Talking 'Bout A Revolution

Now that the weekend has passed, folks from all over have had their chance to speak up about the revolution behind the Revolution. Hugh Williams writes "The blokes at Next Generation decided to ask a bunch of game designers, media and analysts what they thought about Nintendo's new Revolution Controller. Some were a little skeptical. Others were downright in love." Additionally, Heartless Gamer writes "Heartless Gamer blog has initial comments up regarding the Revolution controller, but more importantly comments on the various reactions around the internet regarding the controller." Finally, LATRINE! writes "Whether you like it or not, the Nintendo Revolution is on the way. Brittlefish has an article discussing some of the challenges Nintendo will face in gaining acceptance in the market."

Comments

cradle/shell

[muyuubyou]

Maybe if anyone mentioned the cradle/shell, many more people would consider Nintendo's controller less suicide...
Linky:
http://cube.ign.com/articles/651/651559p1.html
I wonder why I had to find this info by chance, considering all the coverage around this.

Re:cradle/shell

[justforaday]

Thanks for the link. I've been looking for something about the shells. However, something people should note: the picture in the IGN article is a mock-up made by IGN. It is in no way the real thing.

Re:It scratches an itch, a big itch

[rAiNsT0rm]

No, actually it has a LOT to do with it... and thanks for further illustrating my point. The Revolution aims to "cost a tenner" compared to $5-600 of the competition, again hitting the widest cross-section of gamer.

And for the record most of those units sold for $24.99-$39.99 in the States... about the same as the cost of a new console title.

Re:It scratches an itch, a big itch

[|/|/|||]

If you need 27 buttons and 3 analog sticks to feel "right" playing a game, then the Revolution is not for you... and it also isn't targeted toward you.

Well, I agree with most of what you said, except for the quote above. Maybe I'm wrong, since almost all of the discussion that I've seen disagrees with my opinion, but this controller looks like a "hardcore" gamer's dream come true. Seriously, compare it to a dual shock, for example. The dual shock has 2 analog sticks, a d-pad, and 10 buttons (i'm not counting start). In the standard, out of the box config, the rev controller has 1 analog stick, 6 buttons (counting the 2 on the nunchuck, but not counting start, select, home), a d-pad, and the new position/orientation functionality.

First observation is that it has less buttons. Does it make a difference? I don't know - most ps2 games don't use all of the buttons on the controller. Nintendo could add more buttons before release, and you could certainly have a "shell" or a nunchuck with more buttons. Assuming that they don't do those things, dock them a point for number of buttons. Dock them another one because the small a and b buttons don't look very accessable when holding the controller vertically. They might only be usable when in certain "modes" - like you jump in a vehicle and turn the controller on its side to use as a steering wheel.

Now the big difference - 2nd analog stick vs. position/orientation. Will it work? I say yes. In fact, I think it will blow existing control setups out of the water completely. There's a lot of speculation about new kinds of games that you could play with the controller, but it looks like the perfect controller for existing games - especially the FPS. I think a lot of people are hesitant to try something new, but this thing could revolutionize the console FPS. If you have a hard time picturing it, here's my imagination of how it would work:

1. Analog stick is WASD, basically your move forward/back/left/right/diagonal. Just like WASD on a keyboard/mouse setup, only analog.
2. You use the revolution controller to freelook, but it works differently from a mouse. Assume you have a crosshair on the screen. There's a region that takes up most of the center of the screen where pointing the controller moves the crosshair without moving your view. Your character's hand moves to point to the target, but the torso does not rotate.
3. When you point outside of that region (including completely off of the screen), your view rotates at a rate proportional to how far from the center you're pointing. The crosshair, however, never moves outside of the center region. In other words, you can still shoot at things on the screen while your view is rotating. This allows you to immediately point and shoot at anything on the screen, and also to circle strafe, which is an absolute requirement for the modern FPS.
4. The best part, though, and the huge advantage over the dual shock, is when using melee weapons. Hold down the melee button (say A, maybe - B is obviously the Fire button) and your controller is your melee weapon. You go from a 1 button control that makes your character take a swing, to a piece of plastic in your hand that you can whack somebody with!

I don't know if you can see it, but I can picture kicking some major ass with that setup... it's all in my imagination, though, so if you see any flaws in the setup then point them out. As you can tell I'm pretty stoked about the controller, but I'm not a fanboy that can't discuss the tradeoffs. It certainly has room to grow, but that just makes it that much more exciting - think of what this kind of controller could do in a generation or two!

Re:Where this controller should evolve to

[Anonymous Coward]

The Power Glove was neither created nor sold by Nintendo.

Re:Odd people quoted in Links

[MendicantMonkey]

Since when did Sun have a games division?

I believe this started when they decided Java should try to stake a claim in game programming territory. There was some initial talk of positioning Java as a cross-platform solution, and I think that worked out for them in the mobile space, rather than the console space where everyone was talking about it.

Has anyone heard of any console titles using a JVM? I'm curious.