RE: Game Gear (portable gaming thinger): Superior console that failed
I owned a Game Gear and spent many hours on Sonic, Columns, Space Harrier and the few other games I had for it. I sold it a few years back though. The screen, while vastly superior to the Game Boy still doesn't hold up very well today.
I don't think including the Master Gear converter would have made much difference in North America because the Sega Master System was never really that popular here. In places like Europe and South America it was much more popular though and it might have helped in those places.
The Atari Lynx was another superior system that suffered from the same obstacles (price, relatively short battery life and relatively few games.) Then there was the Turbo Express of course but same problems (it had more games but still far fewer than game boy and it was the most expensive of the portable systems). To this day no one has managed to really compete with Nintendo in the portable market unless you count the phone market.
all great points. The Turbo Express was awesome. It was essentially the same thing as the Turbo Grafx16. I just generally loved that system and the little credit card games were appealing to me as well.
I remember the Atari Lynx. I think that between me and my super nerd neighbor that it was the only portable system that neither one of us ever bought - we didn't get the Jaguar either. I really wanted to like those 2 systems and I wish they had done better, because I hated to see Atari leave the gaming realm for purely patriotic reasons.
I had a Turbo Express for a while (long after it was gone from the market though). I got rid of it too because of the low quality screen. By the standards of the day it was an incredible screen but I just find the screens of all those old portable systems hard to look at now. I would rather play the games via emulation on a screen that is larger, has no motion blur and better contrast. I still have a Lynx but I haven't played it in ages.
I had an Atari Jaguar but got rid of that too. I kind of wish I had kept that one though. There weren't many good games for that system but there were a few.
Speaking of Atari, this looks interesting: https://atarivcs.com/