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Nintendo Revolution Controller Revealed
kakos writes "At the Tokyo Game Show, Nintendo president Satoru Iwata has revealed what the Nintendo Revolution controller looks like. The new controller is a radical departure from traditional controller types. Has Nintendo struck gold with their new controller design? The reviewers seem to think so. It should be interesting to see how gamers react to Nintendo's new innovation."
HELL. YES. I just watched the video off of IGN's website, in one part, there was a guy using it as a sword. You could hear them clang. This has to happen, George, I hope your up late like me watching this because this has to happen.
Is it just me, or do you hate it when people say "Is it just me..."?
Here are some examples.
:)
Let's start off with the most obvious implementation: FPS. A genre that drives the PS2 and XBox (and dominates computers) will thrive on the Gamecube. Gone is the fiddling with the joystick. A quick flip of the controller, and you've completely turned around. Aiming is no longer tense; your hand eye coordination will allow you to better attack your enemies using a 3d mouse than with a regular controller (think about how many people are about FPS on the computer.)
Don't like FPS? Let's ignore that and move to a love of the Nintendo community: Zelda. Want to see Link do more than just two directions with his sword? No problem, since you will be controlling his sword. When you swing your arm, Link swings his. When you jab, so does he.
Want to control how tense your bow string is? Pull out the bow and arrow, go into first person mode, and extend your arm. Press a button to lock the start position, and pull back as far as you want.
Zelda isn't your thing? How about some fishing. A whip of the controller and you're casting off. You can bob the line back and forth, left and right.
And the accessories for the controller; you can be sure that these will be fairly inexpensive, meaning that companies can throw in their own little controller to add more depth to the game. How about hooking up the headphone set to talk to your buddies in online games to the controller instead of having to have an entire other attachment to the Revolution?
Now imagine that you hold the controller vertically. You're playing Star Fox. You move the controller, just like in a real jet fighter, and the plane moves with you.
Plus, you have a controller that is in one hand only. This means you can eat cheetos and play games at the same time.
The possibilities for this seem endless. Nintendo was not kidding when they named this the Revolution; we are on the edge of virtual reality, the thing that every geek has longed for since we saw the Holodeck in Star Trek: TNG. What Nintendo is doing is taking the big, hulking interactive setups of yesterday's arcades and turning them into the remote of tomorrow's homes.
You no longer control the machine; you control the character itself. Your arm swing is its arm swing. Your aim is its aim. As we've seen with DDR, gaming is turning into more of a physically interactive medium. With this controller, gone are the days of sitting around on the couch fumbling with the controller. Now, if not standing, you're leaning forward or sitting up straight, slashing with your might or blowing a hole in someone's stomach.
Just imagine if they put out pairs of goggles that really gave you the whole FPS feel.
I think Nintendo has a good chance of winning this round.
Another neat thought while we're indulging ourselves. What if some games allowed you to use two controllers in conjunction with each other? Imagine dual wields pistols, or knives, or even, saw a bow an arrow: you'd aim with one controller and pull back on the string with the other. This could truly open up the video game industry to a whole host of intuitive controls.
Or it could not. Of coursem, how intuitive the controls are are due to the interface design of the game. So let's just hope that game developers are able to exloit this to its fullest potential.
In the beginning the universe was created. This made a lot of people very angry and is widely considered as a bad move.
Powerglove was interfaced with sensors on the TV, it was horribly unresponsive. With the Revolution controller having an internal gyroscope, responsiveness should be perfect!
Satoru Iwata has said, again and again, that he wants to open gaming up. When Hiroshi Yamauchi stepped down, he left some words for Nintendo:
"As I retire from management, I have no words to share. Coincidental to my leaving the company, I would like to make one request: that Nintendo give birth to wholly new ideas and create hardware which reflects that ideal. And make software that adheres to that same standard. Furthermore, this software should attract consumers as new and interesting. Lastly, and of equal importance, is completing these products quickly and at a cost comparable to today's current market. I imagine most people question the feasibility of my request, but Nintendo has always pursued those objectives..."
I've watched the Microsoft and Sony and Nintendo E3 presentations. Sony and Microsoft both repeated the same thing -- we want to be the most powerful machines, and we have them here! Nintendo said, we want our machine to be easy to play and easy to develop for.
Sony said that they wanted to be a media hub. Microsoft said they wanted to break out of the male 18-34 demographic -- right before they stereo typed girls as casual gamers! Nintendo said they had something they felt would include more people in the games.
How about the games? I own Wario Ware: Twisted. It has some of the technology Nintendo has applied to the Revolution controller inside of it. It detects my hand motions, and uses those as means of control. I also have Wario Ware: touched! Between the two, you can quite clearly see that the folks at Nintendo are playing with various games and methods of controlling them (while also delivering interesting gameplay!).
While I am male and in the 18-34 demographic, I don't buy Madden every year. I don't want to buy another WW2 shooter. I don't feel like joining a 5-hour raid in WOW. I just want to have fun. I want to be able to have fun around my school, work, family, etc. I want to involve my friends and family in my fun when I can. The games Sony and Microsoft were showing weren't the games I can see doing that for me. Nintendo's games still do it for me 20 years later.
I don't think Nintendo is in trouble for this next generation.
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
I like the idea, except for one thing- It shows the add-on setup using this second controller with an analog joystick that plugs into the first controller via a short cord. I really think it would be a lot better if they didn't have the cord there.
You can see in the video that the guy pretending to be playing a FPS and wielding the first controller as a sword is having to hold that second one up to his chest. The experience would look so much more natural if he could move his arms independent of one another.
And I can't be certain from just these articles, but it doesn't look like it has gyroscopic feedback- like using gyroscopic inertia to make it feel like you're carrying something heavy, or that your sword has hit something, or that your tennis racket has hit a ball, etc. It would seem a must to me.
Actually, what I think would be ideal would be two identical wireless controllers, each with 1 analog stick, 2 trigger buttons, and 1 combination ABCD/D-pad (because we all know they're pretty much the same) as well as gyroscopic sensors and feedback. Basically break a PS controller in two.
And the reason we have the controllers we have today are because Nintendo basically invented them. The D-pad, the analog stick, the shoulder button, force feedback/rumble vibration, the analog button, these are all timely Nintendo innovations that were copied by the rest of the industry.
Whenever new funcitons are necessary for gaming, they can be easily adapted to the controler and be utilized.
Of course in a day down the road, the functions and actions in game will require for a complete and revolutionary controller.
On the contrary, I think that there comes a point where you have to make some fundamental changes to the controller setup before certain types of gameplay can be realized in a fun and worthwhile fashion. How many people would be playing Dance Dance Revolution if it had never been paired with a "dance mat" controller?
It seems to me we've reached a functional plateau with regards to the "output" we receive from video games, the video and the audio. Sure, the graphics continue to improve, but better graphics aren't really going to change the gameplay experience that much. Also, the addition of sheer processing power isn't going to add much to the equation either, aside from perhaps slightly better bot AI and more complex simulations.
No, right now it seems that technologically, the only thing you can feasibly change to produce a revolutionary leap forward in the gaming experience is to alter the way the player interfaces with the game.
Is it too soon for this kind of "paradigm shift"? Maybe, but I don't think so. Now's the time to start experimenting, when the current crop of controllers has grown stale and even the weakest of the CPU/GPU entrants are going to be capable of producing stunning visuals, and online play is reaching maturity as a standard feature.
I think this was the right time for Nintendo to make this move. Nintendo isn't shooting themselves in the foot "again". They're a profitable company that knows pretty well by now what they're doing. They've had a few missteps (all of the players have) but they are breaking new ground, and while they may not be dominating the market again (yet), they are doing something Sony and Microsoft really haven't been doing with as much success as far as I can tell, and that is that Nintendo is essentially creating new gamers by appealing people other than 19 year old males.
I sincerely doubt this will prove a "fatal" move for Nintendo even the console doesn't catch on like it has the potential to. Nintendo may regress further into providing a niche role in the market, where they can still be a "success" in terms of greatly satisfying their customers while turning a profit ... or they may prove a success on a "revolutionary" scale and be "The" company once again ... whereas Microsoft and Sony find them in a perhaps somewhat less enviable position, one where they vie for supremacy by means of a pissing contest that has both of them producing expensive juggernauts of consoles that will likely serve as "loss leaders" for the both of them for a good long while, in a battle that may leave many customers upset at their ultimate choice of a console ("damn, I'm not really enjoying this $400 toy as much as I thought I was going to!") and one company or the other ultimately losing money from the venture instead of earning it ... or not ... I'm not an expert on this stuff, but this is how it seems to based on various articles and such that I've read.
Where did you here that this controller had a gyroscope? They only mentioned that was what people were rumoring.
I reckon it will work similar to modern virtual reality wands, with the mentioned sensors presumably doing a good job of finaggling the position of the wand. Note this is very similar to how the power glove worked, its just that the technology has gotten a LOT better due to over a decade of research in VR which seems to just now be poised to make an entrance into consumer market.
I've had the chance to play with this kind of stuff in CAVE and related applications, and it always seemed like it could be so much more, if only for some really solid software interface engineering...
Can't do that with anything but a gyro.
Rather than a gyro, how about a series of accelerometers (1 for every axis). If you know the acceleration in an access, derive it and you have speed. Derive it again and you have the distance moved.
This is much more likely than gryos.
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Google innovative? Phhfft! This is Zombo-com!
making games specifically designed for this controller means that they'll ONLY work on this console, the game will be impossible (or at least VERY hard) to port to the other consoles,
I've seen FPS on consoles that were originally designed to work with mouse and keyboard.
You know what? You can also play them with a console's controller that's completely different (however, most gamers prefer the mouse/keyboard combo).
Same with this controller: Some games will run better than with standard controllers, some not so well.
But imagine playing Resident Evil and actually swing your chainsaw the way you want it! This might also bring games like Soul Calibur to a whole new level!
I don't need a signature.
The problem with the power glove wasn't that it was idiotic or without merit: playing punch-out with the power glove was an experience above and beyond any other on the NES. The problem was that almost no games were coded to take advantage of it. The same is true of all of the other perhipherals you mentioned. Everything from the SEGA Justifier to Konami's DDR mats can be considered failures because of the simple fact that none of them shipped with a console and none of them reached their full potential. The SNES and Genesis mice were complete failures in the market, as they only had one game that supported them, yet as we all know mice are not at all failures as interface devices. The only truly "successful" addition to a console can be considered the 4MB memory pack for the N64, primarily because that sucker shipped with a few massively popular games that used it. In other words, no attachment to a console has ever been successfully supported, because it didn't come standard with the console. That shouldn't be a failure here, as this is the controller, and as such will be supported extensively.
Think of it this way, it's a pointer. It's a 3D pointer with angle information. All of the games on the PC can now be done with an even more naturally 3D controller. RPG's menu systems should become a lot more intuitive with just point and click. Click on the ground and your characters will walk over to it. Click on a menu to attack. This seems somehow more civilized than trying to hotspot around with a d-pad. You can steer a plane by, well, steering a plane, or swing a bat by swinging a bat.
I suspect it will be a little uncomfortable at first, but I remember how much my thumbs used to cramp up when I first started pressing down on buttons. I also remember how uncomfortable using a mouse used to be. If you rest your elbows on a knee this should be fine.
Not to burst any bubbles, but the PS2 launch was 90% hype and conjecture that really had no intention of panning out, much the same way that ROB the robot was not intended to be used as anything other than a way to sneak into electronics stores. All system launches are like this. Remember how the Saturn was going to replace your home computer for all internet-related activities? The PS2 had nothing like this. Honestly, I've been waiting for wand input for consoles for some time now... the closest thing was the aforementioned Power Glove, but the Power Glove really was the wrong input for a batch of games that had no analog sensitivity, let along z-axis.
Nintendo knows what they are doing in general... Except for the second analog stick and L3/R3 buttons, every part of the modern controller design can be traced back to a Nintendo system... D-pad came from the NES (and the game-and-watch), the analog stick from the N64. Shoulder buttons and the diamond button layout were from the SNES. The rumble pack first appeared on the N64. So nintendo should be given some credit. Even the Virtual Boy controller was a great piece of work... the dual D-pads with triggers were perfect for TeleroBoxer.
Nintendo is positioning themselves interestingly in this next generation. With the radically visceral controller and a slightly lower system cost / power, they seem to be going for shorter, more intense experiences. This seems like a wise way to differentiate themselves from all of the other consoles and computers. For physical games, you can use the controller in a very natural fashion. Tennis on this system would be brilliant, Golf could be great. Pool. Baseball. Burnout: Revolution. I'm afraid to think of how many of these things are going to get accidentally thrown through windows, but it sounds like a fun process of discovery to me. For intellectual games like the Sims, you have a natural cursor-style input device. I'm not so sure how the z-axis would play into such an arrangement, but maybe it doesn't have to.
And then you have Tekken and a whole bunch of other games that probably can't physically be played o
The ______ Agenda
I have seen the revolution, and it is unquestionably good.
If this controller delivers half of what the video promises, it actually will deliver a revolution in gaming. My only sadness comes from the fact that many, many people will be too frightened to accept such a massive change.
If you look at the feature list, it is everything the 'true' gamer could want.
1) Controller makes completely new types of *genres* possible.
2) Backwards compatibility with 'Cube games
3) Wifi Downloadable content for all the good games of yore.
4) The design is a beautiful example of form following function
5) DVD playback you don't pay for unless you want to.
6) Cost of the hardware is probably only minimally affected by the controller. This isn't like Sony's extra $100 (or whatever) cost to include the Blu-ray drive. This is taking simple pieces and making a much better whole.
It is *almost* perfect. However, the obstacles to overcome are not insignificant, and most are brought on by the fact that the 'true' gamer wants things that Joe Six-Pack does not. There is unfortunately room for quite a bit of doubt:
1) Studios will have to throw out almost everything regarding game design that they know. This will require an entire reworking of our fundamental concepts of gaming. Read this as "huge cost of time and money, with a significant risk of loss"
2) The hardware has to work right, and not be plagued by sensor issues and bad logic.
3) Pretty sure Nintendo said no 1080i support. This is not as huge as #1 & #2, but prices on Hi-Def displays continue to creep downward.
4) Graphics, although unimportant in my eye, must be taken into consideration. Sony and MS have sold billions of consoles on screenshots alone. The public still loves teh shiny, so we can't have any moments where people think "but the XBox makes it look *real*!"
5) Adults. Nintendo, I beg of you, do not forget us. We have loved your games for years, but we've grown together. I have happily followed you into dangerous waters before, and games like Nintendogs and Animal crossing have made the journey fun. For the love of god though, can we have some games that actually cater to adults with unique challenge *and* themes?
6) Net gaming is here to stay. Can you please join us at the table of the internets? We have saved you a seat, but you missed the hors doeuvres . It's ok though, make sure you're here when the main course arrives and we'll fill you in on what you missed.
-- I have fans? Wow.