New Console!!!! (sort of…)

By: Dan | November 12th, 2008
Editorial | News

Break out the champagne and Velveeta, freaks and geeks, because the home console market is about to get a little more crowded.

Toy manufacturer Tectoy has just announced that they will be bringing a brand new console called “Zeebo” into a home near you. There are a few downsides, though. For one thing, when I say “a home near you”, that doesn’t really apply unless you live in Brazil. That’s right, the Zeebo is exclusive to Brazil for the time being.

The other downside? Well, unfortunately, the Zeebo just isn’t all that impressive on paper. Early reports are indicating that it should have processing power similar to that of a hyped up PSP. Also, rather than playing disc based games, the Zeebo will play downloadable games exclusively. This is probably an anti-piracy measure as game piracy has been something of a problem for existing consoles in Brazil up until now.

Tectoy plans to ship Zeebo with 6 games pre-installed including what looks to be a port of the original Quake. There also appears to be a Sonic game of some sort on the way, but there’s not much info available just yet and what info is out there is mostly in Portuguese.

So the Zeebo might not be the next big thing in most markets. It’s still nice to see not everyone has given up on the Brazilian gaming market where, if memory serves, they were still selling the Sega Master System as little as 5 years ago.

We’ll keep you updated on the Zeebo as Tectoy makes new information available.