Nuon
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Note: This page was copy pasted from the Crappy Games Wiki on Miraheze instead of imported due to the Qualitipedia wikis being deleted.
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 The most obscure “game console” ever.
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The Nuon was a "game console" released in 2000 but announced in 1997 as the Project X. It was developed by VM Labs before they went bankrupt in 2001.
Why It Flopped
- The Nuon isn't actually a game console, but a chip added to several DVD players to enhance the features and play video games. This made marketing a bit of an issue as VM Labs wasn't sure what to focus on.
- Units were produced by manufactured by Toshiba, Motorola, and Samsung, but very few models out of their wider ranges of DVD players added the tech, so it was widely overlooked.
- Its price point varied, but the very first model, the Samsung N2000, sold for $500 (it later came down to $349). There was zero fanfare to announce the release (not even a standard press release), with models just showing up on sites like CDW.com back in June of 2000.
- Only eight games were released for Nuon, with the first wave of major releases coming in December of 2000, six months after the N2000 had hit the market. Many more were planned but the Nuon was canceled before they could be released, although a lot of them were "casual games" that VM Labs thought would appeal to the broad market.
- Each manufacturer included different pack-ins, such as Ballistic coming with the Samsung players or The Next Tetris coming with the Toshiba model. While Ballistic was available for purchase separately, The Next Tetris was not, although it was a major rush job and lacked basic things like backgrounds or a 2-player mode (the latter because the Nuon dev kit that the devs were given only supported one player).
- Because it was released in 2000, it went up against the PlayStation 2, which was only $299 and could also play DVDs. In addition, the PlayStation 2 already had 29 launch titles as well as backwards compatibility with original PlayStation games, while the Nuon didn't have any more games available for it until a couple of weeks before Christmas 2000.
- The controllers were essentially rip-offs of the Nintendo 64 controller design, although some didn't use an analog stick. While VM Labs had promised a save card for their games, one never came along so players had to use password systems to track progress on Nuon games. You could use the DVD remote to control games if a controller wasn't available, but this was often pointless and not fun to use.
- VM Labs had also promised online features, allowing users to purchase items they saw in the film, but this never came to be.
- Only four DVDs were released with "Nuon-enhanced" functionality, most of which were horrible. Except for the Planet of the Apes DVD, which was positively received by DVD reviewers.
- It often could take a few minutes to load a game on start, although once loaded, load times within the game were fast.
- One of the games, which were based on the Crayon Shin-chan manga series, was released on a Korean Nuon system that was region locked and cannot be played unless you have that Korean system. Of course this wasn't a big issue, since not many outside of Korea (along with its home country of Japan and Southeast Asia) really care about the IP.
Redeeming Qualities
- It has an updated version of Tempest 2000 called Tempest 3000 that is exclusive to this console.
- Freefall 3050 A.D., while strange, is rather unique in that you are in constant freefall while dodging obstacles and fighting enemies. This was a Nuon exclusive until a Steam release came along in 2019.
- Every Nuon model came with a built-in audio visualizer that was known as the VLM-2. This was a "sequel" to the VLM that appeared on the equally obscure Jaguar CD, and was developed by the same person, Jeff Minter. This would activate when playing an audio CD, and by using the controller, users could change the effects and interact with the psychedelic graphics. Different effects came with different Nuon players.
- All models allowed users to use some of the Nuon features, such as the zoom, multi-angle & strobe video functions. These features are uncommon even on modern DVD or Blu-Ray players, but they were a bit gimmicky. Quality of these functions varied between players (ex. the N2000 had 20x zoom, while the Toshiba SD-2300 only did 16x). Nuon Enhanced DVDs included more features like gamma corrected zooms with annotations on things in a scene, but again, this was mainly just a gimmick.
- The Samsung N2000 is a pretty versatile DVD player that had extensive audio options, including Dolby Digital & DTS support, optical or coaxial out ports, HDCD support, N-2-2 spatializer support (pseudo-3D sound), an external audio jack with it's own volume knob. It also supported composite, S-Video & component video.
Videos
Trivia
- The Nuon could be seen as a spiritual successor to the Atari Jaguar, since many of the people involved in its development, including the hardware designer, either worked at Atari or on the Jaguar hardware itself. Two of the games were also direct sequels to Atari Jaguar games (Tempest 3000 and Iron Soldier 3); A third known as Merlin Racing was designed by the same company that created Atari Karts, with MR serving as a spiritual successor to AK.
- The Nuon chip was a 128-bit multi-core processor that was powerful enough that it could do real-time raytracing in fullscreen, something of a feat for 2000. It was also claimed that developers could port games from other systems like the PC, PlayStation or Dreamcast to the hardware in a matter of weeks instead of months or years.
- The first controller prototypes for the system were called "The Claw" by development staff and featured six action buttons, two shoulder buttons, a D-pad, and an analog stick. At some point during development, the decision was made to abandon this design and just straight up copy the Nintendo 64 controllers.
- The controllers have become exceedingly rare and thus command high prices when they do show up on marketplaces.
- In early 2021, Songbird Productions produced a re-issue of Eclipse's Iron Soldier 3. Prior to this, the game was among the rarest Nuon releases, since a bug in the original production version caused a recall, then shortly after that VM Labs declared bankruptcy.
- The controller that shipped with the Samsung N2000 was dubbed "The Batwing Controller" since it looks like it belongs in Batman's utility belt.
- When it was known as Project X, there was a rumor spread through game magazines that the reason that Sony included a DVD player in the PlayStation 2 was that they were afraid of what Project X was promising to do to DVD players, although this has never been confirmed by any Sony executive.
- The initial release version of the processor, codenamed Aries 1 & Aries 2, ran at 54MHz, while the last version called Aries 3 ran at 108MHz and had other improvements in its memory caches. The Aries 3 was used in the RCA Nuon models and the Samsung N504/505 European players. All of those players did not come with Nuon controller ports, however, and no official software was designed to take advantage of the Aries 3 improvements.
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