Bonk: vs.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: GohanX on April 04, 2012, 09:47:44 AM
I'll toss in a couple points from my perspective. For the majority of gamers in the US (and, let's face it, the parents that funded them) a $300 console crossed the line.
From my point of view as someone who grew up at this time and loved video games, I agree. $200 was absolutely the upper limit for a video game system then, as a Christmas present (my ONLY Christmas present, mind you) so anything priced higher than that was out of reach. It didn't matter that the Duo packed in a bunch of awesome games, and to buy a SNES and the equivalent games would have cost more than $300. It didn't matter that the Duo was a complete system for the same price as the Sega CD add on. It also didn't matter that it had a CD Rom drive, and thus was a great deal for the money considering PC CD drives were often $300 by themselves. I knew all of this, but it didn't matter since it was simply too expensive for my parents to buy.
It was mentioned that the Playstation came out a few years later at $299.99, that was also out of reach and I think it was $149.99 before I got one for Christmas. This didn't really bother me, as a friend that was a few years older than me purchased a Saturn and we rented games for it every weekend.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: BigT on April 04, 2012, 02:25:48 PM
I'll toss in a couple points from my perspective. For the majority of gamers in the US (and, let's face it, the parents that funded them) a $300 console crossed the line.
From my point of view as someone who grew up at this time and loved video games, I agree. $200 was absolutely the upper limit for a video game system then, as a Christmas present (my ONLY Christmas present, mind you) so anything priced higher than that was out of reach. It didn't matter that the Duo packed in a bunch of awesome games, and to buy a SNES and the equivalent games would have cost more than $300. It didn't matter that the Duo was a complete system for the same price as the Sega CD add on. It also didn't matter that it had a CD Rom drive, and thus was a great deal for the money considering PC CD drives were often $300 by themselves. I knew all of this, but it didn't matter since it was simply too expensive for my parents to buy.
It was mentioned that the Playstation came out a few years later at $299.99, that was also out of reach and I think it was $149.99 before I got one for Christmas. This didn't really bother me, as a friend that was a few years older than me purchased a Saturn and we rented games for it every weekend.
I agree. I'm not 100% sure what the logic was behind the Turbo Duo marketing strategy. Though, judging by the ads, they seemed to position themselves against the Sega CD.
To get more developer support, they needed more market penetration. I still think that price would have been the only way to do that. The Duo was based on a mature design that used an in-house processor, relatively little RAM/ROM, and an in-house CD-ROM. It was not as overly-complex and costly as the Sega CD design. I don't think that they would have lost much money pricing the Duo at $199 or $249 (max). By that time, I assume that they had pretty good yields on their chips and had cranked up CD-ROM production. Of course, ideally, they would have also been more aggressive with pricing of the TurboCD earlier, to get some reasonable sales... by the time the Duo came out, they should have bundled the rest of their Turbo CD inventory with system 3 cards and GOT and sold them from ~$99-$149 to provide a nice upgrade path to current TG16 users. Time and time again it has been proven that the way to make money on consoles is via software sales.
I grew up in a large market in the LA area and a lot of my friends had TG16s. There were some early adopters like me and some other picked up TG16s when their price went down to ~$69 or so... however, I didn't know anyone who bought the CD attachment and only one person who got a duo as they cost too much for our middle class families to justify buying them for their young kids... I tried with my parents and failed miserably... Most of us ended up getting an SNES instead.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: kazekirifx on April 04, 2012, 04:56:32 PM
From my point of view as someone who grew up at this time and loved video games, I agree. $200 was absolutely the upper limit for a video game system then, as a Christmas present (my ONLY Christmas present, mind you) so anything priced higher than that was out of reach.
No offense, but the problem is that you weren't in TTi's target audience for the system. They wanted people who could afford a $300 system and plenty of $50 games on top of that. Me, I just barely managed to afford one with long-term allowance saving + Xmas money, and after I had the system I was buying new games for it so slowly with what little money I had that I doubt TTi really made much of a profit off me.
Unless you're only twenty years old and don't remember what it was like at the time, the Duo was a great value because it was also a CD player. Even by the time the Duo launched, I only knew of a few people my age who had any kind of CD player. Even when the CDX came out, I bought one immediately because it was the same price as the average discman.
This is exactly correct. CD players were expensive back then, and if the Duo had been any cheaper it would have been rivaling the cheapest full-size CD players available at the time. (Hmmm. This is how Sony got people to buy PS3s as a Bluray player...) I think many of you are underestimating how expensive it was to manufacture a CD drive in 1992. I know a CD drive doesn't seem like a big deal compared to a cartridge slot when you think about it nowadays, but at the time the difference was huge. It wasn't realistic then to market a CD-rom system against a cartridge-only system. This becomes even more clear when you look at retail prices of other CD-based systems available at the time and others which were released in the years soon following. If anything, the Duo was on the low end of the price spectrum for CD-based systems of the early 90's.
... by the time the Duo came out, they should have bundled the rest of their Turbo CD inventory with system 3 cards and GOT and sold them from ~$99-$149 to provide a nice upgrade path to current TG16 users
This is an interesting idea. In this case as well, I think rather than $99-149, $199+ would have been a more realistic retail price for this imaginary set, given the pricing of other consoles at the time. But you are right, they had Turbo CD's just sitting on the shelves which were still way overpriced, and didn't even come packaged with the latest system card. It would have been a nice idea to do something constructive with these, rather than just jumping ship completely to focus on the Duo, and releasing the Super System Card as a mail order-only upgrade.
Overall, I see what you guys are saying, that they should have followed the philosophy of "Lose money on the hardware, make money on the software" which is common practice with consoles today. At the time, this was not necessarily the most accepted strategy, though I can't say for sure it wouldn't have helped if TTi had tried this with the Duo. It just wasn't common practice at the time, and also I imagine that they might have been actually losing at least a bit of money on the hardware because, again, CD drives were still pretty expensive at the time. Sure, TTi could have chosen to undercut all their competitors on hardware pricing and thus stood a chance of convincing kids to buy Duos instead of the other systems, and then reaping the rewards of the software market through a large user base. But there was no guarantee this would have proven successful. The competition would have likely also lowered their prices in response. The bottom line is that there is no way that TTi would have attempted this in 1992. No way in hell. They stood to lose a sh*tload if this strategy failed, and they were in no position to risk that.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: SamIAm on April 04, 2012, 07:51:19 PM
No offense, but the problem is that you weren't in TTi's target audience for the system. They wanted people who could afford a $300 system and plenty of $50 games on top of that.
OK, but how many people were in that target audience? What we're saying is that the number of people in the entire US market for whom a $300 console was an option was too small to be profitable. If NEC wasn't targeting the general population, then they weren't going to get deep enough market penetration to get the 3rd party support they needed to stay afloat...and that's exactly what happened.
Also, I think the "Duo as a CD player" solution only worked for people who had a centralized entertainment setup, which again, wasn't the general population. The PS2 worked as a DVD player because a PS2's integration is identical to that of a normal DVD player. The same can't always be said of a game system and a CD player.
Honestly, I think CD-ROM based game consoles were too expensive in the US in the early 90's, period. For most of us, $300 was just not what you spent on a game system. Cartridge games still met people's standards, and cartridge systems would always undersell a CD system.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: BigT on April 04, 2012, 07:57:23 PM
... by the time the Duo came out, they should have bundled the rest of their Turbo CD inventory with system 3 cards and GOT and sold them from ~$99-$149 to provide a nice upgrade path to current TG16 users
This is an interesting idea. In this case as well, I think rather than $99-149, $199+ would have been a more realistic retail price for this imaginary set, given the pricing of other consoles at the time. But you are right, they had Turbo CD's just sitting on the shelves which were still way overpriced, and didn't even come packaged with the latest system card. It would have been a nice idea to do something constructive with these, rather than just jumping ship completely to focus on the Duo, and releasing the Super System Card as a mail order-only upgrade.
Overall, I see what you guys are saying, that they should have followed the philosophy of "Lose money on the hardware, make money on the software" which is common practice with consoles today. At the time, this was not necessarily the most accepted strategy, though I can't say for sure it wouldn't have helped if TTi had tried this with the Duo. It just wasn't common practice at the time, and also I imagine that they might have been actually losing at least a bit of money on the hardware because, again, CD drives were still pretty expensive at the time. Sure, TTi could have chosen to undercut all their competitors on hardware pricing and thus stood a chance of convincing kids to buy Duos instead of the other systems, and then reaping the rewards of the software market through a large user base. But there was no guarantee this would have proven successful. The competition would have likely also lowered their prices in response. The bottom line is that there is no way that TTi would have attempted this in 1992. No way in hell. They stood to lose a sh*tload if this strategy failed, and they were in no position to risk that.
Does anyone have an idea of what the manufacturing cost was of the Turbo Duo?
The system board seems like it would be pretty inexpensive. They were using the same basic design as from 1987. I doubt that the HuC6280 was very expensive... heck, 65c02 chips were pretty cheap back then. Memory was also not that expensive in 1992. Especially, since the Duo probably uses pretty slow ram and only has 256k main cd ram + 8k work ram + 64k VRAM + 64k adpcm buffer + 256k bios rom... the cd-rom drive is the wild card... I have no idea what the oem cost was for a drive back then... retail prices were high, but that doesn't always indicate production costs... nec did produce them in house and the PC-engine duo was released 1 year prior to the Turbo Duo, while the original CD attachment was released a few years prior to that, so I'd assume they would have reduced production costs over 4+ years since the original PC engine CD drive was released. All the main R&D was done years prior!
The SegaCD seems like a different story... they added a bunch of custom hardware for graphics and sound (which were sorely underutilized and limited by the poor color palette of the Genesis) and added a redundant (albeit faster) 68k processor (68k series was significantly more expensive than the old Mostek/WDC 65c02 chips... also, it did have quite a bit more ram... so I could totally see it being more expensive to develop and manufacture than the Turbo Duo.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: kazekirifx on April 04, 2012, 09:46:32 PM
OK, but how many people were in that target audience? What we're saying is that the number of people in the entire US market for whom a $300 console was an option was too small to be profitable. If NEC wasn't targeting the general population, then they weren't going to get deep enough market penetration to get the 3rd party support they needed to stay afloat...and that's exactly what happened.
Yep. TTi knew it, and that's why they only made it available at specialty stores. NEC had already been going with virtually zero 3rd party support with the TG16 for a few years, and I'm sure TTi didn't expect that to change dramatically after the release of the Duo. The number of units produced was probably a lot for a 'specialty' system, but still I'm sure it was not nearly as high as the number of SNES's and Genny's Nintendo and Sega had produced - even in their initial runs. Again, they weren't going for an SNES-size launch. They knew that was out of the question. The $300 price tag clearly shows they were targeting gamer adults and spoiled kids whose parents were loaded. They didn't expect the casual gamer to shell out that kind of money.
If they really wanted to take on Nintendo and Sega, then they could have done it with the TG16, not the Duo. And we all know there are a lot of things NEC should have done differently with the TG16 too, but that is a whole separate discussion in itself.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: esteban on April 05, 2012, 12:42:13 AM
First, I want to thank you all (especially Zeta, who crafted many hilarious, at times ludicrous, lines!) for turning this thread into a goddamn masterpiece. (http://junk.tg-16.com/images/pcgs.png)
Second, although there have been some persuasive arguments/counter-arguments presented, I was surprised by how the "16-bit wars" we're characterized by...everyone. It was never TG-16 vs Genesis at the dawn of the 16-bit era. It was Genesis vs. firmly entrenched NES. And the NES wasn't dethroned instantly, simply because it had aging hardware. Far from it.
A crucial piece of the puzzle you folks missed: The NES never died! It would be far more accurate to say that the NES led a full life and gradually receded (faded) from the market. So, really, our beleaguered (doomed) TG-16 and the (Young Turk) Genesis were competing with the NES juggernaut, first and foremost, for the price-sensitive consumers (parents) of the mainstream market. Forget about any niche markets (NEC's business plan was intent on capturing the mass-market—at least, that was their original goal upon launch). We have already established that mass-market, mainstream success (NES) creates a momentum that insures continued sales—despite fresh, new competitors (Genesis, TG-16). Let's not forget that the existing user base for NES was huge, with money to spend on new software, thereby ensuring that publishers would continue supporting the aging NES. Surely you remember how many fantastic NES games were released in late-1989, 1990, 1991...some of the most critically acclaimed and profitable NES titles co-existed with the dawn of the 16-bit era.
Why bring this up? The continued success and popularity of NES pushed TG-16 even further into the periphery.
Brand recognition? Must-have games that everyone is talking about? Software that you can easily lend to/borrow from others? The NES was crushing even the mighty Genesis (and Sega had superb marketing and a compelling library of games).
What were parents/price-sensitive shoppers going to buy in 1989 and 1990?
NES. (Everyone has one! It provides good entertainment for a reasonable cost.)
What were folks with more expendable income going to get?
Genesis.
What was Zeta going to buy?
He saved his money for years and purchased 3DO at launch.
What was Cook going to buy?
He was busy playing the games that were included with Windows 3.0.
What went wrong with the TurboDuo?
Wrong question. We should be asking ourselves: "How did TTi manage to launch the Duo and stick around for as long as they did?"
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: DragonmasterDan on April 05, 2012, 01:07:10 AM
A crucial piece of the puzzle you folks missed: The NES never died! It would be far more accurate to say that the NES led a full life and gradually receded (faded) from the market. So, really, our beleaguered (doomed) TG-16 and the (Young Turk) Genesis were competing with the NES juggernaut, first and foremost, for the price-sensitive consumers (parents) of the mainstream market. Forget about any niche markets (NEC's business plan was intent on capturing the mass-market—at least, that was their original goal upon launch). We have already established that mass-market, mainstream success (NES) creates a momentum that insures continued sales—despite fresh, new competitors (Genesis, TG-16). Let's not forget that the existing user base for NES was huge, with money to spend on new software, thereby ensuring that publishers would continue supporting the aging NES. Surely you remember how many fantastic NES games were released in late-1989, 1990, 1991...some of the most critically acclaimed and profitable NES titles co-existed with the dawn of the 16-bit era.
This was about the TurboDuo not the TurboGrafx 16. By 1992 when the Duo came out the NES was no longer dominating the market. In fact that was the case by 1991 when the Genesis finally outsold it. If we were talking about the TurboGrafx 16 from its start in 1989 then obviously the NES would be hugely important. But this was more about the Duo, which came out three years later and was more of a premium item aimed at a far more dedicated gaming audience.
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What went wrong with the TurboDuo?
Wrong question. We should be asking ourselves: "How did TTi manage to launch the Duo and stick around as long as they did?"
The answer to this is simple. NEC Home Electronics USA wanted out of the home video game market. Hudson and NEC of Japan were not ready to give up,both of them pooled together some resources and the end result was TTI. As far as how they managed to stick around as long as they did, the small scale of the operation towards the end tells you all you need to know with games allegedally having print runs of merely 500 copies towards the end.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: soop on April 05, 2012, 01:29:59 AM
If you guys ever agree, you should collaborate on a "history of the Turbo Grafx" for Wikipedia.
and we should totally split PC Engine from TG-16 on wikipedia.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: spenoza on April 05, 2012, 06:12:49 AM
Another thing we forget about the success of the NES is that it was constantly patched along by extra hardware included in the cartridges. All the awesome games we remember from about 2 years into the life of the NES used mappers with additional hardware to make up for the shortcomings of the original NES design.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: Arkhan on April 05, 2012, 06:22:45 AM
we dont need that. there are no PCE shortcomings!
also, Contra for NES was epic-sweet, and LACKED over the Japanese one.
All of the awesome games from 2 years in is a bit of a stretch. There weren't that many using extra mappers.
And, some of what did wasn't even released here so it doesn't even count.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: spenoza on April 05, 2012, 07:52:14 AM
also, Contra for NES was epic-sweet, and LACKED over the Japanese one.
All of the awesome games from 2 years in is a bit of a stretch. There weren't that many using extra mappers.
And, some of what did wasn't even released here so it doesn't even count.
Super Mario Brothers 2 and 3 used extra mappers. Punch Out used a mapper. Kirby's Adventure used a mapper. I could go on, but the thing is, most of the best-regarded games used a mapper that did more than simply allow addressing more memory. Sometimes it was simple, like allowing a stationary bar for game information, but that's still something that was difficult to replicate on the stock NES.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: DragonmasterDan on April 05, 2012, 08:36:28 AM
Super Mario Brothers 2 and 3 used extra mappers. Punch Out used a mapper. Kirby's Adventure used a mapper. I could go on, but the thing is, most of the best-regarded games used a mapper that did more than simply allow addressing more memory. Sometimes it was simple, like allowing a stationary bar for game information, but that's still something that was difficult to replicate on the stock NES.
All of those games are more than 2 years after the platform launched. Remember, the Famicom came out in 83, the earliest game mentioned Punch Out, came out in 87. The use of mappers didn't really start until then. To the US, yes that was two years later, but four years into the Japanese life of the platform.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: spenoza on April 05, 2012, 08:59:24 AM
All of those games are more than 2 years after the platform launched. Remember, the Famicom came out in 83, the earliest game mentioned Punch Out, came out in 87. The use of mappers didn't really start until then. To the US, yes that was two years later, but four years into the Japanese life of the platform.
I did specify NES and not Famicom, since we're talking about the TurboDuo largely in the US context, and this IS in the TG-16 forum and not the PCE forum.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: kazekirifx on April 05, 2012, 02:54:10 PM
and we should totally split PC Engine from TG-16 on wikipedia.
No we shouldn't. I understand that each system has its own separate history in each country it was marketed, but Genesis doesn't have a separate page from Mega Drive. NES doesn't have a separate page from Famicom. Why should TG-16 be any different?
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: SignOfZeta on April 05, 2012, 07:14:54 PM
and we should totally split PC Engine from TG-16 on wikipedia.
No we shouldn't. I understand that each system has its own separate history in each country it was marketed, but Genesis doesn't have a separate page from Mega Drive. NES doesn't have a separate page from Famicom. Why should TG-16 be any different?
I agree. That would be a terrible idea.
Regarding some things I've said...I have to apologize.
$300 was not too much money for a successful system based on five year old hardware. The Duo's library is every bit as modern looking as the SNES and Genesis to the average man. Even the games written in 1988 look nothing like FC games despite them being written at the same time and by the same people who made most of their money writing FC games. Even the PCE ports of FC games look nothing like FC games. The TG-16 didn't have a NES-esque controller. The games' ROM sizes are just as large as SNES/MD stuff most of the time. Anyone who didn't buy this system was either an idiot or a SNERD, probably both. What TTI needed to do was spend 50 million on advertising to educate the masses. People should have known that the system would eventually be proven to be capable of non-flicker-based transparencies by a home brew coder exploring an undocumented feature 15 years after the system was dead (f*cking DUH!). The only reason why the people bought Genesis/SNES was because of the ads, obviously. All the games look terrible and are full of unfair cheesy tricks. Nobody actually has fun with them. I only said all those things before because I hate the PCE to death. All 4151 of my posts are about how much the PCE is a piece of shit. Also, the 3DO f*cking owns.
Or, more logically, the system did not appear, in the eyes of the average gamer, to be worth $300, even if the average gamer had $300 to spend, which they probably didn't.
I was in my late teens when the 16-bit era was in full swing. I bought the Genesis, the Duo, and the SNES, in that order. I loved all three systems although the Genesis (Sega's most popular system, but, IMO, absolutely their worst) is very much last place with the SNES and PCE taking about equal time during their normal lifespan. These days the PCE gets the most play. I couldn't afford Neo Geo until recently when the MVS market reached full depreciation. I've been posting here for seven years and before that did time on the Turbo Mailing list.
If you are mentally capable of grasping the fact that someone can love SFC as much as PCE then you can probably also understand this: The PCE is one of the greatest systems ever, possibly THE greatest, but when it comes to the TG-16 gaining mass market success, NEC/TTI was dead f*cked. This doesn't mean there was anything wrong with the system, it was just never going to happen. For the same reason that more people watched Phantom Menace than Solaris, more people bought Madden on Genesis than Lords of Thunder. ITS OKAY THIS WAY. PCE isn't the prom king, he's the poet. He's not Def Leopard, he's the Dead Kennedy's. PCE doesn't own a home, he lives in a squat in Manchester in 1977. PCE never combs his hair, but he didn't start getting fat when he turned 20 either. PCE is awesome, not despite these things, but BECAUSE of these things.
If you can't understand these concepts then...you are doomed to a frustrating time trying to rewrite a history where the Duo had everything going for it but just got somehow magically screwed by amorphous player haters.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: NightWolve on April 05, 2012, 09:00:24 PM
And Zeta delivers another entertaining, yet informative post! Bravo! I do wonder what other goodies I've missed by you over the years I wasn't around.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: Tatsujin on April 05, 2012, 10:31:17 PM
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: Arkhan on April 06, 2012, 03:47:17 PM
Im not really sure how to explain it but I think the whole "ohh it used a memory mapper" thing is kind of pointless.
The really OMG WOW ones (MMC5, aka CV3) were not really used heavily, and the other ones (MMC1-3) are so commonly used that it isn't worth mentioning. It's not "extra hardware" in the sense of anything grand. It's memory management. Whoopdeedick.
The important extra addon stuff were things like the Na106 and the VRC2.
and we didn't even get them here, so whoop-de-doooooo.
Ever play Contra for Famicom? It's got snow.
We didn't get any of the sweet shit here.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: SignOfZeta on April 06, 2012, 04:14:29 PM
Im not really sure how to explain it but I think the whole "ohh it used a memory mapper" thing is kind of pointless.
Totally. I mean, how hypothetical and nerdy can an argument get? What defines a system are the games that actually exist.
These days I actually prefer the pre-MMC games though. Donkey Kong 3 has no flicker. I can't even tell WTF is going on in Mighty Final Fight.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: thesteve on April 06, 2012, 04:33:30 PM
one of the first things i noticed about my TG16 bitd was with all the sprites on screen in R-Type it didnt slow or flicker
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: SignOfZeta on April 06, 2012, 06:00:47 PM
Yeah, that's my favorite part about the PCE. It is really low on flicker.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: Tatsujin on April 06, 2012, 06:21:37 PM
..and rich in lots of sprites and bullets and colors and action and speed and dynamics and all what's needed for some superior 16bit shoot'em up play fun.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: thesteve on April 06, 2012, 07:22:36 PM
yep, its better then SMS for shmups. and the SMS beat NES hands down
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: spenoza on April 08, 2012, 07:05:06 AM
Im not really sure how to explain it but I think the whole "ohh it used a memory mapper" thing is kind of pointless... It's not "extra hardware" in the sense of anything grand. It's memory management. Whoopdeedick... The important extra addon stuff were things like the Na106 and the VRC2.
Not entirely correct. Here is a quote from Wikipedia about the MMC 1-3:
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Most licensed games used either the MMC1 or the MMC3, which could swap graphics data for animated tiles, diagonal scrolling, and had a built-in interrupt counter for split screen effects
Sure, it did memory mapping, but there were other chips that also did that. The MMCs also allowed for improved video effects and such that were difficult or impossible with the stock NES hardware. They weren't massive hardware expansions like the SuperFX chip on the SNES or the MMC5 on the NES, but they did improve system capabilities beyond simply being memory mappers. I consider those hardware expansions. Super Mario Bros. 3, for example, could not have been made as it was without MMC3, and not just for the memory mapping.
You are correct, though. We didn't get some of the best ones here, because the best mappers also improved sound quality with additional sound hardware. The NES lacked the audio passthrough on the cartridge slot, so there was no way to make them work here without a system revision.
This makes me think of something, though. Does the TG-16 have a scan line timer? Can it do the split screen tile thing like SMB3?
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: Black Tiger on April 08, 2012, 07:37:31 AM
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People should have known that the system would eventually be proven to be capable of non-flicker-based transparencies by a home brew coder exploring an undocumented feature 15 years after the system was dead (f*cking DUH!)
You should know now since examples have been given to more than once, that many published PCE games from bitd feature non-flicker transparency effects.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: Arkhan on April 08, 2012, 11:34:24 AM
Not entirely correct. Here is a quote from Wikipedia about the MMC 1-3:
-_-;
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Most licensed games used either the MMC1 or the MMC3, which could swap graphics data for animated tiles, diagonal scrolling, and had a built-in interrupt counter for split screen effects
This is MEMORY MANAGEMENT
that's what the MMC stands for, lol.
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Sure, it did memory mapping, but there were other chips that also did that.
Yeah, and they were all called MMC# too or some were called VRC#
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The MMCs also allowed for improved video effects and such that were difficult or impossible with the stock NES hardware. They weren't massive hardware expansions like the SuperFX chip on the SNES or the MMC5 on the NES, but they did improve system capabilities beyond simply being memory mappers. I consider those hardware expansions. Super Mario Bros. 3, for example, could not have been made as it was without MMC3, and not just for the memory mapping.
All the improved video effects are from memory management. It's a hardware expansion, sure, but not in any grand sense.
and, all MMC3 has in it IS memory mapping. and the scanline IRQ to do split scrolling easier. But hey, they did it before MMC3. It just became *easier*. It could've been done without it, but would have been a few pains in the ass. What the hell else do you think is in the thing? Magic?
Note the fact that we didn't get most of these, but they are still mostly memory mappers.
The really cool extra hardware is the Namco163. It gives you sweet music.
You're making it sound like the cartridges had amazing extra addons, when really all it did was include a useful memory mapper.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: NightWolve on April 08, 2012, 02:05:13 PM
Hm, that was interesting:
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Since the NES, unlike the Famicom, did not allow cartridges to add additional sound channels, the soundtrack on the western versions could only access the original five sound channels built into the NES and had to be reworked.
Why the hell did they redesign that ability OUT of the NES system if it had already gone into the Famicom design?
@Tatsujin: I'm adding that slowclap animated GIF to my PWN image collection. Thank you! ;) I guess my avatar would've worked for your purposes too, but eh, that one is kinda old.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: ccovell on April 08, 2012, 02:09:21 PM
Most licensed games used either the MMC1 or the MMC3, which could swap graphics data for animated tiles, diagonal scrolling, and had a built-in interrupt counter for split screen effects
"Diagonal Scrolling" is Nintendo's Blast Processing. It was PR-speak for something the base NES could do anyway. I think they mentioned it just to promote Play Action Football. Smoke and mirrors.
I agree with Arkhan. Most mappers/MMCs just added (very useful) character graphic banking, PRG ROM banking, and an interrupt unit. It's a mapper-- hence the name -- not a DSP.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: SignOfZeta on April 08, 2012, 03:16:04 PM
People should have known that the system would eventually be proven to be capable of non-flicker-based transparencies by a home brew coder exploring an undocumented feature 15 years after the system was dead (f*cking DUH!)
You should know now since examples have been given to more than once, that many published PCE games from bitd feature non-flicker transparency effects.
I'm a bit hazy about the exact details that previous "SignOfZeta hates PC Engine" witch hunt turned up, but in the end I thought we agreed that we have different opinions of what transparencies are, what flicker based transparencies are, etc. To me, the first system to do real transparencies, where you could just throw down a layer and change its opacity at will, numerically, with a hardware function, where slowdown would not f*ck up the effect because it wasn't based on an interlacing trick, was the SNES. The PS, SS were the next big ones to have it built in, although the CDI, Jag, and 3DO might have done it as well, I'm totally clueless about the capabilities of those systems.
The way the PCE does transparencies is the same way its done on Genesis, Neo Geo, and other 16 bit arcade hardware. The object is there, it isn't there, it is there, it isn't there, really fast like that, so that it appears half there. In other words, it flickers. Its not transparent like a clear piece of plastic of glass is transparent. When things are transparent in real life they aren't %50 opaque because the thing is only there %50 of the time and absent the other %50 of the time. They are %50 transparent because only %50 of the light actually travels though them. On PCE you can't really change how transparent an object is except by changing the rate of the flicker, and that really falls apart at certain levels. Ie: you can't have something with %5 opacity since that would mean having the object only appear in %5 of the frames which...really wouldn't work for shit...although it is done quite frequently, usually when a character dies and is meant to disappear. Of course you can also make things seem transparent via very careful pallet choices and dithering effects, but those aren't variable at all.
If the coder wanted to make the clouds slightly more opaque he could assign a different opacity factor. If the game slows down (which it certainly does, because its a SNES after all) there is no constantly changing flicker rate to f*ck up the effect. Its exactly that opaque all the time.
Like I said before, I'm sure you think this looks like shit, or that its unfair tackily made bullshit, it doesn't matter, but its an actual transparent layer, just like in Photoshop or, in the old days, cels painted with transparent paint, gels that go over spotlights, etc. The PCE doesn't do this, at least not in retail games. Its OK though. I DONT HATE THE PCE. I'm just saying that the SNES was the first system to do this, three years later. Not even the Neo Geo can do it.
Now that I think about it, the fact that I chose Kikikaikai is interesting. This game is on both PCE and SFC. The PCE version is much more like the arcade version, the SNES version is a hella hopped up remake. Most people who aren't super hardcore fanboys with lifelong devotions to specific companies would say that the SNES version is quite a bit fancier. There are many many reason this is the case, but it really does illustrate my point that the PCE does not appear as powerful as the SNES to most people. Most people don't care that the PCE version is several years older, wasn't that great of a port, and was never designed to be fancier than the arcade in the first place, etc, they just look at the stuff and judge the SFC port to be better. That's what they did in Japan of course, in the US Kikikaikai never came out for TG16 and nobody played the SNES version, they would have made other comparisons, but either way...that's what they did, world wide, and this is why the SNES is usually regarded as the "winner" of the 16-bit era. People in 1990 didn't know about all the in-depth analysis of system capabilities you and other people would provide years into the future. They could only see what they saw at the store, at the arcade, and at their friends house.
There is theory, and there is reality. In politics people will often go with theory, but when it comes to spending cash, they usually go with reality. The reality is that by 1992 people were buying SNES because when they saw the SNES, they liked what they saw. The OP asked, "What went wrong" with the Duo. Well, people didn't like what they saw. They saw the visuals as being from the past and the price as being from the future. Strictly speaking, that's exactly what it was. An architecture from 1987 and a price point that wouldn't become acceptable until 1995.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: SignOfZeta on April 08, 2012, 03:18:35 PM
"Diagonal Scrolling" is Nintendo's Blast Processing. It was PR-speak for something the base NES could do anyway. I think they mentioned it just to promote Play Action Football. Smoke and mirrors.
Seriously? They actually used "diagonal scrolling" as a buzz word? I don't remember much of that. Blast Processing I do remember though. Sega pushed that really hard with Sonic 2.
Also, to be fair, "diagonal scrolling" does actually mean something. "Blast Processing" is something where I still don't even know what that's supposed to mean.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: Arkhan on April 08, 2012, 03:21:35 PM
Even from a technical perspective, the TG16 is pretty much half way between the NES era and the SNES era. Technically, historically, chronologically, aesthetically. Have you ever played a SNES game as crude as Keith Courage or Energy? I haven't. I know, you like Keith Courage and Energy, thats fine, but seriously....JUST LOOK AT THOSE GAMES. Are they more like NES or more like SNES? Honestly. No bullshit. If you saw Blue Blink for the first time today would you assume it was for Neo Geo or CPS2 because of how insanely great the 16-bit visuals are?
Shaq Fu. Pit Fighter Home Improvement Waynes World? Bebe's Kids
Some of these came out so far into the life of the SNES that their shitness is inexcusable. There are more. Terminator was pretty shitty, so was Revolution X. THe one Bubsy game was kind of retarded too.
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Come on. Its OK to wall yourself off into your own little world. We all do it a little every day to stay sane. The problem comes when you fail to admit/understand that this is what you are doing. China Warrior is shite. It just is.
You are using hindsight and time-travel shenanigans to diss games. I wonder if you were like this when the stuff was current.
I think you simply lack the ability to play old games in their proper context. You probably hate Atari 2600 Asteroids because it flickers and you can play something better on your iPhone, right?
I play Hydlide for what it is and don't even bother comparing it to LoZ. Comparing it would be dumb. No shit LoZ is going to play better. It's got more to work with. Hydlide basically paved the way for all the action RPGs, not Zelda, not Ys. Recognize.
China Warrior is the first game for the greatest console ever made. Call it a tech demo, but it's got HUGE sprites, sweet music, and solid gameplay. Nearly everyone who plays it and makes fun of it approaches it wrong. It's a Gladiator style game. Not a Streets of Rage style game. Once you've realized this and approach it as a timing based game, you'd be surprised how much more fun you have with it.
I bought that game and played it for the first time in 1999. It was 7.95$ I played it for hours and hours and hours. I had PS1, Genesis, Sega CD, Saturn, SNES, a Quake II capable PC, and other stuff I could have played too. This did not stop me from having a kickass weekend affair with China Warrior until I beat the flying f*ck out of that drunk bastard. What about it makes it shite, other than it not being Streets of Rage.
Energy is a port of a PC-88 game. What the f*ck were you expecting? For all of it's flaws it still isn't that bad. It's campy enough that even if I paid full price for that game, I wouldn't hate it.
I'm not in my own little world.
Actually, maybe I am.
However, this little world has everything. I've got 2600, INTV2, C64, Apple II, NES, SMS, PCE, etc. etc.
I play it all, and I like it all. I play Akalabeth as much as I play Super Star Soldier.
I'll fire up Ultima V after playing CF2. China Warrior followed by Alisia Dragoon.
I just play games that I think are good. It's not hard to recognize which games accomplished something great and paved the way for what you're pissing and moaning about.
Without Hydlide, I wonder if we'd have Ys like we have it now. Without China Warrior, we may not even have the PCE as we know it today. What if they made it with tinyass douche-sprites and people just brushed it off, and it flopped so bad people refused to buy it? What if the massive sprites didn't excite developers and go OMG LOOK HOW BIG SHIT CAN BE ON THIS THING HOLY f*ck.
You never know.
EDIT: also, Diagonal Scrolling means one thing.
Isolated Warrior.
Game's f*ckin awesome.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: ccovell on April 08, 2012, 04:09:08 PM
"Diagonal Scrolling" is Nintendo's Blast Processing. It was PR-speak for something the base NES could do anyway.
Seriously? They actually used "diagonal scrolling" as a buzz word? I don't remember much of that. Blast Processing I do remember though. Sega pushed that really hard with Sonic 2.
"Diagonal Scrolling" is Nintendo's Blast Processing in that it was PR-logic for something the base NES could do anyway.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: rag-time4 on April 08, 2012, 05:11:17 PM
I really wanted a Duo when I saw it for sale... I think of all place I saw it at Long's Drugs, now CVS pharmacy. I seemed to remember them having the SNES and Genesis as well. I never pushed my parents for one because I just didn't know enough about it to have any real interest.
I had some brief experience with the TurboGrafx-16 maybe 1-2 years prior, because my next door neighbors had one. I got to play Battle Royale, China Warrior, Bloody Volt, and Legendary Axe II. Of all those, Axe II stood out the most, and seemed a decent game. But action platformers werent the type of games that I got excited about back then. The two games I wanted most with the SNES were Super Mario World and Final Fantasy IV. I hated Battle Royale, thought China Warrior was incredibly stiff and unimpressive, saw Bloody Volt as a penniless man's Contra, and Axe II was decent but not enough.
My neighbors quickly got rid of their Turbo and got a Sega, and eventually a SNES as well.
The one game I was excited about as a kid on the Turbo, through the release of the Duo, was Fighting Street... but I kind of forgot about it as a kid because I was so impressed with some of the games on the SNES. I finally did buy a boxed Duo in 00/01 or so, along with Fighting Street, SideArms, and Keith Courage.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: NightWolve on April 08, 2012, 05:35:48 PM
Shaq Fu. Pit Fighter Home Improvement Waynes World? Bebe's Kids
I didn't say as bad, I said as crude. I meant technically crude. Like, obviously of a specific hardware generation. Shaq Fu might be a piece of shit, but its clearly a 16-bit game. While the sprites are puny, they have quite a bit of animation. Home Improvement is a much better game (than Shaq Fu) and even better looking (than Shaq Fu) and more "16-bit-ish".
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You are using hindsight and time-travel shenanigans to diss games. I wonder if you were like this when the stuff was current. I think you simply lack the ability to play old games in their proper context.
I admit you are much more of a connoisseur. You can find the sliver lining in old games that I can't, but for the most part I actually did play these games in the correct historical context. I'm turning 39 this year for f*ck's sake. I remember when there was a successful arcade every few blocks in this country and half the machines had b/w or vector monitors in them. I'm not trying to brag or anything, but in all seriousness kids born in the early 70s were in a unique situation to see, for the most part, what is so far the entire life cycle of video games and personal computers. The only shit that predates my experience is stuff that was so rare or so un-fun that it can't really be said to have been part of the cultural landscape.
Of course I didn't play every single thing in existence during that time period, so perhaps I am being unfair to Energy since I didn't play it for the first time until a few years ago....but I don't think I am. The thing really seems kind of sucky.
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You probably hate Atari 2600 Asteroids because it flickers and you can play something better on your iPhone, right?
Honestly I've always thought the 2600 was a piece of shit. I spent my time in arcades and the 2600 had very few good arcade conversions. Between %90 of the games being zero fun beyond the first 5 minutes and the f*cking HORRIBLE joystick (I was a weak and sickly child...or perhaps just lazy) I always hated that system. I did like the Coleco a lot though, and I had the 2600 module for it so I actually did amass quite a huge collection of $1 2600 games from Kmart during the crash years...I just like Coleco games a lot more.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: kazekirifx on April 08, 2012, 09:21:25 PM
Arkhan and Zeta, Somehow I agree with both of your opinions so much, though I'm not sure how that's possible.
Incidentally, I was born in 1980, so I am right between the generations the two of you grew up in. It was a great time to be born since I was just old enough to start playing video games when the NES was the thing. I vaguely remember playing 2600 at a friend's house, but never actually got one until just a few years ago. The 2600 is amusing to me, and I'm really not sure why people who grew up with it complained about the ports. It wasn't until the PS2 days that home technology really started to be fully on-par with the arcades. I find Pac-Man on 2600 to be quite playable. Who cares if the playfield is the wrong size, the pellets the wrong shape, Pac-Man isn't round, and the difficulty is all screwed up? It's still fun and playable. I also enjoyed E.T. after watching the old "how to play" video someone put up on youtube. It's far from the worst game ever in my opinion.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: NightWolve on April 08, 2012, 09:59:47 PM
I also enjoyed E.T. after watching the old "how to play" video someone put up on youtube. It's far from the worst game ever in my opinion.
Wait, no, you're kidding, right? I have a pseudo 2600 system ("Gemini," some sort of Atari 2600 knock-off) boxed away in my attic somewhere and I happen to have that piece of shit game, too! I don't even remember how it got into the collection (and I sure hope to God my dad didn't pay no $50 bucks for that shit, it was likely purchased for a couple bucks after the crash at some K-Mart perhaps), but hands down, that really is one of the WORST games EVER made!! IT IS! Almost all the games are garbage, except for a very few. The few I recall enjoying are River Raid, Megamania, (two shooters) Frogger, Pitfall 2 by Activision (ALMOST forgot that one!) and, eh, I can't think of anything else...which is either due to my bad memory or how much I think most of the games for that system sucked. ;)
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: BigusSchmuck on April 09, 2012, 07:39:43 AM
After reading through this thread, I suddenly don't feel old anymore. :P I'm glad this thread isn't going to a apple 2 vs commodore 64 argument, otherwise I think I would go insane.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: Black Tiger on April 09, 2012, 08:16:25 AM
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"Diagonal Scrolling" is Nintendo's Blast Processing. It was PR-speak for something the base NES could do anyway.
What did Johnny Turbo call Lords of Thunder on that PBS show? A "DVH shooter"?
Nintendo did do more bs phantom tech advertising than Sega. Their handy chart debunking the Genesis said that the SNES could run Sonic the same as the Genesis version, except that it could also scale up Sonic's sprite till you could make out every individual whisker.
Ads for FFIII said that new blast processing/style techniques made it display all 256 colors at once in every screen or something. Ads for Killer Instinct said that even more advanced programming technology allowed it to display 512 colors per screen.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: SignOfZeta on April 09, 2012, 09:04:14 AM
The reason ET is so hated is because there was no How to Play video back then. The game. As it shipped, is inscrutable. It cost fifty f*cking dollars (when gas was $0.70 a gallon) and nobody had any fun with it whatsoever.
Regarding Pacman: You had to be there. You have to understand that people played a LOT in the arcade. Video games were a predominantly arcade thing in the early 80s. Pacman especially was huge. There were books published showing you how to play it. There was even a record where a guy speaks the exact pattern you need to repeat I order to kill the game. "Left, right, up, right...". Pacman 2600 doesn't even have the right f*cking maze. People were pissed because they thought it could be better, and it really could have been. IIRC there is even a homebrew port of 2600 that is much more accurate. (That might have been a dream I had though). It's quite likely that kids who's parents never let them go to the arcade, kids who only knew Pacman from the shitty cartoon and the lunch boxes and puffy stickers, those kids probably thought the 2600 ver was fine.
To use a more clear example of why 2600 sucks, play Donkey Kong on 2600, Coleco, and arcade and get back with me. Was Donkey Kong Jr on 2600? I'm assuming it was, and I'd guess that was pretty terrible as well.
Also, good arcade ports weren't unknown pre-PS2. They don't have to be good, they just have to be decent. The NES has several, Donkey Kong 3 NES is very good. Flicky on Genesis, SFII on all 16-bit systems. Anything CPS2 on Saturn was good (and sometimes even PS). Obviously everything on Neo Geo is perfect.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: Arkhan on April 09, 2012, 09:39:09 AM
It exists.
and yes, the Atari 2600 version of Pac Man was a goddamn mess. It's not like Defender where its like "ok, this isn't as good as the arcade but it's still pretty good."
It's more like
"Why is the maze like this? What the hell kind of sound effects are these? Why does the game never get any harder? etc".
Defender took some liberties due to 2600 vs arcade cabinet.... Pac Man... took some liberties too. I think it was the guy programming it being a lazy SOB. He could have easily made the maze the right way. Those sound effects could have been fixed. There is 0 excuse for any of it. The startup noise sounds like a phone having a stroke, and the pickup noise sounds like someone farting. The death noise is ok at least.
Those idiotic noises were used as generic TV sound effects for "Kid playing game you can't see", for awhile too.
It's not like they didn't have the means to do better. It isn't like it was a first year game and no one knew how to program the 2600. Slot Racer was already out. Hell, it's maze was closer to Pac Man's maze than Pac Man. That ain't right. The homebrew hack isn't exploiting some crazy trick that noone knew about either. It's just someone who isn't a jackass. I bet the hack took longer than 6 weeks (development length of Atari 2600 pacman).
It could have been way better. They should have let Activision have a crack at it. The other arcade ---> 2600 ports weren't too bad. Even Donkey Kong is playable and pretty similar to the original. Asteroids was pretty perfect too. Gorf wasn't too shabby, and neither was Space Invaders. Berzerk was awesome. Venture even! but, Pac Man, no. They screwed up on that one. You can tell it was rushed.
I know people that said they had fun with ET when it came out. They said "it wasn't bad but once you beat it, it lost most of it's fun". I like the game. I thought it was ok when I played it in the 90s for the first time, and I thought it was fine after the internet decided it's the worst game ever.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: Necromancer on April 09, 2012, 10:35:06 AM
To me, the first system to do real transparencies, where you could just throw down a layer and change its opacity at will, numerically, with a hardware function, where slowdown would not f*ck up the effect because it wasn't based on an interlacing trick, was the SNES.
In other words: "The first system to do transparencies in the exact same manner as a SNES was the SNES." It's hard to argue with that.
The way the PCE does transparencies is the same way its done on Genesis, Neo Geo, and other 16 bit arcade hardware. The object is there, it isn't there, it is there, it isn't there, really fast like that, so that it appears half there. In other words, it flickers.
Much of the time that is true, but go back and re-read those threads and you'll find many examples of non-flicker based transparency in PCE games. The techniques used admittedly have limits and are not 100% analogous to the SNES's transparency capabilities, but they are transparencies; dismissing them entirely with blanket statements like "the PCE can't do transparency" is as inaccurate as saying "the PCE can't do parallax"; it can do both, albeit not in the same manner as the SNES or in a way that it could replicate any SNES transparency pixel for pixel.
On a peripherally related note, what are the 'transparencies' (for lack of a better term - it's more like looking through a net) in the hidden passages in Legend of Xanadu. It looks like there's black/nothing alternating every-other-pixel on top of the characters.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: Arkhan on April 09, 2012, 10:37:53 AM
Atari 2600 has the best transparencies. I mean, look at those ghosts in pacman! They're see thru!
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: Necromancer on April 09, 2012, 10:46:38 AM
I was one of those poor f*ckers that didn't know any better about 2600 Pac Man. I lived in a small town and had only seen the real deal a couple of times, so I didn't know how it was supposed to be.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: Arkhan on April 09, 2012, 11:25:23 AM
I was one of those poor f*ckers that didn't know any better about 2600 Pac Man. I lived in a small town and had only seen the real deal a couple of times, so I didn't know how it was supposed to be.
I guess everyone in my family liked it, but knew it sucked compared to the arcade machine 2 blocks away. Though, I bet that if it weren't Pac Man, and wasn't hyped up as being the arcade to home conversion of such a sweet game, I bet it wouldn't have been as anger-inducing for people.
Kangaroo, Jungle Hunt, and Frogger were what they mostly played.
And Asteroids and Berzerk.
as a game, it really isn't awful. It plays fine. It just sounds really stupid, and is barely like the arcade one.
There were better clones in 1982. I guess Pakacuda for C64 was pretty awesome at the time. I've played it (the same cracked disk they used!). It's pretty fun. same release year as Pac Man on Atari 2600.
I think what pisses me off the most is that the fruit is just a f*cking rectangle. C'mon, they could've made it look like a cherry or something.
I don't even give it an A for effort, because I think the whole thing was rushed to quickly cash in on Pac Man.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: NightWolve on April 09, 2012, 02:20:53 PM
After reading through this thread, I suddenly don't feel old anymore. :P I'm glad this thread isn't going to a apple 2 vs commodore 64 argument, otherwise I think I would go insane.
Quiet you! ;) Honestly, I don't think I've ever even discussed Atari 2600 publicly before this thread... Seriously, I had forgotten all about it, but then when E.T. was mentioned, it brought back memories, of the whole system in general and a sort of "trauma" (if you will) with that particular game... I remember I was excited, enjoyed the movie and wow, now I get to play the game! How cool is that?? Yay! So I put the the cart in, turn the system on, start playing and my instant reaction within seconds, "HUH? WHAT?? WTF IS THIS GARBAGE??? WHAT WERE THEY THINKING?" When a game makes a first impression on ya like that, oh you remember it, alright!! And it looks like "the Internet" remembers it too, judging by this E.T. Wiki article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.T._the_Extra-Terrestrial_(video_game)) I never knew existed prior to this thread.
E.T. is a couple of blocks of one color or so, you push the button and OK, his head moves up and down just the like movie (wow, awesome!), then you move around, you fall in a pit and sometimes, you can even get him to levitate out of it (again wow, just like the movie!), but most of the time you can't... You walk around some, you might get chased by some baddie, but you're slow, so best way to evade is to fall into a pit, then you have to try to levitate back out...if you can. Repeat! No thanks! The article does say, "the game can be enjoyable after the player has learned to navigate the pits" one of the few positive comments by Classic Gaming in support of one of videogame history's most costly debacles... I don't think learning to levitate properly would've changed my opinion or history's opinion, and so I don't think it should lose its razzie award because a minority somehow "managed" to find enjoyment with it... ;)
Quote from: Arkhan
I thought it was fine after the internet decided it's the worst game ever.
Well, that pesky Internet (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.T._the_Extra-Terrestrial_(video_game)) full of a bunch of cranks does make some good arguments... Aside from being a horrible game, significantly contributing to Atari's failure, millions in losses, the 1983 crash, it appears it DID do something good, though: "the large number of unsold E.T. games along with an increase in competition prompted retailers to demand official return programs from video game manufacturers."
Can we at least agree that it has a "significant place" in videogame history ?? ;)
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: Black Tiger on April 09, 2012, 02:57:26 PM
To me, the first system to do real transparencies, where you could just throw down a layer and change its opacity at will, numerically, with a hardware function, where slowdown would not f*ck up the effect because it wasn't based on an interlacing trick, was the SNES.
You really seem to be stretching to disqualify the Genesis' hardware transparency effects, with your specific detailed description of SNES transparency as your definition as "real transparencies". As you've been told and shown way too many examples of, there are lots of transparency effects in PCE games "where slowdown would not f*ck up the effect because it wasn't based on an interlacing trick". Since you have SNES-superiority tunnel vision, you'll ignore it again, but for the rest of us who want to see an accessible example, go play Lords of Thunder until . Pause all you want, you'll never see an uncolored or single-colored section of that moving transparency layer, because there is absolutely no flicker, interlacing, etc (fake!) tricks being used. As I've pointed out in the past as well, some of these 60fps PCE transparencies do things that SNES hardware transparencies cannot. The PCE can't do every effect the SNES can do the exact same way either, but it can and did do all kinds of non-flicker transparency effects. Same with the Genesis.
You do understand as well that in order to get the SNES to do a transparency effect it's not as simple as flipping a switch, right? There is actual programming involved, just as with PCE transparency effects. You also must realize that the PCE doesn't require you to tape a colored sheet across your TV screen like Space Invaders the arcade does... the programming makes the PCE hardware do it all. Just like all the parallax that it does too. The color capabilities and speedy internal workings of PCE hardware actually make it all the more versatile at doing all kinds of non-flicker transparencies. There are also all kinds of limitations to SNES transparency effects too, the biggest being that it can only do a single transparent tile layer.
The way the PCE does transparencies is the same way its done on Genesis, Neo Geo, and other 16 bit arcade hardware. The object is there, it isn't there, it is there, it isn't there, really fast like that, so that it appears half there. In other words, it flickers.
Again, you are alone in your ignorance of the reality that the rest of the world is sharing. This is how the SNES does many transparency effects, like the Yoga Flame... and those other consoles can use this method as well... but the Genesis and PCE have many games that use non-flicker transparency effects. Repeatedly saying otherwise doesn't change the fact. You may dislike flicker transparencies, but you still have to put up with them in SNES games.
Quote
When things are transparent in real life they aren't %50 opaque because the thing is only there %50 of the time and absent the other %50 of the time. They are %50 transparent because only %50 of the light actually travels though them. On PCE you can't really change how transparent an object is except by changing the rate of the flicker, and that really falls apart at certain levels. Ie: you can't have something with %5 opacity since that would mean having the object only appear in %5 of the frames which...really wouldn't work for shit...although it is done quite frequently, usually when a character dies and is meant to disappear. Of course you can also make things seem transparent via very careful pallet choices and dithering effects, but those aren't variable at all.
The transparency effect in Blood Gear which I mentioned in our last "Zeta Witch Hunt", does degrees of transparency, not just 50/50... but takes it further to include special lighting effects which reveal added detail. So there is the staggered non-flicker transparency effect happening, which on SNES would only tint the layer behind it... but on top of that Blood Gear also brings out detail that was hidden in the shadows, the way that fully 3D lighting effects would reveal objects further behind the outer objects.
Even from a technical perspective, the TG16 is pretty much half way between the NES era and the SNES era. Technically, historically, chronologically, aesthetically. Have you ever played a SNES game as crude as Keith Courage or Energy? I haven't. I know, you like Keith Courage and Energy, thats fine, but seriously....JUST LOOK AT THOSE GAMES. Are they more like NES or more like SNES? Honestly. No bullshit. If you saw Blue Blink for the first time today would you assume it was for Neo Geo or CPS2 because of how insanely great the 16-bit visuals are?
Again, common sense should prevent the need for these basic concepts to be spelled out. A poor game, aesthetically or otherwise, is no measure of a console's potential. The very best, most impressive games, are simply the best examples we have. You undermine your credibility all the more when you pick out PCE games you feel are unimpressive as proof of the PCE's weakness. You also reveal your limited knowledge of the SNES/SFC library with these kinds of claims. But, if you actually believe in this kind of logic, here's your proof that the SNES is only an NES-quality 8-bit console-
I'd like to point out that the SFC LOH looks worse than the 16-color MSX one.
But at least the SFC version doesn't have FAKE(!) scrolling. [-X
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: SamIAm on April 09, 2012, 05:29:45 PM
All those PCE transparencies seem like they're trying to inspire the idea of a transparency, and that's all.
The SNES processes transparencies by actually averaging the color values of overlapping pixels, and this technique is the basis of all modern transparency processing since. My impression is that it's also very easy to enable this when making an SNES game, as well. It's not a hack, it's setting a screen mode.
Effects like checkerboard dithering look terrible in comparison. This comes up a lot when talking about the Saturn and Playstation - the Saturn can't process transparency quickly if the two pixels being averaged are being drawn by different GPUs, with some exceptions. In many games, they went with a substitute. Castlevania SOTN looks like ass on the Saturn almost solely for this reason, and it's not even something that Saturn fans spend effort on disputing.
Lords of Thunder does the same thing Sonic games did for water - changing the entire palette partway down the screen. Is it effective? Sure. Is it good for anything other than water? Not really.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: spenoza on April 09, 2012, 05:36:09 PM
All those PCE transparencies seem like they're trying to inspire the idea of a transparency, and that's all.
The SNES processes transparencies by actually averaging the color values of overlapping pixels, and this technique is the basis of all modern transparency processing since. My impression is that it's also very easy to enable this when making an SNES game, as well. It's not a hack, it's setting a screen mode.
Effects like checkerboard dithering look terrible in comparison. This comes up a lot when talking about the Saturn and Playstation - the Saturn can't process transparency quickly if the two pixels being averaged are being drawn by different GPUs, with some exceptions. In many games, they went with a substitute. Castlevania SOTN looks like ass on the Saturn almost solely for this reason, and it's not even something that Saturn fans spend effort on disputing.
Lords of Thunder does the same thing Sonic games did for water - changing the entire palette partway down the screen. Is it effective? Sure. Is it good for anything other than water? Not really.
Does it really matter if a transparency effect is calculated on the fly or pre-arranged with smart palette use? It is true that on-the-fly transparency is a lot more flexible in how and where it can be used, but that doesn't mean that prearranged substitutes can't be just as good in their set context.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: SamIAm on April 09, 2012, 05:44:13 PM
That palette-change trick works fine where it works, but it is extremely limited in its application. It's like putting on tinted glasses. True transparency (as I don't hesitate to call it) allows you to actually make an object transparent. That means transparent clouds, fireballs, ghosts, dripping honey or whatever. The difference in design potential is massive.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: spenoza on April 09, 2012, 05:55:46 PM
That palette-change trick works fine where it works, but it is extremely limited in its application. It's like putting on tinted glasses. True transparency (as I don't hesitate to call it) allows you to actually make an object transparent. That means transparent clouds, fireballs, ghosts, dripping honey or whatever. The difference in design potential is massive.
I think "on-the-fly" or "real-time transparency" is more appropriate than "true transparency". But even the SNES was highly limited in how it could use real-time transparencies, due to the transparent layer being a tile-based background layer rather than sprites or either (same with Mode 7 effects). There are lots of weird moments in SNES games where objects either remain without any change when a transparent layer passes by or which disappear behind the transparent layer instead of changing color and remaining otherwise visible. Those were mostly problems early in the life cycle of the system, but it still demonstrated that the real-time transparency effect was limited and finicky, and had to be futzed with in order to be relatively seamless. Heck, even the Sega Saturn had some issues with its transparency implementation, and it was quite a beast all the way around (I understand this problem was actually a bug and not part of how things were supposed to work).
So I will agree that, generally speaking, some kind of real-time implementation is going to be ultimately more flexible, but it wasn't really until the Playstation that said implementations were truly trouble-free.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: BigusSchmuck on April 09, 2012, 06:20:47 PM
With all this talk about transparencies and flickering I'm surprised no one has gotten a seizure yet. lol At any rate, who cares about special effects just so as you enjoy the games you play right? Besides, games like Mega Man 3 for the NES you can use the slow down glitches to your advantage, at least I did back in the day...
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: SamIAm on April 09, 2012, 06:23:58 PM
So I will agree that, generally speaking, some kind of real-time implementation is going to be ultimately more flexible, but it wasn't really until the Playstation that said implementations were truly trouble-free.
I basically have no disagreement there.
As a big Saturn fan, I've spent a lot of time looking into what the problem was with the system not being able to do transparencies sometimes. Basically, it comes down to the fact that true/real-time transparency effects involve two graphics having their color values averaged, and if the two graphics involved are being drawn by the Saturn's two different GPUs (or VDPs, as they're known), it's inefficient for them to communicate the necessary information.
If all you want is the Saturn's VDP2 to draw a transparent background layer of clouds over another background layer of mountains, then that's no problem at all. NiGHTS shows an interesting case of sprites being transparent over other sprites and polygons, but not backgrounds, because VDP1 was only doing the effect with its own graphics. If you want an effect like though, you've got to allow the system a lot more processing time to pull it off because it involves VDP1 sprites and VDP2 backgrounds. Surprisingly, this feature is also not hard to enable, it's just hard to budget time for.
Speed is the biggest reason why so many Saturn games have fake transparencies.
The bug aspect that you may have heard about is that the Saturn does tend to glitch out when doing polygon-on-polygon transparencies. The only Saturn game to do this in a non-hack fashion is Dead or Alive, and it does it only for the explosion that happens when someone goes outside the ring. The effect is so fast that it doesn't matter if it glitches.
Finally, there are hacks and shortcuts. VDP2 can make a layer of transparency over ALL graphics on the screen very easily, which is actually a very often-used effect. Also well-known is a hack that lets you make a VDP1 sprite transparent over a VDP2 background very efficiently, but with one compromise: any sprite that gets in between those two will simply disappear. Guardian Heroes did this with one character's red cape. Eventually, this hack was even implemented into Sega's later dev kits.
There, all you ever wanted to know about Saturn transparencies.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: Arkhan on April 09, 2012, 06:31:27 PM
did people piss and moan this much about transparency when SNES and shit were current? I know I didn't give a f*ck.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: spenoza on April 09, 2012, 07:16:22 PM
The bug aspect that you may have heard about is that the Saturn does tend to glitch out when doing polygon-on-polygon transparencies.
See, I used to think this, too. Now I'm not so sure of it. In fact, I bought into the whole "the Saturn is a true 2D machine" and "the PSX only used flat polys". It turns out I was wrong (partially). The only classic 2D stuff the Saturn does involves backgrounds. Saturn sprites ARE flat polys, or very nearly are, as far as I can tell. It has no separate 2D engine or blitter outside of its texturing capabilities. 2D sprites are basically a function of the texturing engine. Now, the Saturn does 3D differently than many systems in that it uses quads, and quads are better suited to 2D implementations than triangles. I don't know the full scope of the system's handling of transparent textures, but if it can do transparent sprites, it can do transparent textures. It may be that it can't do transparent solid-color or garoud-shaded polys, but it shouldn't have any problems with textured ones.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: SamIAm on April 09, 2012, 07:18:13 PM
My TV was too shit to make out most of those effects anyway.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: kazekirifx on April 09, 2012, 08:17:30 PM
The average person trying to decide which system to buy in the early 90's didn't give a shit whether or not true transparency could be achieved or not. As Zeta (I think) also pointed out earlier, Did the Turbo have Mortal Kombat, NBA Jam, or Ninja Turtles? No, no, and no. That along with the price, and the fact that most people didn't know anyone else who had one, and hadn't even heard of it doomed it to hardcore obscurity.
Obviously, the reason I liked Pac Man and E.T. on 2600 is because the Internets had told me how bad they were beforehand, and I was fully prepared for the worst. Then, being able to actually force some enjoyment out of them I was pleasantly surprised. Learning how to actually play and succeed at "the worst game of all time" was indescribably satisfying... (And for the record, the "How to Play" video on Youtube I believe was actually made in the 80's.... though I don't know how it was distributed back then. (Probably two boxtops from E.T. serial plus $10.95 S&H :P)) This is the same as the 'Waterworld effect' I experienced when I saw the movie Waterworld for the first time ever in about 2007 or 2008. Being prepared for an infamously bad movie made it pleasantly surprising to find some positive aspects in the experience.
I imagine people who got their first Turbo after 2000 or so probably also experienced the 'Waterworld effect' to some extent. They probably have a pretty good idea of what to expect from the system and certain games beforehand, thanks to Al Gore's Internets. But back in the day, it was so different. I wanted every game I bought for the Turbo to be the next Mario-killing blockbuster that would prove to all my friends how awesome the system was once and for all. Expectations that high tend to set one up for disappointment.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: SamIAm on April 10, 2012, 03:54:54 AM
The bug aspect that you may have heard about is that the Saturn does tend to glitch out when doing polygon-on-polygon transparencies.
See, I used to think this, too. Now I'm not so sure of it. In fact, I bought into the whole "the Saturn is a true 2D machine" and "the PSX only used flat polys". It turns out I was wrong (partially). The only classic 2D stuff the Saturn does involves backgrounds. Saturn sprites ARE flat polys, or very nearly are, as far as I can tell. It has no separate 2D engine or blitter outside of its texturing capabilities. 2D sprites are basically a function of the texturing engine. Now, the Saturn does 3D differently than many systems in that it uses quads, and quads are better suited to 2D implementations than triangles. I don't know the full scope of the system's handling of transparent textures, but if it can do transparent sprites, it can do transparent textures. It may be that it can't do transparent solid-color or garoud-shaded polys, but it shouldn't have any problems with textured ones.
Oh hey, I missed this. I was responding to Arkhan last time.
I'm not qualified to go into great depth on the subject, but I remember it was the conclusion of a bunch of homebrew guys on the board where I hung out. I also have personally seen the glitch in Dead or Alive - some polygons simply disappear when the effect is happening. AFAIK, it's exclusively a problem with polygon-on-polygon transparencies, and not a problem at all with polygon-sprite and polygon-background transparencies at all.
Who knows for sure, though. Anyway, yeah, the Duo. It was too expensive.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: jeffhlewis on April 10, 2012, 05:30:57 AM
and yes, the Atari 2600 version of Pac Man was a goddamn mess. It's not like Defender where its like "ok, this isn't as good as the arcade but it's still pretty good."
If you guys haven't already, you should really read the book "Racing the Beam" - it's a history and in-depth study of the VCS/2600 platform. They use popular games like Combat, Pac-Man and Pitfall as case studies, including studying the assembly code used in the games and the creative thinking that had to be used to make the 2600 do anything beyond very basic Combat-type games.
I knew very little about the 2600 going into the book (I was born in 81 so I missed most of the Atari age) but I found the talks about the architecture really interesting - basically the 2600 hardware was specifically designed to run a series of VERY basic games like Pong, combat and a BASIC editor, and that was it. Atari had planned to have that hardware around for a year or two. The guys who designed it never dreamed of being able to do anything approaching games like Pitfall and others - those games were really the product of a lot of creative thinking by the programmers and the fact that the 2600 didn't have a screen buffer, so game logic had to be performed while the screen was being redrawn (hence the book title). Programmers had to be fully aware of the registers keeping track of the current scanline and how many CPU clock cycles they had to run code between scanlines. really interesting stuff.
The book also goes over the absolute corporate insanity that brought about Pac-Man - the suits basically gave the programmer like 5 weeks to create the game. It's kind of amazing he was able to do it at all.
Link to the book: http://www.amazon.com/Racing-Beam-Computer-Platform-Studies/dp/026201257X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1334075025&sr=8-1
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: geise on April 10, 2012, 05:32:13 AM
As probably already stated by others:
Next to no advertisement (except small sections in game mags)
Anime and RPG's weren't mainstream yet
Next to no fighting games unless you imported
Shooting games were starting to die out in popularity
Next to no 3rd party support or Big Budget titles/Arcade hits
Already struggling for market share against Sega and Nintendo
Stores weren't promoting it and had it placed in small obscure parts of the store.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: Arkhan on April 10, 2012, 05:48:03 AM
and yes, the Atari 2600 version of Pac Man was a goddamn mess. It's not like Defender where its like "ok, this isn't as good as the arcade but it's still pretty good."
If you guys haven't already, you should really read the book "Racing the Beam" - it's a history and in-depth study of the VCS/2600 platform. They use popular games like Combat, Pac-Man and Pitfall as case studies, including studying the assembly code used in the games and the creative thinking that had to be used to make the 2600 do anything beyond very basic Combat-type games.
I knew very little about the 2600 going into the book (I was born in 81 so I missed most of the Atari age) but I found the talks about the architecture really interesting - basically the 2600 hardware was specifically designed to run a series of VERY basic games like Pong, combat and a BASIC editor, and that was it. Atari had planned to have that hardware around for a year or two. The guys who designed it never dreamed of being able to do anything approaching games like Pitfall and others - those games were really the product of a lot of creative thinking by the programmers and the fact that the 2600 didn't have a screen buffer, so game logic had to be performed while the screen was being redrawn (hence the book title). Programmers had to be fully aware of the registers keeping track of the current scanline and how many CPU clock cycles they had to run code between scanlines. really interesting stuff.
The book also goes over the absolute corporate insanity that brought about Pac-Man - the suits basically gave the programmer like 5 weeks to create the game. It's kind of amazing he was able to do it at all.
Link to the book: http://www.amazon.com/Racing-Beam-Computer-Platform-Studies/dp/026201257X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1334075025&sr=8-1
yeah. Activision had some good drugs back in the 80s. It is the only way I can explain that shit.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: spenoza on April 10, 2012, 06:33:25 AM
It is rather amusing to find out that the creator of E.T., considered one of the worst games ever, not just on the 2600, was also the creator of Yar's Revenge and Raiders of the Lost Ark, two of the better games on the 2600. The latter two games took a year or so to develop and for E.T. he was given 5 weeks, so that pretty much covers things, I think.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: Arkhan on April 10, 2012, 12:13:51 PM
It's no great surprise that Yars Revenge and Raiders took a year, where ET took 5 weeks.
In order to develop for Atari 2600, you first have to basically create your own library to access the video hardware. Seeing as Yar's Revenge was an early title, I'm sure Warshaw had to sit and dick around to figure everything out.
Raiders was more advanced than this, again requiring dicking around.
You can see reuse of some stuff he learned in those two games when you look at ET.
The programming isn't the actual problem with ET. The problem is the game concept itself leaves a lot to be desired. It's too ambitious. Most of those adventurey games are hit/miss. Raiders of the Lost Ark barely worked as it is.
ET Should have just been an arcade-like game. It should have been a few mini-games broken up into segments where you earn a piece of the phone.
Maybe have one that's like a mini pacman, grabbing reese pieces while avoiding the FBI/NASA people Then one where you're like running from left to right, like moon patrol, avoiding the FBI/NASA while you run thru the woods Then one where you are elliot steering the bike like Night Drivin' or some shit
bunch of crap like that, all ending with a space-ship flying "get ET's ship into space!" portion.
It would have worked better. Atari 2600's strong point is basic arcade games.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: NightWolve on April 10, 2012, 12:30:26 PM
!!!! Moon Patrol! Hey, we used to pass that game around on 5.25" floppies back in my High School days and when Radioshack's Tandy 1000 PC's were still in style!!! I just thought of something, too, Moon Patrol was actually my first "hack!" Eheh! If you could figure out how to use a hex editor on the DOS platform and edit a binary executable to change "Game Over" into "You Suck!" -- which was my chosen goal at the time -- well, then by God, that earned you your hacker credentials! That was my baptism right there! I didn't know dick about programming, but I sure could do a thing or two with a hex editor!! I don't get it though, you're like ~10 years younger than me and frighteningly far more retro than I am... ;)
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: Arkhan on April 10, 2012, 12:42:08 PM
I'm defective.
I hopped generation gaps, and threw up gang signs while doing it.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: geise on April 10, 2012, 02:31:50 PM
Arkhan rhymes with Retro "Can"
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: Arkhan on April 10, 2012, 02:59:31 PM
youre a retro can.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: Tatsujin on April 10, 2012, 03:29:08 PM
What is a retro can?
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: Arkhan on April 10, 2012, 03:50:57 PM
its like a retro bottle, but a can.
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: BigT on April 10, 2012, 04:39:04 PM
and yes, the Atari 2600 version of Pac Man was a goddamn mess. It's not like Defender where its like "ok, this isn't as good as the arcade but it's still pretty good."
If you guys haven't already, you should really read the book "Racing the Beam" - it's a history and in-depth study of the VCS/2600 platform. They use popular games like Combat, Pac-Man and Pitfall as case studies, including studying the assembly code used in the games and the creative thinking that had to be used to make the 2600 do anything beyond very basic Combat-type games.
I knew very little about the 2600 going into the book (I was born in 81 so I missed most of the Atari age) but I found the talks about the architecture really interesting - basically the 2600 hardware was specifically designed to run a series of VERY basic games like Pong, combat and a BASIC editor, and that was it. Atari had planned to have that hardware around for a year or two. The guys who designed it never dreamed of being able to do anything approaching games like Pitfall and others - those games were really the product of a lot of creative thinking by the programmers and the fact that the 2600 didn't have a screen buffer, so game logic had to be performed while the screen was being redrawn (hence the book title). Programmers had to be fully aware of the registers keeping track of the current scanline and how many CPU clock cycles they had to run code between scanlines. really interesting stuff.
The book also goes over the absolute corporate insanity that brought about Pac-Man - the suits basically gave the programmer like 5 weeks to create the game. It's kind of amazing he was able to do it at all.
Link to the book: http://www.amazon.com/Racing-Beam-Computer-Platform-Studies/dp/026201257X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1334075025&sr=8-1
Thanks for the recommendation. That sounds like a book right up my alley... sadly, my programming and hacking days are likely behind me as real life and a job in a totally unrelated field takes up 99% of my time, but I always enjoy reading about clever approaches to hardware limitations... As I was born in '81, the next generation of systems was more familiar to me... I wonder if there are any books like this pertaining to the 8/16 bit generations...
Title: Re: Turbo Duo...What went wrong?
Post by: Tatsujin on April 11, 2012, 04:10:34 AM
@Tatsujin: I'm adding that slowclap animated GIF to my PWN image collection. Thank you! ;) I guess my avatar would've worked for your purposes too, but eh, that one is kinda old.