Reflections On The Revolution

Kotaku has been reporting from the Digital Interactive Entertainment Conference this past week, and they have a short piece on Industry giants talking about gaming on the Revolution. From the article: "Miyamoto keeps dropping his receiver, which is connected to an earpiece through which English is translated into Japanese. The perky student that greeted me at the door tells me that they didn't have money for a Japanese-to-English translator, meaning that I have to pay extra attention to what Miyamoto's saying right now. He's talking about the Revolution controller."

Comments

The Controller

[Eightyford]

What's to stop Microsoft or Sony from creating their own copy of this controller design?

Re:The Controller

[MBCook]

Well, I thought a little more and there is one possibility that I should mention.

Both the PS and the Saturn got analog controllers after launch (ostensibly because they saw how good the N64's analog stick helped things). Now both controllers got a lot of use, much more than most add-on peripherals. The fact that those controllers started being bundled with the consoles did help quite a bit.

But the analog stick was obvious, and the control scheme was very close to the old d-pad (just more accurate) so the games didn't suffer as much if you didn't have one as the difference between the Revolution controller and a current controller. Plus the Sega controller had something of a killer app in Knights: Into Dreams.

My point is if they realize early enough and start packing in, they could adapt during the generation, but it would have to be near the later half of the generation (like the analog controllers). Short of a couple of killer-apps each (a new GTA might be able to do it for the PS3), Nintendo will have the lead in the controller area.

PS: Other things: U-Force for NES, any dance pad (and the running mat for the NES), that octagonal controller for the SNES/Genesis that could detected punches and kicks, the SNES mouse, the PS mouse, the Dreamcast keyboard, the power glove, and many others (note: I realize some of these were third party). And, most obvious of all: steering wheels. They have been around forever (arguably the paddle controllers for the 2600) and are obviously useful, but games are forced to allow normal controls because so few people own them.

Re:The Controller

[AuMatar]

Nintendo had the first analog thumbstick, different from joystick.

The Nintendo D pad was digital, as compared to the analog Intellivision. Very different gameplay from the two. Sega Genesis used an analog only because N had the patent on digital

Re:The Controller

[Judge_Fire]

The Intellivision controllers were d-pads. They were just round instead of a plus.

But they had 16 directions, equally accessible, without needing to hold down two buttons as in d-pad diagonals. It was a great controller.

J

Re:El Controller & El Price

[AuMatar]

I can see some definite sports uses. Want to pass? You don't have to remember what button is what teammate- just point at the reciever. Sounds like it would be good for qb and basketball games.

Re:More of the same

[justchris]

Actually, you're blatantly incorrect.

Unless you're going to tell me that Super Mario Bros. is the same game as Mario 64.

Perhaps the original Legend of Zelda is the same game as Ocarina of Time, or perhaps it'd be better to compare it to Zelda 2?

There is a difference between franchises and sequels. GTA3 is in the same franchise as GTA2, but isn't really a sequel. They had the technology to improve the game, and made it a different game, but with a similar name.

Mario has Mario Party, Paper Mario, Mario Kart, Mario Baseball and so on. They're part of the same franchise, but they're hardly sequels.

That being said, there are 7 Mario Parties now, true sequels, all basically the same game. I personally couldn't stomach more than one of those, but just because you dont' like sequels, doesn't mean everyone else hates them. What's more, with the revolution controller, we can look forward to something new even in sequels. I plan to pick up Mario Party for the Revolution, which will be the first one I've picked up since the original, because it will likely have sufficiently different gameplay (at least in the minigames) to make it worthwhile.

Myself, I actually own more PS2 games than Gamecube games, but then I'm a big fan of RPGs and Strategy games.