The reason that the Nintendo products are called “iQue” in China is because Japan and China really, uh, aren’t in the best standing with each other. A product that does not have a Japanese sounding name is more likely to sell. That’s why Nintendo avoids using their real company name as much as possible.

That seems almost weird seeing something so very Nintendo-y look like a (for lack of a better phrase) cheap Chinese knock-off

It’s weird that the unit still has the “Nintendo” logo on the top.

I hope Sin and Punishment comes out on the DS. After all, it was released for the iQue.

DS in china will cost like 60 dollars. In china, all games are on flashcards, you can go to a kiosk, pay like 4 dollars and get games flashed to your card. If they were not cheap, everything would be sold illegally anyway.

So is this like that N64 thing where all the games are built in?

The ones sold in malls? No, those were actually illegal.

If I’m not mistaken, there was a device released in China by Nintendo called the “iQue” that allowed people with it to download games onto flash cards at bookstores and the like. This was to curb the ludicrus amount of piracy of Nintendo games there. If I remember correctly, it could play NES, SNES and N64 games. I imagine this is named “iQue” DS, just so the product recognition will remain among Chinese consumers. The evasion of a Japanese brandname is also a good point.

(Hell, there may have been an article about the iQue here on 4cr. I remember reading about it somewhere…)

Yeah, I wrote an article here:
http://www.4colorrebellion.com/archives/2005/06/02/nintendo- ique

I was speaking to my Chinese friend about Ique and he was saying that it’s really unpopular because people don’t want to play old games when they could just go and download new ones for free. He doesn’t really get the whole piracy = illegal jig. I’m guessing they’re releasing the Ds over there because they’ve got a pretty tight piracy prevention on the Ds.

You know, I’ve always thought that sounds like ‘iPod’, ‘iMac’ and ‘iTunes’ and so on… even the shiny blue logo has the same ring to them.