Nintendo iQue

[evilmess]

The iQue Player (or in Chinese "Gods Playing Machine") is a new Nintendo console to be released by mid-October.

http://www.lik-sang.com/news.php?artc=3198

The interesting bits
Nintendo 64 Nano-Technology inside
Updateable Operating System
Possible release outside of China

http://www.ique.com/

How are 2 player games handled?

[Ed Oscuro]

Whoa, with copyright on the title screens and all...

...Mao you're talking? I wonder what he'd have to say about this...

Anyhow, glad to see updates on this! I'll certainly be picking up one some way or other :D

Text boxes look really odd with just Chinese text, though.

[Captain Wrong]

Woah! Is that for real? I mean that just seems like piracy waiting to happen and I can't believe Nintendo would be that careless. Plus, it just looks kind of cheap in a way that Nintnedo's hardware doesn't.

(And people really gotta quit with naming things the "i" something. Gaah, even that sounds cheap.)

[Ed Oscuro]

The term i-Que doesn't really make sense to me; to a British person it would seem to imply bad things about load times...

It does look cheap, yeah, but that's the goal of the thing after all.

[Scoots]

Well, maybe to an illiterate Brit....

[Ed Oscuro]

Or how about "they could easily make a pun," then.

[hydr0x]

ooooooooold news :D

[Ed Oscuro]

No, it's news. If you checked the link you'd see that all this new stuff came out today. Oops!

[whoisKeel]

what's with that aweful D-pad?

[Lady Jaye]

Yeah, I don't understand this: if it's made by Nintendo (or at least under license from Nintendo), why doesn't it use Nintendo's classic D-pad? That alone would make it seem more dubious than anything else. Unless you can say that Nintendo out-pirated itself... :hmm:

[hezeuschrist]

Originally designed to be released in China where piracy runs rampant. That's why it's so cheap.

[jonjandran]

I can't stand playing n64 games if it's not on an emulator anyway.
It's to darn fuzzy, gives me a headache, and this is probably the exact same crappy graphics.

[Ed Oscuro]

The D-pad probably isn't as bad as it looks. I'm guessing it was placed below the joystick so it would be easier to play SNES era games.

[kevincure]

This is a real Nintendo product, not a pirate or anything like that. I'd guess they're trying to set up business relationships in China, which, after all, has the fastest-growing middle class in the world. The general rule in Economics is that once adjusted income goes over $5000, people start buying luxuries likes videogame systems. Many, many Chinese are approaching this level, and thus Nintendo sees a golden opportunity.

(Interestingly, Sony has been the most proactive in tackling the non EU/US/Japan game market - I'm pretty sure they have Ps1 officially released with support in India and the Arab World, among other neglected markets. The problem in many of these areas (and places like Latin America) is that no one wants to pay more than a couple bucks for a game, since they've been buying pirated games for a decade.)

[Ed Oscuro]

The point about the Arabic world and India is important...I can't see how Sony can rely on selling their PS2 in those markets, which makes their release of the PSX and Nintendo's re-release of older games on new(ish) hardware all the more brilliant.

[evilmess]

Nintendo fans / collector are probably going to want one of these because it's a novelty item that is an official Nintendo product.

Notice how it already has the clone form factor but this baby has much better technology inside. So for the intended market it looks ready to compete with the clones and the games already exist so it looks like Nintendo has a good product on their hands.

Low cost
Existing game library
Unique software distribution

Is the N64 heavily pirated or cloned? Software, hardware?

[Jorpho]

I've heard that the N64 is actually quite difficult to pirate. Here we are...

http://assembler.roarvgm.com/Black_market/Grey_N64/grey_n64.html

Of course, there are still copiers.

[davidbrit2]

Man, they really found a way to produce the thing for almost nothing. That can't be more than $40 of production per unit. If they can make a good amount from the individual units, they won't really get screwed by piracy. After all, they're releasing translations of somewhat old games on writable media. The price point of the games should easily compete with the available pirate stuff.

And by the way, how on earth did they fit Dr. Mario, Mario 64, Star Fox, Zelda 64, and Wave Race onto a 64 MB card???

[Jive3D]

on the card that comes with it upon first purchase ONLY Dr. Mario is a full game.

All the other games on there are TIME LIMITED DEMOS.
so that's how they fit it all on there.

Probably have reoccuring music tracks too to save space on sound and whatnot.

[davidbrit2]

Yeah, that's the basic model, but Lik Sang is offering a version with all full versions on a 64 MB card for $30 more.