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.