I would imagine that I am a bit older than most of you. I was there when it all started with Pong machines and the Atari 2600. With a few exceptions there isn't really much reason to talk about either one of those things and stuff didn't start to get really captivating to the masses until the release of the NES. Things got really good once we entered the 16 bit era and it seemed like there was a new console, not just a new game, every other month or so.
one of those systems that basically just completely flopped in the United States was the NEC Turbo-Grafx 16. This was a system that I absolutely loved even though I only knew one other person that even owned one. It could prove difficult to find games for this system at all because it sold so poorly as a console, most of the time we had to order them from a shop, out of a catalogue and phone calls were involved. Yeah, it was a while ago. Also, since there was no internet or at least not one that anyone not in the military got to use, we had to rely on magazines or word of mouth to have any idea what to order next. For the most part the limitations of the TG-16 was it's own downfall but there were some gems on that machine that other machines either didn't or couldn't release. Here are my favorites.
Neutopia
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Hudson Soft brought us this gem and it was an extremely obvious Zelda ripoff. If they never got sued over this I would be surprised because they weren't even being covert about the aspects that they "borrowed" from the famous game franchise. If we were to color the main character green and show screenshots to people it would just be assumed that it was a Zelda game. It basically was and this is what made it so great. It was released before the SNES Zelda games so it was a real joy to have. The music was a strong point for the TG16 and they did a magnificent job with it. If I could find this game on an emulator I would play it today, it's that good.
Splatterhouse
Let's be honest here, Splatterhouse is NOT a great game. As side scrolling action platformers are concerned it is actually extremely weak. The controls are clunky, the enemies are very predictable, and there isn't much variety in this very short game that is meant to be completed in one go. What made it special was how they were really pushing the boundaries of what is considered acceptable in games at the time. We were very puritan back then and violence of this magnitude in games was still frowned upon by a lot of people. I think most people bought this game not because it was good, but because it was so taboo. It's probably really tame by today's standards but there was a time that this would have upset a lot of people's parents if they knew that their kids had it.
Dungeon Explorer
The thing that made this game so great was a couple of things actually. We had just departed the arcade craze time period of a legendary game called Gauntlet that was a massive success. That game had 4 classes that you could play as and most of them were basically the same. In Dungeon Explorer there was something like 8 different classes but again, they mostly behaved the same. To have a game that actually looked BETTER than the arcade version of Gauntlet on your TV at home was amazing. It was some of the most fun I ever had with a co-op local game and me and my gaming nerd neighbor pal played through this dozens of times.
It functioned basically exactly the same as Gauntlet but it had bosses as well. To make things even better, it was the first game that I ever played that had procedurally generated maps, so every playthrough, aside from the order in which you encounter the bosses, was going to be unique.
There were graphical limitations of course, this was 1990 after all, but the music combined with the fact that the game was going to be a bit different every time you played through it, made this one of my favorite games that I ever played on any console. There was some controversy created by over-active Christian parents who didn't like the fact that a lot of the names of characters were taken from the bible including Judas and the main baddy being named "NATAS". At least they have the good sense to not outright name it "Satan."
I suppose this kind of game could be seen as an early precursor to what would eventually be known as Diablo.
The Turbografx was a huge flop in the States from NEC's standpoint and other than peripherals, they never really tried again to enter the market. For those of us that had this machine, all 17 of us, we had a lot of fun with it though.