Topic: A Revolution in China?

[UncleBob]

Here's a good question for ya.

How will piracy and the Virtual Console play together in a market such as China?

[odifiend]

If China is in Nintendo's sight, it is peculiar that they would have now switched from their proprietary format to DVDs.  It seems like it would be a lot wiser to release a special chinese focused edition of the console (own name and own format) rather than jeopardize the momentum they were gathering with their existing markets.

[AnyoneEB]

odifiend: As I understand it, the Wii's disc format is just as much a DVD as the GCN's format is a mini-DVD: same technology, but implemented in such a way that it is completely incompatible with regular DVD readers/writers.

[Terranigma Freak]

Bloodworth, you missed the point. The point is: if you can't play pirated games on the system, it won't be popular in China.

As for games like Zelda and Metroid, I know Zelda has been pirated (I've seen a GB Zelda game with OOT boxart and screen shots), but they don't sell very well. The Chinese simply don't give a damn about good gameplay. Nintendo destroys piracy, so even though the games are pirated, it's hard to get it into people's hands. Outside of Mario, Nintendo has no big name killer-app for the Chinese market. Admittingly, I haven't been back to China for 6 years now, so perhaps the I-Que managed to gain some tiny bit of popularity there. Or maybe not.

[18 Days]

Sorry sorry but how is Wii a more communist name than Revolution? Did anyone address this?

[Kairon]

"Wii" is more friendly to dictatorships (which is what communism seems to become after its initial spark) than "revolution."

LOL, this is an entertaining train of thought.

~Carmine M. Red
Kairon@aol.com

[mantidor]

I dont think that revolution is friendly or unfriendly towards dictatorships, but controversial, and is better to avoid using the term.

[AnyoneEB]

Uh, who said you can't pirate GCN games? You really think the pirates in China are burning pirated PS2 games? They press them, just like the publisher does (sometimes in the exact same factory). I do not think that pressing a GCN disc is significantly more difficult than pressing a DVD. On the other hand, producing cartridges is a lot more expensive than producing discs (which is one of the reasons why all the 3rd parties went for PSX over N64), so PSX was probably a lot more popular than N64 because the games would have been a lot cheaper.

[ruby_onix]

Quote
Originally posted by: mantidor
oh yeah I was sure you knew about piracy in China, I was confirming that for some odd reason, in the early days of piracy with the Famicom/NES, Zelda and Metroid were almost never pirated and thus became unknown in the region ("That guy is a woman!?", I get that a lot around here when playing metroid, even among what we could call traditional gamers). Im sure that being Zelda the first cartridge with a battery backup made things difficult for pirates, but I have no idea why Metroid was also left behind.

Metroid and Zelda were Famicom Disk System games, not Famicom games. That's probably where the disconnect comes from.

Since FDS games were writable, they often had save features, but the FDS didn't come out in America, so they had to work their way around it. That's why Metroid had such a huge and complicated password system (the Justin Bailey password apparently didn't exist in the original FDS version, because it didn't have passwords). The battery backup was invented for the American version of Zelda 1.

But I was under the imnpression that the Famicom Disk System was bootlegged to all heck. Because all you had to do was put together some custom disks, and then you could easily write whatever game you wanted onto them.

And the HK guys didn't even stop there. They bootlegged the American NES versions (as Famicom carts). I've got a couple of those. And I don't have one, but I've heard that there's even an HK version of Metroid for the Famicom out there, where they took the original FDS version and put it onto a battery backup Famicom cart, and it's supposed to be better than either the NES or FDS versions.

Here's a pic of some cool FDS bootlegs, for your enjoyment.

http://img152.imageshack.us/img152/9330/fdsgames5px.jpg

Notice how none of the disks actually have "Nintendo" stamped into them, and how Mario 3 says it's supposed to be played in a Game Doctor.

[mantidor]

I never catched a famicom disk system around here, but I had my experience with funny material as well, like a Sonic-Mario, Pikachu-Mario and other weird spinoffs, or the 1001 games in one which were all Super Mario Bros with modifications, like gravity, speed, enemies, etc, there was one with gravity modified so much that you could jump huge leaps and could bypass the final flag easily, leading to a never ending scrolling world.
 

[UncleBob]

When I saw the Power Players at a mall once, they had a demo playing of "MC Mario" - which was "MC Kids" with a Mario Sprite replacing the kids.
It was odd seeing Mario next to Ronald McDonald.

[wandering]

Quote
Here's a good question for ya.

How will piracy and the Virtual Console play together in a market such as China?

The virtual console, I think, would be key to success in china. I'm thinking downloadable cheap new Wii games/old classic games is all Nintendo would be interested in selling over there. I'm sure people will find a way to pirate virtual console games, but they should be cheap enough that it won't matter as much.