PSA: Do NOT help fund the Coleco Chameleon.

[yourbeliefs]

You may have heard about the Coleco Chameleon, which is supposed to be a console that could play older games as well as play newer, cartridge based ones.

What you may NOT know is that this thing has a VERY troubled past to say the least. First there was controversy about it's crowdfunding campaign:





Then the company fired petty attacks to its critics..



Then after the crowdfunding didn't go well, it rebranded itself as the Coleco Chameleon (note that it has NOTHING to do with the original Coleco company and is just a name, and in fact doesn't even support old Coleco Controllers)



THEN the company put out a prototype at a toy fair, and it was suspicious to say the least.



And now finally, a new prototype has been released, and it was revealed that the system is nothing more than an Atari Jaguar shell with a DVR capture card inside.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_4qn52MHI8

Truly a company behind this cannot be trusted, so in case you were curious or thinking about donating because all these "news" groups were reporting on it without doing any sort of damn research, now you know better.

 

[king3pj]

The Giant Bomb guys already ripped this thing pretty hard on one of their podcasts last week but it's good to see more evidence baking up their claims. Even without word that this is a shady product I can't say I have any interest in it.

There are already several choices for this kind of thing. I just took a look at Amazon and there are several different Retron consoles in prices ranging from $21 to $125 that have support for various cartridge based consoles depending on which model you choose.

The only thing I can see that these guys are doing that is different is that they are trying to get developers to make new, cartridge based games for their system. I can't imagine why any developer would want to pay to have cartridges manufactured when they can just release their games on Steam, Xbox Live, or PSN without the hardware constraints of these old systems. Even if you are making a retro-style 8-bit or 16-bit game I think those platforms make a lot more sense than making a cartridge for this system. There is a reason no one uses cartridges anymore.

 

[yourbeliefs]

Yeah Pat and Ian have talked about how there's really NO incentive for any developer to work with this system. The creators of this make a point that "Games won't need to be updated!" as a selling point, as if cartridge games in the past were never updated. News Flash: They were. It was not uncommon for major bugs to be discovered, which would lead the developer/publisher to release patched/updated versions of their games. The best example of this was The Legend of Zelda. The battery packs that saved data had an AWFUL bug where they'd just randomly lose all their saved data. I would know, because it happened to me personally. I was at the very end of LoZ. I had the red ring and knew where Gannon was but couldn't find the silver arrow. Then I went on a vacation and didn't play for a while and when I came back, all my saves were gone. I have more vivid memories of that than people from Dallas do of the Kennedy Assassination. Anyways in later copies they put a warning on the save screen telling people to hold down Reset when they saved so that the same thing wouldn't happen to them. And keep in mind, the Nintendo was a damn popular system, so it was okay for Nintendo and other companies to reprogram and resell their games. But for such a small market like the Chameleon? I think not.

On a side note, I HIGHLY recommend Pat The NES Punk's YouTube channel, as well as the Completely Unnecessary Podcast that he and Ian do (which is where all the clips above are from.) They do a Q&A on every show and they've actually answered quite a few questions that I've sent in. I found out about Pat from this famous Angry Video Game Nerd episode.

 

[yourbeliefs]

Colecovision (or rather, the holding company) is now demanding that the development team provide a true prototype within the next 7 days which will be inspected by an independent engineer to see what exactly is going on. If they're not satisfied, they're pulling their name and support of the project.

 

[yourbeliefs]

Well, it looks like the jig is up so to speak. First Coleco officially pulled their support of the project, and shortly afterwards the project's Facebook page AND website were taken offline.

http://www.engadget.com/2016/03/08/coleco-pulls-support-from-chameleon/

 

[ohioankev]

There is a reason no one uses cartridges anymore.

Even Nintendo was a generation late on ditching cartridges over CD.