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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."
Wow, imagine what the possibilities of combining this with interactive porn!!
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Here's the problem: The controller is far too exotic, which means 3rd party developers will not make any big-budget games for it. Do you really think you can play fighting games with this thing? Sports games? NO! There will be few, if any, ports of popular games on the other platforms. The only games you're going to see on this new Nintendo console will either be Nintendo originals or an assortment of puzzle and party games. This will be a MAJOR reason for why many people would not be buying this console. People don't just want to play these "unique" types of games, they want to play games like Grand Theft Auto. Popular franchises. There'll be few, if any, of them on the console BECAUSE of this controller.
What Nintendo has accomplished by creating this controller is they carved out a very specific niche for their new console. It'll be popular among people who want to try something new, without particularly caring about the games they're playing. It's a NOVELTY console. This is how most non-Nintendo-fanboy gamers will look at it, and this is how developers will look at it.
Along with this controller announcement, Nintendo shares fell by 2.5% today. I wonder if it's related.
UNIX: A computer user is defined as a programmer. WINDOWS: A computer user is defined as a consumer.
It's one of those idiotic ideas which sound all great and revolutionary (again) until you actually try it. No, seriously.
RPGs? Try swinging your arm around like with a sword for hours, because that's what you'd have to do in an action-RPG. See how quickly it gets uncomfortable and then outright _painful_.
FPS? It's been done already, and done better with lightguns. And skipping over the lower accuracy that's already been mentioned, again, the problem is that you just can't keep your arm pointing at the screen for hours. Those are games played for half an hour, maybe an hour at a time, and by then you're already desperately trying to find ways to "cheat" by resting your arm on something. It really gets that uncomfortable.
And let me get back to the "again" part. It's not even a new idea. The PS2 at launch also demonstrated cool-sounding gizmos, like swords you can swing around and see your character do the same swing. Guess why it never actually took off? And it goes even farther back in time, with gizmos like the power glove that was already mentioned.
Idiotic ideas are like vampires in this industry. You just can't ever really kill them. Just when you think one failed spectacularly and miserably, that you've seen it crumble into a pile of ash once and for all... someone drops a drop of blood there and it springs right back to life.
Or more accurately, some ignorant designer comes along and thinks he's soo utterly original for repeating the same mistake again. "I know! It'll be soo original to have permanent death!" (Well, no, every third idiot MUD coder gets the _exact_ same idea. It's not original, it just keeps failing and getting off the radar.) Or in this case, "I know! It'll be soo original to make people swing the controller around!" Or whatever.
*sigh* I know by now I can't expect people to learn from history, as in what happened in the 1600's at the court of some obscure HRE "kingdom". But, eh, the launch of the PS2 isn't _that_ far back in time. You'd think someone at Nintendo would get their head out of their ass long enough to remember that the exact same thing was hyped back then.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I didn't think it was possible for my boner to rip through my pants.
Thank you for your insights.
"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.)"
Yep, that's why you get owned in FPS by people using a presentation remote control instead of a mouse. Oh, wait, except you don't.
Trust me, this is one use that's been tried to _death_ before. If there actually were some inherent advantage in it, we'd have known it already. (We've had no problem switching from keyboard to joystick, or then from joystick to mouse when it actually offered better tracking. These things just don't.)
If Nintendo wanted to do something that actually works in FPS, they could have just replaced the right stick on a normal controller with a trackball. That actually works.
"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."
Actually, I don't. I just want to point and click, and have the arrow go that-a-way. If I want it to go farther or closer, I'll vary the angle I shoot it at, thank you very much. So that's one gimmick I can live without quite easily.
"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."
Actually, if we're talking Zelda-type games, that's the least of my concerns. A story that's not for pre-schoolers would be right at the top, on the other hand.
Not meant as an offense or anything, but that's really why I'm playing my story-driven RPGs on the PS2, PC or XBox. Not because of the controller, but because of the "story-driven" part. Adding more kinds of ways to swing a sword is just about irrelevant there.
"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?"
Accessories always tended to be the part where you pay three times what it's worth. And if we're talking Nintendo, we're talking the company that made you pay extra to get a lightbulb for the original GBA's dark screen, or various other such gimmics. So, umm, I'll wait and see there. I wouldn't take it for granted.
"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."
Except in that case I'd rather use a good self-centering force-feedback joystick than wave a wand around. Because that's what you're really pretending to do there: pretending that a silly wand without all that is a substitute for the real thing.
The advantage of Nintendo's controller over that is...? I'm drawing blanks here.
" Your arm swing is its arm swing."
So it can get uncomfortable real fast?
"Your aim is its aim."
And a piss-poor one, compared to using a mouse with your fingers.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
It actually looks like as uncomfortable as Intellivision controller from 80's. If you have missed that piece of nifty design, take a look at it from the wikipedia with keyword "Intellivision". Escpecially strap of wire and the remote controller alike another side. I can't imagine what the hell did they thought when they started to design that.
Think about playing something for hours where only other side of the controller is in use. It looks like that the next Nintendo console will be as "arcade" as previous.
But who actually cares. I haven't seen nobody playing with Nintendo related stuff for years (except 8bit). It's obivious that it is aimed to Asia in first place, where people buy them because the label says Nintendo.
They did this with the N64 as well. There was all this hype about their new controller. And if it wasn't for the fact that you see one of those crazy things in just about every hotel room on earth, nobody would remember it at all, least of all Nintendo, it would seem.
That time, they apparently believed their target demographic had three hands. This time, it would appear they aim for the one-handed crowd.
Seriously, these guys are not really paying attention. Maybe it's so crazy that it will bring them back some market share, but I doubt it. The only people who will care is the slashdot crowd, and even they won't care for long.
I had no idea Slashdot had this many Nintendo fanbois. Is there any reason only the pro-Nintendo articles are getting voted up?
... well...
I'm surprised someone can make a comment that a remote wand is going to be better for FPS's. Why not a remote mouse? I've yet to see anyone improve on this technology without requiring recharging times every two hours.
Has anyone even taken into consideration how long these devices will hold a charge or how often batteries would need to be replaced? Somehow I doubt Nintendo has made great strides in battery power and usage.
Granted, it does look cool, but it looks as if Nintendo will be positioning themselves as the console for "active" gamers. If I wanted to entertain myself while flicking my wrist around,
That's the sound of Nintendo shooting themselves in the foot...