The Turbo Grafx-16 was created by two companies, Hudson and NEC, and primarily marketed by NEC who manufactured it too (I believe it used technology that Hudson owned or something, not sure on the relationship 100%). Anyhow, long story short, the North American company was in constant battles internally with the Japanese "parent" company (this was how it was back in the day, Japan was the headquarters for companies and called the shots for most). NEC/TTI in North America didn't have much control over what titles they brought out over here.

Titles such as Street Fighter II, Gradius and Salamander were planned but the Japanese parent dropped the ball as far as North American release of those titles and many others. Basically, the North American company was hogtied, handcuffed and left to flounder in whatever success it could muster based on it's extremely limited resources.

That is why we got many crappy titles and hardly any of the good ones. When TTI was formed though, there was supposed to be more control put in the hands of the North American company but it was too little too late. All licensing deals still had to go through the Japanese parent company so it was still a convoluted mess to get anything that wasn't an NEC of Japan release over in North America.

Sorry for double post, must have been when my net access was messing up.

I think every system has this kind of gap but with a smaller library the bad games stand out more. The NES gave us both Super Mario 3 and MC Kids. If those were the only two platformers to choose from it would look a lot like the platformer selection on the TurboGrafx-16. The NES had so many more games to pad out the library and make it more balanced.

Shapeshifter is a good example of why CD gaming stumbled at first - the producers of that game invested more time in music and recorded dialog than on actual game play. There were some titles, like the Ys or Lunar games, that used the CD format extremely well. Unfortunately many others just used it to slap new audio tracks on games that would otherwise have fit on a cartridge.

tg16 did not have native parallel scrolling abilities, but some programers worked out how to do it. this could be partly why some games look better than others but mostly as mentioned, it would be the production quality overal. i would not guess it's hard to program for a tg16 as it is for a saturn or jaguar. the tg16 cd might be another story.

The TG-16 is apparently tough to program for, at least from what I have heard back from some people doing it with homebrew titles. It is quite a cobbled together system, 8-Bit CPU, 16-Bit graphics blotter chip and such, it is almost as bad as the Jaguar or Saturn in being parts shoved into a case.

i'd guess that like the jaguar where most games were coded as 32 bit games, perhaps tg16 a lot were coded with 8bit graphics. perhaps the earlier games didnt utilise the full graphic capabilities.

the difference would be super mario bros for nes and super mario bros for snes, not a huge difference but it's there