You say you want a Revolution.
15 Sept 05

My first thought, "Oh my, Nintendo's lost their minds." They've created a remote control for video games. Yay! That's Great! Wait, no it isn't. Here, look at this. My next thought was, "Haven't they heard of ergonomics?" Then I remembered it was Nintendo we're talking about here.

As an aside, I like the functionality of Nintendo controllers, but really. They haven't made one that was ergonomically sound. People have said they need to merge with Microsoft and just make games. I think they'd be better off with Sony as they know how to design attractive products. Maybe they could go with Apple and have iGames. Sorry.

I guess I'm pretty leery. I've used an air mouse. Compared to a regular mouse, it's awkward and hard to use. With practice you can get decent with it. That's just what we need, a controller with a learning curve. Let's do the run down.

The first and biggest point is that Nintendo got what it wanted. They've differentiated themselves from the competition. If you make a game to take advantage of the Revolution controller, it will be near impossible to port to another system with the same effect. On the flip side, it will be much harder to port anything to the revolution. I'm sure the big publishers can handle it for major titles, but beyond that don't expect to see much on the Revolution that's on the other two systems.

Next, they do provide a lot of options for developers to play around. You have pointing, the D pad, tilting and the attachable analog stick. There are a lot of possibilities. Sure, most of them will probably be mouse like, but if the precision is good and the ability to port from the PC is there (and relatively easy), that opens a ton of strategy gaming options. The down side to that is that if Nintendo sticks to their avoidance of high definition, you could lose a lot, since most strategy games are information dense. I'm sure Nintendo will come up with at least one game that's a killer app that could only be done with that controller.

The negatives seem just as obvious. First, gamers are lazy. I have wrist rest for my mouse. That way I don't have to keep my wrist in proper mousing position for hours of gaming. 3D movement sort of precludes lazy arms. You can rest your arms on you knees with a standard controller. Who knows what it will be like with the grand movements of the Revolution controller.

Next, there's the potential for simple game actions to become difficult to perform. This is a problem with any new controller. Simply, the bugs haven't been worked out. It's kind of like Black and White, there were a couple of simple spells that I just couldn't seem to get the recognition system to recognize. That ends fun.

Finally, we have the potential for gimmicks released as games. This also happens with any new controller. Sometimes it's an evolved tech demo. The problem is that the activities that are fun and captivating for a few minutes don't have the ability to carry the player along for the whole game.

In unrelated news, there's a new Winter Assault Designer Diary up. And Microsoft has released its staggered release dates. Cheers.

Jason