nuon, the best gaming system nobody knew about

You probably know this about me already. As I noted in this earlier post, I'm a gamer. Which is tough, because I still don't have a modern gaming system.

At the beginning of this decade/century/millenium, I rolled the dice and missed on Nuon (see the Dome for more information about what Nuon is). Nuon was a game chip produced by the now-defunct VM Laboratories to go into DVD players. A few players were produced, primarily the Toshiba SD-2300 and the Samsung N501 along with a couple of other models. It was a DVD player that was also a game system (compare to Playstation 2 which was a game system that also played DVDs). I have one Toshiba and one Samsung.

There were only 7 commercially produced games released for this system. One of those, Iron Soldier 3, was the rarest and is still very hard to get. It is the only game that I don't have. I was the 2nd highest bidder about 3 times in a row at about $60 years ago. The price skyrocketed after that and I've never gotten one. But I have had all of the others all along.

Nuon was a good system, IMHO just as good as Playstation 2. It's still the best game system I've got.

Tonight, 5 year old kcrazorback daughter asked if she could play the game with the "animals that drive the cars." The flagship game for Nuon was Merlin Racing. This game is cart racing at its best. It is a fantastic game--unfortunately, the others weren't all done with the same quality. But a quick shout out to two of those other games that were well done: Tempest 3000 is Tempest like you remember from 25 years ago and very well done while Freefall 3050 AD is unlike anything else you've ever played, is very challenging and I have not really learned to play it yet.

There is a very small number of developers cranking out homebrew games which do work on some Nuon players (not the Toshibas). There were lots of other commercial games in development at the time the system went belly up as well--who knows maybe someday some of those will be distributed. I doubt it because the folks with rights to them are out of business, but you never know.

If you find a Nuon system on the cheap (ebay, garage sale, thrift shop, whatever), grab it and find out what the rest of the world has been missing.

Meanwhile I've got to go get kcrazorback daughter more interested in gaming if we're ever going to talk mom into getting us a Wii.