speaking of hw limitations, the first time I played SMB Special on the pc8801 I remained speechless: it cannot handle scrolling, so what is the point to convert a game which bases most of his gameplay on the side scroll??
I guess the game industry was not much better in the 80s than it is now: as long as you can take some money from the brand...
Yeah, there's always been a dirty side to the industry driven by money rather than a desire to produce a good game. Movie tie-ins, bad ports of things far beyond the hardware etc. Many of them didn't have true scrolling which is why a large number of games will page flip, or scroll in 8-pixel tiles.
The real gems of the 8-bit (and some 16-bit) systems were the original titles, or original takes on popular arcades (call them rip-offs if you want..) but without the official branding.
It seems Japan didn't really have the same development culture at this point on computers, the vast majority of the software library on these thing seems to be arcade ports (some pretty good) and a couple of JRPGs that were ported to everything. Actual original software, and quirky ideas seem sorely lacking in their home market. It seems computers just weren't as popular, and there wasn't as much of a (home / indie / low-budget but original) development community around them, all the effort went into the closed platforms like the consoles, which might be why they're struggling these days.
It's good to see these systems emulated but it's quickly becoming apparent their software libraries can't hold a candle in terms of originality to those of the popular euro 8-bits, which surprises me.
