Tech Tuesday – nD Indie Game Platform. Watch out Nintendo!

I'm a Nintendo fan. I love a lot of their games and I have a Wii and a Nintendo DS.  I owned a Gamecube and plan on upgrading to a WiiU when personal economics allow. But every now and then something really inspiring comes along to shake my loyalty to a well proven company or platform. This indie game platform, is starting to do that now.

nD is a new handheld gaming device being developed by Robert Pelloni, and the plan is to offer the device for about $10 and sell the games for it thru an App Store type of model that Apple is pretty well made the standard now. The specs for the device would be a 400MHz cpu, with a 320 x 240, 2.4 inch back lit screen, 16MB of internal RAM and 2GB of internal storage for games in the base model. All for $10. Excuse me while I pick my jaw up off the floor. For comparison, the Nintendo DS uses a 66MHz cpu and a Sony PSP uses a 333MHz cpu. So already it's a more powerful system and offers a higher resolution then the Nintendo DS.

The device will run a modified version Linux, have WiFi built in and is already starting out with a couple of games being developed for the platform. The other part is, the development of games is available to any home brew gamers. An SDK will be available soon, according to the website and developers will get 90% the revenue from their games through the nD store.

When I looked at this and read a little about it, it kind of reminded me of the GP-32, that was made by a Korean company, but was never really released in the US. But that was very open for home brew games and was at the time, something I would have seriously looked at buying if it was available here in the U.S. But the nD, going solely on the specs and the idea, does look fantastic on paper. Thy are working on getting venture capital funding for the project and hope to release it late this year or early 2011. Their target date is "Before the WiiU launch."

I am pretty revved up for this. I'm hoping that this really does take off and for the price, you can't really beat it.  So I'll be keeping an eye on it. I don't think it'll outsell Nintendo or Sony or Microsoft's platforms, but it will definitely bring the home brew game market and platform, a few steps closer to being a mainstream thing. What do you think about this? Would you get it based on the price? What kind of games would you like to see it?

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