The Revolution Begins Now

1up.com has a lengthy feature up today about everything that's currently known about Nintendo's next volley in the console wars. From the article: "Once again, Nintendo has single-handedly flipped the videogame market on its head. After a generation of mockery and snickering from Sony, Microsoft and even diehard fans, Nintendo's come out of left field with an idea that's more reminiscent of what the company stands for than anything they accomplished during the GameCube era. Let's break it down and see what it all means." Update: 10/17 22:08 GMT by Z : I'm getting over being sick. Link fixed.

Wake up, Zonk!

[kniLnamiJ-neB]

Perhaps the story is actually about the social networking aspect of Halo games... and it's on gamasutra, not 1up... perhaps we should give Zonk some caffeine, or fire his lazy butt... 'cause that link had NOTHING to do with Revolution.

try this link

[manno]

I think they meant to link this
http://www.1up.com/do/feature?cId=3144666&did=1 [1up.com]

some Revolution stuff from 1Up

[Red Flayer]

So, here's a review of Time including the Revolution controller in its list of 5 things that'll blow your mind: http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3144800 [1up.com]

Here's a story about Peter Moore (of Microsoft) praising the Revolution: http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3144015&did=1 [1up.com]

And here's a story about J Allard on the Revolution: http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3144413&did=1 [1up.com]

And here's a lengthy piece on the arrival of the Revoultion: http://www.1up.com/do/feature?cId=3144666 [1up.com]

I think this last one is the one that should have been linked to the summary.

Re:Oh for crying out loud!

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you over estimate the difficulty of porting games to the Revolution; in fact anyone who has ever modified or ported a game will tell you that the easiest and least time consuming task is porting the controls (regardless of how complicated the control scheme is). About all you have to do to see the revolution controller in a conventional light is to break it down into its smallest pieces.

Almost every game engine supports analogue and digital inputs, as well as screen space mapping; the reason for this is that you have to consider analogue stick input, analogue button input, D-pad input, digital button input as well as mouse input. Now consider that the revolution controller is a six axis control (six analogue inputs) with several buttons (digital or analogue inputs) a D-pad and an optional analogue stick (2 more analogue inputs) and a screen mapped pointing device. Thus the engine support is built in.

Now consider how games are currently controlled; for the most part you can brake existing games into 3 categories (with a handful of exceptions) single analogue control, dual analogue control and keyboard mouse control. With single analogue control you control movement with an analogue stick and use a lot of buttons, with dual analogue control you use 2 analogue sticks and sparsely use buttons and with mouse and keyboard control you use a screen mapped pointer with a digital (or analogue) movement and a sparse set of buttons. When using the revolution controller as a pointer with the analogue stick attachment you have the closest approximation of the keyboard mouse set up that a controller has ever had; if you use the revolution controller as a 'gyroscope' (bad word, can't think of a better one) you have a decent mapping of the dual analogue control setup. The only one which could potentially cause a problem is the single analogue lots of button setup; I personally suspect that Nintendo will release another attachment that has 4 face buttons on it to make this an easy porting situation.