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"
I don't know that I agree with this. Whereas maybe some of the control mechanics will have to be mildly audited, none of the story, material, pacing, demographic and targetting, marketing, environmental/immersive or visual aspects of gaming will need to change. Genres will expand, but the old ones won't go away. Interfaces may be augmented, but the old ones won't go away.
2) The hardware has to work right, and not be plagued by sensor issues and bad logic.
Yeah, that's what they say every time a non-wired controller comes out. Nintendo hasn't had a responsiveness problem since the first generation power glove, and that's because accoustic coupling sucks.
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.
They have since retracted this; it seems likely that they won't make this mistake, or at least if they do that there will be an adapter, much like the one for the XBox, which reverses such a problem. That said, should they not provide HD, a lot of early adopters will refuse to adopt out of simple anger, so you're right, this is a concern.
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*!"
You'll find, if you check through history, that eye candy is only a prominent seller when there's nothing else important in a generation. Remember please that the Master System was more powerful than the NES, but failed, and that the Turbo Grafx, Neo Geo and Megadrive were more powerful than the SNES, but failed. Consider also that the XBox and the GameCube are significantly more powerful than the PSX or PS2, and both have made relatively little competition. Then there's Saturn and Sega CD versus SNES, Dreamcast versus PSX, Lynx/Jaguar/Nomad/GamePark/WonderSwan vs Gameboy, WonderSwan Advance/GP32/N-Gage vs GBA, GP32X versus DS, Intellivision versus ColecoVision/2600, CD-I versus Genesis, and so on.
Whereas eye candy can tip the balance rather dramatically in a drought, software dominance has always been the absolute final word in console gaming. Eye Candy Dominance is generally a phenomenon of the PC gaming world, or of gaming within the purview of a single console.
5) Adults. Nintendo, I beg of you, do not forget us.
Nintendo has finally stopped making this mistake, in the DS. Consider games like Brain Training, the three surgery games, the dictionary, Urbz, Feel the Magic, and arguably the broad-demographic Nintendogs.
6) Net gaming is here to stay. Can you please join us at the table of the internets?
Yeah, um, they're deploying their DS internet wifi service in two months, and announced it almost a year ago; the Revolution is known to be internet focussed out of the box.
It can be argued that Nintendo is taking online play much more seriously than Sony is this generation, though in fact Microsoft is the only gaming company that seems to realize the dramatic importance therein thus far.
The reason for the failure of Microsoft's tilt-sensitive controllers is that deployment was so low that no software developer could justify deploying a game dependant on the technology. You'll note that games like Kirby's Tilt and Tumble and the GBA Wario Ware, which guarantee such presence by embedding that hardware in the game cart, have been extremely well recieved by their target audiences.
Furthermore, tilt sensitivity in gaming has such a successful implementation in pinball that even 20 years after the demise of pinball as a common game, people still occasionally use the word as slang to imply that a game (or whatever) has killed the player in belief that they're attempting to cheat.
right before they stereo typed girls as casual gamers!
That's market research, not stereotyping. To turn a blind eye to gaming patterns in the hope of remaining politically correct is to throw millions (potentially billions) of dollars in profit down the drain.
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!).
Actually, specifically within the Nintendo world, this was brought to the platform first by Hal, in the form of Kirby's Tilt and Tumble. (That's not entirely true; there was a GBC game that had tilt sensitivity too, but I'll be damned if I can remember what it was, so I'm going to act like everyone else in this thread and pretend it never happened. Still, it's true at least in modern trends.)
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.
That sensor's not for primary communication. The Rev controller uses RF. My guess is that the it's there so it can 'see' the reciever you'll have to attach to your TV. In other words, that's for the 'point' feature of the controller. Judging from the hands-on report over at cube.ign.com, it's clear that the controller works very well.
Yeah, except that the point feature is essentially a light gun, which doesn't need a sensor on a television at all. Current supposition suggests that, since the Revolution controller is known to be able to discern distance, the sensor most likely acts as a reference point for the depth axis.
On earth, penises have always been roughly cylindrical.
Talk to a veteranarian; the arc cylinder, as seen for example with elephants, horses, and everything else the people making all these dick jokes wish they were, is a far more common design than the cylinder on this planet. Even most great apes have that design; in this regard humanity is in the extreme minority. (Interestingly, this implies that human evolution reflects the missionary position as opposed to doggy style, when mates were selecting by genitalia. Arcs are much better for doggy, as they work at nearly every angle and nearly every size combination in that arrangement, whereas for straight cylinders, doggy style only works for men of a certain size or larger.)
How did your species ever survive its early stages? It must've been terribly uncomfortable for your women.
Comfort has very little to do with genital design. Consider for example that cats' penises have hooks at the end (I'm not joking,) or that wolves and sheep inflate after the act to the point where the two animals are unable to seperate, presumably to keep the genetic material from falling out. In this respect, humans are very very lucky. Or, if you're a catholic obsessed with species productivity, relatively unlucky.
Wikipedia is, as usual, full of crap. The analog stick predates Atari's very existence by almost five years, and can be seen as far back as the third generation MRC Spacewar hardware prototypes.
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.
Intellivision invented the D-Pad and horizontal controller.
Colecovision introduced shoulder buttons.
Force Feedback is a Sega Arcade innovation (Afterburner,) though the term is actually a Microsoft marketing gimmick from their controllers which did it before the SNES existed. No Nintendo console has Force Feedback to date. (Force Feedback is very different than rumble - rumble is the shaking we think of in the Sony Dual Shock controller. Force Feedback is when a controller jerks the other direction, like Afterburner, Cool Drivin', Stunts and Outrun did.) Sony also had rumble before Nintendo did.
The analog button's first major deployment was the Sony Dual Shock 2, though its first primary deployment is in the old Logitech handheld racing controllers for the PC.
One is that the main controller looks like carpal tunnel city.
Carpal Tunnel is a repetitive wrist stress injury; this is why carpenters, whose tools don't involve significant wrist action, get different stress injuries instead. This controller is likely to all but eliminate the current forms of RSI involved with controller usage (with the possible exception of what's caused by rumble,) in favor of stress injuries to the elbow and shoulder instead.
My other concern is how precise and repeatable the hand-gesture controls will be.
This is really an issue for the software developers, who will probably need to learn the hard way to accomodate this very issue. I suspect first generation software will be hurt by this problem, but that it will end quickly.
It's a really superb idea, but it's going to require deployment of sensors on either side of the TV.
No it won't. The controller is gyroscopically oriented. Unlike the Power Glove, which used ultrasonic echolocation, this controller is entirely self-orienting. The only deployment this controller will need is the orientation disc, which should slip *under* your TV, and whose purposes are (probably) twofold: to provide the initial line to TV center, and to measure distance from the controller to the TV (the Revolution controller is known to be depth aware, meaning no more putting the light gun against the TV to get good Duck Hunt scores.)
I wonder how well Nintendo is going to handle the gamut of televisions, from 13" B&W up to 100" projection models.
Even if sensors needed television deployment, which they don't, Nintendo solved this quite easily with the Power Glove by structuring the sensors with adjoining plastic "pipes," in a vaguely Capsella-ish fashion. If your TV was too big, buy a two dollar plastic pipe.
As an aside, my friend's 52" television is the largest television I've ever seen in someone's house. 100" is more than eight feet. I don't know that I've even seen an advertisement for a television that big, and neither Fry's nor Good Guys - the two local retailers with the best high-end TV selection - carry anything over 65". Who do you hang out with?
Don't get me wrong, I love the idea, but doing it right, and giving it the kind of sensitivity you have with mice and analog thumbsticks, will be very hard.
No game console in history has the sensitivity of a mouse, all smarmy comments about the SNES Mario Paint mouse aside. That's never hurt the game industry before; why should it now?
Like it or not, and regardless of what you think of their consoles, Nintendo has been responsible for every single important controller innovation for the last 25 years.
Bzzt.
The original Nintendo Entertainment System dispensed with the single joystick/button and came out with the direction pad (D-Pad) - something that's still included on every single controller design today, including Sony's and Microsoft's.
The flat controller style was available for the Channel F, the Intellivision, the Colecovision, the 5200, the Vectrex and several other consoles.
The Super Nintendo Entertainment System came out with a new four button design. However, it wasn't the number of buttons that was revolutionary - it was the diamond shape that they where placed in. Again, this exact design is still being used.
The diamond shape is not a terribly significant invention, but its first placement can be traced back to Colecovision extension controllers. Nintendo was merely the first company to ship this as a default arrangement.
For the N64 Nintendo came out with the analog control stick - which ushered in the age of true 3D gaming. Once again, everyone immediately copied their design. And once again, the analog control stick is still being used today.
Actually, the analog control stick was the type of controller used in the very first video game (unless you count Ralph Baer's oscilliscope design.) Most Atari 2600-era consoles shipped with an analog stick by default. This was the style of controller involved in Spacewar, and was in arcades 15 years before Nintendo decided to move out of card gaming.
Finally, for the Gamecube they came out with the "Wavebird" - the first truly well-designed wireless controller. And guess what?
Amusingly, the Wavebird isn't even Nintendo's first well-designed RF controller, let alone the first ever. Since you've chosen to hook this innovation on the intensely subjective concern of "good design," it's difficult to place this, but most informed arguments are likely to be for Sega, Logitech or (shudder) Microsoft.
Microsoft and Sony's new controllers are wireless.
Microsoft did it for the PC before Nintendo did it at all.
Simply put, Nintendo has never ever faltered in their controller design.
You've never seen an N64, have you? The N64 controller has no significant improvements over the controllers of its day, has a very confusing physical geometry, has button placements which cannot all be handled from a single hand position, and is widely regarded as one of the worst joystick designs in major console history.
I'm not in the ecstatic "NINTENDO RULES SUPREME AND OWNZ ALL OF YOU" camp
No, you're from the "Nintendo invented sliced bread, the horse and buggy, and pants" camp. Equally annoying, really.
Yes, they were quite important when the Colorado Leather Company introduced them into their Colecovision system, before they had even changed the company name to Coleco.
There's a big difference between the company that invented something and the first company you're aware of using a technique. Reading a book may help you seperate ignorance of origin from invention; I recommend "Supercade," which though hardly complete may hint to you that Nintendo is honestly a fairly late comer to the fundamental design of gaming.
1). Wireless efficiency. The PC Jr. had a wireless keyboard. Is this thing going to work in a crowded house with lots of peanut butter flying around?
The PC Jr's keyboard was infrared, not wireless. That said, Nintendo now has extensive experience with wireless controllers and other wireless devices; common examples include the DS, the Pokemon GBA adapter and the WaveBird, but they're hardly alone. Nintendo had a good, functional wireless controller in the late NES era. Interference from other wireless devices has never been a significant problem.
2) Durability. Speaking of which, how hard can you beat on these things? What's the MWBF (Mean Waves Between Failure) on this thing? Are people going to just wave them right into the rubbish bin?
I still have a working second generation NES. In fact, no Nintendo console or peripheral has ever broken on me, with the notable exception of the Power Pad, which considering what it does is in my eyes understandable. Nintendo has always made extremely durable equipment. I don't see any reason for them to stop now.
3) Endurance. How long can a twelve-year-old boy wave his arms before fatigue sets in?
Experience from the Power Glove, the Dreamcast Fishing Controller and the N-Gage (primarily from hurling it against the wall in disgust, natch) suggests that this limit is about 45 minutes when you first get the console, and that that tends towards three hours after about two months, then plateaus. Since that's the general play duration of the average Nintendo session, and since this controller is likely to involve less fatigue than the Power Glove (it had to be constantly elevated, whereas this controller is unlikely to be in constant swing except for swordfighting games - and even then, constant swing is much less fatiguing than prolonged elevation,) it seems likely that this isn't a significant problem.
Anyone remember when the neighborhood spaz would get über-pissed because he sucked at videogames and so he'd make a run to turn off the console, and a fight would ensue?
There really needs to be a way to prevent the console from being turned off remotely, or else there's going to be lots of bruises and bloody noses in homes that house both children and Revolutions.
Yeah, we just stopped inviting him over. Simple solutions are often the most effective; he learned his lesson.
I agree, and I think the thing that will make or break them is the question: Is it easy for 3rd parties to develop for?
Ask any PS1 or PS2 developer: as long as there's a ton of money at stake, the publishers just don't care what an abominable nightmare job the thing is to work with.
Simply put, Nintendo has never ever faltered in their controller design.
Simply put, this is wrong. Remember Virtual Boy, Power Glove, the giant bazooka thing, the stupid little robot, etc.
Whereas I agree the parent post is nonsense, I don't think these are particularly appropriate counterexamples. The virtual boy isn't a controller, the Power Glove is one of the most financially successful extensions in the history of gaming, and the stupid little robot - Robbie, it was called - was how Nintendo talked its way back into Sears, allowing the market crash caused by Atari's fundamental lack of quality control to be ignored in favor of the presentation of the NES as the controller for an electronic toy, rather than as the then-hated video game console, seen by myopic buyers as a deadly money pit.
The bazooka thing... well, good call, there.
some failures (Power Glove), and some the jury is still out (Gamecube controller, DS).
What? The Power Glove is the third most profitable extension controller in console history, and the DS is outselling the PSP globally by almost 1.6 to 1, setting sales records on the way out the door. What makes you think there's a jury out?
The PS3 controller is very likely to look a lot like the Dual Shock.
Amusingly, Sony revealed the PS3 controller several months ago, and it's quite different than the Dual Shock. It looks like a batarang. (Whereas many people will tell you thanks to Kutaragi's suggestion that it's a concept controller that this is nonsense, it's important to remember that the PS3 controller has been in mass production for two months now; to replace it would be fantastically expensive.)
OTOH, I see this controller as a DIRECT snub to third-party developers, abandoning multiplatform releases almost entirely.
As a third party developer, I can firmly say that it's much more exciting to have this new venue for development than it would be to have yet another cookie cutter controller.
That's an interesting myth and all, but in fact the style of controller which most people attribute to Nintendo - flat controller, D-Pad, right hand buttons - was originally invented by Fairchild for the Channel F, and was made most popular by the Intellivision.
Make historical comment only if you remember history. Most people forget that there's almost 20 years of gaming history predating Nintendo, and it's common that nobody can even name any involved companies besides Atari. (Entirely too many people believe that Atari was the first major video game company, or that the 2600 was the only thing they had to offer back then.)
then Sony would have nothing to lose and everything to gain by rushing a last minute version into the PS3.
Sony's demographic has as their primary argument point the supposed innovative nature of their consoles, to do such a thing would do immense damage to the marketability of Sony's platforms.
Truth be told, Sony would be fools to adopt this technology, whether or not it's successful, until they had some or another silly gimmick to superficially seperate themselves, such as the secondary shelf buttons on the original PSX controller (god, it's annoying how there are two consoles called that, but another one called the PSone prevents retronym distinction.)
Don't get me wrong; I feel that the PSX' shape was a major ergonomic win. That said, they marketed the extra two buttons as hard as they could, as if nobody had ever made shelf buttons before, instead of the actual improvements they'd made.
I'm not clever enough to try and pick out who the big loser of this generation will be, however I think sony are probably fairly safe (playstation is a massive worldwide brand).
Maybe, maybe not. Playstation makes up a shockingly large percentage of Sony's profits (several years ago, Sony was kept in the black only by Playstation, though that's no longer true.) Despite the ungodly piles of cash the brand rakes in, it's important to understand that the margin is still relatively small; a 10% dip in the Playstation's profitability would be a major blow to Sony, and there's a pretty damned good chance this controller will make a substantially larger dent than that.
The only other prediction I will make is that Microsoft will regret rushing to market.
I can't imagine why. They have nothing new and interesting with which to compete; their position as the first of the new generation will win them substantial acceptance in gadget-heavy Japan, since everyone needs the new toy and there's nowhere else to turn; that they're first to market is probably the single largest factor in causing success for the 360 in the otherwise shockingly xenophobic Japanese market.
It seems like they couldn't really make up their minds with regards to the hard drive and so have fudged it by making it optional (a pretty expensive thing to do for both MS and consumers just so you can put a tick on the spec sheet saying it supports hard drives).
That's one way to look at it. However, most market analysts believe that the cost strata were introduced because Microsoft developed a console dependant on a hardware price drop which turned out to be smaller than predicted, and that since the resulting console was too expensive for the market to tolerate, and since Microsoft isn't stupid like Neo Geo, Turbo Grafx or Sega (Saturn, Sega CD, Nomad, etc,) they introduced what is effectively a stripped down console, but maintained the larger design to be uptaken by wealthy early adopters.
Considering as how it's the third most profitable extension controller to a console system in history (amusingly, after two other Nintendo controllers - the Max and the Power Pad, respectively,) you've got a hell of an interesting definition of gimmick.
Of course, at the price Nintendo wanted for a power glove, they only needed to sell four to get that position in the list...
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.
Luckily, since it sent the same inputs as a standard controller, games didn't need to be coded for it; that's what that nonsense about plugging in a code on that little digital keypad from the list was - a packed struct telling the device what to send according to what game.
The real problems with the Power Glove were twofold: one, it was too expensive, and two, your arm became fatigued extremely quickly.
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This is an interesting list.
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"
I don't know that I agree with this. Whereas maybe some of the control mechanics will have to be mildly audited, none of the story, material, pacing, demographic and targetting, marketing, environmental/immersive or visual aspects of gaming will need to change. Genres will expand, but the old ones won't go away. Interfaces may be augmented, but the old ones won't go away.
2) The hardware has to work right, and not be plagued by sensor issues and bad logic.
Yeah, that's what they say every time a non-wired controller comes out. Nintendo hasn't had a responsiveness problem since the first generation power glove, and that's because accoustic coupling sucks.
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.
They have since retracted this; it seems likely that they won't make this mistake, or at least if they do that there will be an adapter, much like the one for the XBox, which reverses such a problem. That said, should they not provide HD, a lot of early adopters will refuse to adopt out of simple anger, so you're right, this is a concern.
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*!"
You'll find, if you check through history, that eye candy is only a prominent seller when there's nothing else important in a generation. Remember please that the Master System was more powerful than the NES, but failed, and that the Turbo Grafx, Neo Geo and Megadrive were more powerful than the SNES, but failed. Consider also that the XBox and the GameCube are significantly more powerful than the PSX or PS2, and both have made relatively little competition. Then there's Saturn and Sega CD versus SNES, Dreamcast versus PSX, Lynx/Jaguar/Nomad/GamePark/WonderSwan vs Gameboy, WonderSwan Advance/GP32/N-Gage vs GBA, GP32X versus DS, Intellivision versus ColecoVision/2600, CD-I versus Genesis, and so on.
Whereas eye candy can tip the balance rather dramatically in a drought, software dominance has always been the absolute final word in console gaming. Eye Candy Dominance is generally a phenomenon of the PC gaming world, or of gaming within the purview of a single console.
5) Adults. Nintendo, I beg of you, do not forget us.
Nintendo has finally stopped making this mistake, in the DS. Consider games like Brain Training, the three surgery games, the dictionary, Urbz, Feel the Magic, and arguably the broad-demographic Nintendogs.
6) Net gaming is here to stay. Can you please join us at the table of the internets?
Yeah, um, they're deploying their DS internet wifi service in two months, and announced it almost a year ago; the Revolution is known to be internet focussed out of the box.
It can be argued that Nintendo is taking online play much more seriously than Sony is this generation, though in fact Microsoft is the only gaming company that seems to realize the dramatic importance therein thus far.
The reason for the failure of Microsoft's tilt-sensitive controllers is that deployment was so low that no software developer could justify deploying a game dependant on the technology. You'll note that games like Kirby's Tilt and Tumble and the GBA Wario Ware, which guarantee such presence by embedding that hardware in the game cart, have been extremely well recieved by their target audiences.
Furthermore, tilt sensitivity in gaming has such a successful implementation in pinball that even 20 years after the demise of pinball as a common game, people still occasionally use the word as slang to imply that a game (or whatever) has killed the player in belief that they're attempting to cheat.
right before they stereo typed girls as casual gamers!
That's market research, not stereotyping. To turn a blind eye to gaming patterns in the hope of remaining politically correct is to throw millions (potentially billions) of dollars in profit down the drain.
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!).
Actually, specifically within the Nintendo world, this was brought to the platform first by Hal, in the form of Kirby's Tilt and Tumble. (That's not entirely true; there was a GBC game that had tilt sensitivity too, but I'll be damned if I can remember what it was, so I'm going to act like everyone else in this thread and pretend it never happened. Still, it's true at least in modern trends.)
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.
Amen.
That sensor's not for primary communication. The Rev controller uses RF. My guess is that the it's there so it can 'see' the reciever you'll have to attach to your TV. In other words, that's for the 'point' feature of the controller. Judging from the hands-on report over at cube.ign.com, it's clear that the controller works very well.
Yeah, except that the point feature is essentially a light gun, which doesn't need a sensor on a television at all. Current supposition suggests that, since the Revolution controller is known to be able to discern distance, the sensor most likely acts as a reference point for the depth axis.
On earth, penises have always been roughly cylindrical.
Talk to a veteranarian; the arc cylinder, as seen for example with elephants, horses, and everything else the people making all these dick jokes wish they were, is a far more common design than the cylinder on this planet. Even most great apes have that design; in this regard humanity is in the extreme minority. (Interestingly, this implies that human evolution reflects the missionary position as opposed to doggy style, when mates were selecting by genitalia. Arcs are much better for doggy, as they work at nearly every angle and nearly every size combination in that arrangement, whereas for straight cylinders, doggy style only works for men of a certain size or larger.)
How did your species ever survive its early stages? It must've been terribly uncomfortable for your women.
Comfort has very little to do with genital design. Consider for example that cats' penises have hooks at the end (I'm not joking,) or that wolves and sheep inflate after the act to the point where the two animals are unable to seperate, presumably to keep the genetic material from falling out. In this respect, humans are very very lucky. Or, if you're a catholic obsessed with species productivity, relatively unlucky.
Another neat thought while we're indulging ourselves. What if some games allowed you to use two controllers in conjunction with each other?
Amusingly, the article discusses this possibility in the form of the Nunchaku controllers. This was also discussed extensively in the TGS discussion.
Mod parent and metamoderate modders down. This isn't interesting if you'd RTFA.
Wikipedia is, as usual, full of crap. The analog stick predates Atari's very existence by almost five years, and can be seen as far back as the third generation MRC Spacewar hardware prototypes.
Intellivision invented the D-Pad and horizontal controller.
Colecovision introduced shoulder buttons.
Force Feedback is a Sega Arcade innovation (Afterburner,) though the term is actually a Microsoft marketing gimmick from their controllers which did it before the SNES existed. No Nintendo console has Force Feedback to date. (Force Feedback is very different than rumble - rumble is the shaking we think of in the Sony Dual Shock controller. Force Feedback is when a controller jerks the other direction, like Afterburner, Cool Drivin', Stunts and Outrun did.) Sony also had rumble before Nintendo did.
The analog button's first major deployment was the Sony Dual Shock 2, though its first primary deployment is in the old Logitech handheld racing controllers for the PC.
Nice try, though.
One is that the main controller looks like carpal tunnel city.
Carpal Tunnel is a repetitive wrist stress injury; this is why carpenters, whose tools don't involve significant wrist action, get different stress injuries instead. This controller is likely to all but eliminate the current forms of RSI involved with controller usage (with the possible exception of what's caused by rumble,) in favor of stress injuries to the elbow and shoulder instead.
My other concern is how precise and repeatable the hand-gesture controls will be.
This is really an issue for the software developers, who will probably need to learn the hard way to accomodate this very issue. I suspect first generation software will be hurt by this problem, but that it will end quickly.
It's a really superb idea, but it's going to require deployment of sensors on either side of the TV.
No it won't. The controller is gyroscopically oriented. Unlike the Power Glove, which used ultrasonic echolocation, this controller is entirely self-orienting. The only deployment this controller will need is the orientation disc, which should slip *under* your TV, and whose purposes are (probably) twofold: to provide the initial line to TV center, and to measure distance from the controller to the TV (the Revolution controller is known to be depth aware, meaning no more putting the light gun against the TV to get good Duck Hunt scores.)
I wonder how well Nintendo is going to handle the gamut of televisions, from 13" B&W up to 100" projection models.
Even if sensors needed television deployment, which they don't, Nintendo solved this quite easily with the Power Glove by structuring the sensors with adjoining plastic "pipes," in a vaguely Capsella-ish fashion. If your TV was too big, buy a two dollar plastic pipe.
As an aside, my friend's 52" television is the largest television I've ever seen in someone's house. 100" is more than eight feet. I don't know that I've even seen an advertisement for a television that big, and neither Fry's nor Good Guys - the two local retailers with the best high-end TV selection - carry anything over 65". Who do you hang out with?
Don't get me wrong, I love the idea, but doing it right, and giving it the kind of sensitivity you have with mice and analog thumbsticks, will be very hard.
No game console in history has the sensitivity of a mouse, all smarmy comments about the SNES Mario Paint mouse aside. That's never hurt the game industry before; why should it now?
Like it or not, and regardless of what you think of their consoles, Nintendo has been responsible for every single important controller innovation for the last 25 years.
Bzzt.
The original Nintendo Entertainment System dispensed with the single joystick/button and came out with the direction pad (D-Pad) - something that's still included on every single controller design today, including Sony's and Microsoft's.
The flat controller style was available for the Channel F, the Intellivision, the Colecovision, the 5200, the Vectrex and several other consoles.
The Super Nintendo Entertainment System came out with a new four button design. However, it wasn't the number of buttons that was revolutionary - it was the diamond shape that they where placed in. Again, this exact design is still being used.
The diamond shape is not a terribly significant invention, but its first placement can be traced back to Colecovision extension controllers. Nintendo was merely the first company to ship this as a default arrangement.
For the N64 Nintendo came out with the analog control stick - which ushered in the age of true 3D gaming. Once again, everyone immediately copied their design. And once again, the analog control stick is still being used today.
Actually, the analog control stick was the type of controller used in the very first video game (unless you count Ralph Baer's oscilliscope design.) Most Atari 2600-era consoles shipped with an analog stick by default. This was the style of controller involved in Spacewar, and was in arcades 15 years before Nintendo decided to move out of card gaming.
Finally, for the Gamecube they came out with the "Wavebird" - the first truly well-designed wireless controller. And guess what?
Amusingly, the Wavebird isn't even Nintendo's first well-designed RF controller, let alone the first ever. Since you've chosen to hook this innovation on the intensely subjective concern of "good design," it's difficult to place this, but most informed arguments are likely to be for Sega, Logitech or (shudder) Microsoft.
Microsoft and Sony's new controllers are wireless.
Microsoft did it for the PC before Nintendo did it at all.
Simply put, Nintendo has never ever faltered in their controller design.
You've never seen an N64, have you? The N64 controller has no significant improvements over the controllers of its day, has a very confusing physical geometry, has button placements which cannot all be handled from a single hand position, and is widely regarded as one of the worst joystick designs in major console history.
I'm not in the ecstatic "NINTENDO RULES SUPREME AND OWNZ ALL OF YOU" camp
No, you're from the "Nintendo invented sliced bread, the horse and buggy, and pants" camp. Equally annoying, really.
Yes, they were quite important when the Colorado Leather Company introduced them into their Colecovision system, before they had even changed the company name to Coleco.
There's a big difference between the company that invented something and the first company you're aware of using a technique. Reading a book may help you seperate ignorance of origin from invention; I recommend "Supercade," which though hardly complete may hint to you that Nintendo is honestly a fairly late comer to the fundamental design of gaming.
1). Wireless efficiency. The PC Jr. had a wireless keyboard. Is this thing going to work in a crowded house with lots of peanut butter flying around?
The PC Jr's keyboard was infrared, not wireless. That said, Nintendo now has extensive experience with wireless controllers and other wireless devices; common examples include the DS, the Pokemon GBA adapter and the WaveBird, but they're hardly alone. Nintendo had a good, functional wireless controller in the late NES era. Interference from other wireless devices has never been a significant problem.
2) Durability. Speaking of which, how hard can you beat on these things? What's the MWBF (Mean Waves Between Failure) on this thing? Are people going to just wave them right into the rubbish bin?
I still have a working second generation NES. In fact, no Nintendo console or peripheral has ever broken on me, with the notable exception of the Power Pad, which considering what it does is in my eyes understandable. Nintendo has always made extremely durable equipment. I don't see any reason for them to stop now.
3) Endurance. How long can a twelve-year-old boy wave his arms before fatigue sets in?
Experience from the Power Glove, the Dreamcast Fishing Controller and the N-Gage (primarily from hurling it against the wall in disgust, natch) suggests that this limit is about 45 minutes when you first get the console, and that that tends towards three hours after about two months, then plateaus. Since that's the general play duration of the average Nintendo session, and since this controller is likely to involve less fatigue than the Power Glove (it had to be constantly elevated, whereas this controller is unlikely to be in constant swing except for swordfighting games - and even then, constant swing is much less fatiguing than prolonged elevation,) it seems likely that this isn't a significant problem.
Anyone remember when the neighborhood spaz would get über-pissed because he sucked at videogames and so he'd make a run to turn off the console, and a fight would ensue?
There really needs to be a way to prevent the console from being turned off remotely, or else there's going to be lots of bruises and bloody noses in homes that house both children and Revolutions.
Yeah, we just stopped inviting him over. Simple solutions are often the most effective; he learned his lesson.
No doubt there will be those who say they weren't actually the first. To those people - remember that Nintendo was the first company to make it work.
That's just not true. The Colecovision and Intellivision both made that design work 10 years before Nintendo hit the market at all.
Just because you don't remember how popular those consoles were doesn't mean they weren't popular.
I agree, and I think the thing that will make or break them is the question: Is it easy for 3rd parties to develop for?
Ask any PS1 or PS2 developer: as long as there's a ton of money at stake, the publishers just don't care what an abominable nightmare job the thing is to work with.
Simply put, Nintendo has never ever faltered in their controller design.
... well, good call, there.
Simply put, this is wrong. Remember Virtual Boy, Power Glove, the giant bazooka thing, the stupid little robot, etc.
Whereas I agree the parent post is nonsense, I don't think these are particularly appropriate counterexamples. The virtual boy isn't a controller, the Power Glove is one of the most financially successful extensions in the history of gaming, and the stupid little robot - Robbie, it was called - was how Nintendo talked its way back into Sears, allowing the market crash caused by Atari's fundamental lack of quality control to be ignored in favor of the presentation of the NES as the controller for an electronic toy, rather than as the then-hated video game console, seen by myopic buyers as a deadly money pit.
The bazooka thing
some failures (Power Glove), and some the jury is still out (Gamecube controller, DS).
What? The Power Glove is the third most profitable extension controller in console history, and the DS is outselling the PSP globally by almost 1.6 to 1, setting sales records on the way out the door. What makes you think there's a jury out?
The PS3 controller is very likely to look a lot like the Dual Shock.
Amusingly, Sony revealed the PS3 controller several months ago, and it's quite different than the Dual Shock. It looks like a batarang. (Whereas many people will tell you thanks to Kutaragi's suggestion that it's a concept controller that this is nonsense, it's important to remember that the PS3 controller has been in mass production for two months now; to replace it would be fantastically expensive.)
OTOH, I see this controller as a DIRECT snub to third-party developers, abandoning multiplatform releases almost entirely.
As a third party developer, I can firmly say that it's much more exciting to have this new venue for development than it would be to have yet another cookie cutter controller.
That's an interesting myth and all, but in fact the style of controller which most people attribute to Nintendo - flat controller, D-Pad, right hand buttons - was originally invented by Fairchild for the Channel F, and was made most popular by the Intellivision.
Make historical comment only if you remember history. Most people forget that there's almost 20 years of gaming history predating Nintendo, and it's common that nobody can even name any involved companies besides Atari. (Entirely too many people believe that Atari was the first major video game company, or that the 2600 was the only thing they had to offer back then.)
then Sony would have nothing to lose and everything to gain by rushing a last minute version into the PS3.
Sony's demographic has as their primary argument point the supposed innovative nature of their consoles, to do such a thing would do immense damage to the marketability of Sony's platforms.
Truth be told, Sony would be fools to adopt this technology, whether or not it's successful, until they had some or another silly gimmick to superficially seperate themselves, such as the secondary shelf buttons on the original PSX controller (god, it's annoying how there are two consoles called that, but another one called the PSone prevents retronym distinction.)
Don't get me wrong; I feel that the PSX' shape was a major ergonomic win. That said, they marketed the extra two buttons as hard as they could, as if nobody had ever made shelf buttons before, instead of the actual improvements they'd made.
I'm not clever enough to try and pick out who the big loser of this generation will be, however I think sony are probably fairly safe (playstation is a massive worldwide brand).
Maybe, maybe not. Playstation makes up a shockingly large percentage of Sony's profits (several years ago, Sony was kept in the black only by Playstation, though that's no longer true.) Despite the ungodly piles of cash the brand rakes in, it's important to understand that the margin is still relatively small; a 10% dip in the Playstation's profitability would be a major blow to Sony, and there's a pretty damned good chance this controller will make a substantially larger dent than that.
The only other prediction I will make is that Microsoft will regret rushing to market.
I can't imagine why. They have nothing new and interesting with which to compete; their position as the first of the new generation will win them substantial acceptance in gadget-heavy Japan, since everyone needs the new toy and there's nowhere else to turn; that they're first to market is probably the single largest factor in causing success for the 360 in the otherwise shockingly xenophobic Japanese market.
It seems like they couldn't really make up their minds with regards to the hard drive and so have fudged it by making it optional (a pretty expensive thing to do for both MS and consumers just so you can put a tick on the spec sheet saying it supports hard drives).
That's one way to look at it. However, most market analysts believe that the cost strata were introduced because Microsoft developed a console dependant on a hardware price drop which turned out to be smaller than predicted, and that since the resulting console was too expensive for the market to tolerate, and since Microsoft isn't stupid like Neo Geo, Turbo Grafx or Sega (Saturn, Sega CD, Nomad, etc,) they introduced what is effectively a stripped down console, but maintained the larger design to be uptaken by wealthy early adopters.
Considering as how it's the third most profitable extension controller to a console system in history (amusingly, after two other Nintendo controllers - the Max and the Power Pad, respectively,) you've got a hell of an interesting definition of gimmick.
...
Of course, at the price Nintendo wanted for a power glove, they only needed to sell four to get that position in the list
but every person on the planet knows how to move their hands in free space.
So what you're saying is, you've totally forgotten high school gym class?
Amazing, considering as how they can't even do that in real life.
I envy your ability to forget the N-Gage so quickly.
What's Sidetalkin' ?
Luckily, since they had suction cups on the bottom, you didn't have to.
For three minutes at a time, at least.
Yeah, that elbow movement will supplant outdoor activities for exercise overnight. Cough.
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.
Luckily, since it sent the same inputs as a standard controller, games didn't need to be coded for it; that's what that nonsense about plugging in a code on that little digital keypad from the list was - a packed struct telling the device what to send according to what game.
The real problems with the Power Glove were twofold: one, it was too expensive, and two, your arm became fatigued extremely quickly.
Long isn't insightful. Mod parent down.