Epic's Mark Rein Expounds On The Revolution

nb caffeine writes "Epic's Mark Rein is shooting his mouth off again, this time bashing the Revolution controller and EA's management style. This seems to be a recurring theme with him." From the article: "I guarantee you there's going to be lots of people who say the whole reason for this game is this controller, we made the perfect game for the controller. And all it'll be is about the controller, and not necessarily a great game...I've heard EA and Activision make absolutely ridiculous statements about, 'Oh, it's going to take 30 million dollars to make a game and we need 300 people' - that's just a bunch of bullsh... They're just covering up for their own management and incompetence. Or mismanagement I should say."

Re:Um, yeah, Mark...

[Admiral Ackbar 8]

Nintendo also came up with things like Robby the Robot, Virtual Boy, and the Power Glove.

For the love of everything good, Mattel made the friggin Power Glove. Not Nintendo.

Re:Um, yeah, Mark...

[scot4875]

The point of Rob was *not* as an alternate input device. The point was to make the NES seem unlike any of the previous video game consoles. They added him, even though they *knew* it was crap, to distinguish themselves from the 'competition,' which at that point was mainly customers' distaste for video game consoles. Read Game Over or (IIRC) High Score. They both talk about this.

Rob was an investment. He was smoke and mirrors. You'll notice that they didn't sell it in anything but the first NES packages.

And, as someone else already pointed out, Mattel made the power glove, not Nintendo. The only alternate input devices that Nintendo provided for the NES were the Advantage and the NES Max, which were both good controllers.

--Jeremy

Re:Duck Hunt Revolution

[Anonymous Coward]

Notwithstanding the rude comments by the other ACs, my thoughts are that you should do a little research into the subject. First of all, the Revolution controller isn't an IR pointer. The comparisons to TV remote controls are based on shape, not technology. Nintendo hasn't said a whole lot about how the thing works, but they have revealed that there will be two small devices beside the TV. These presumably let the system know where the TV is relative to the controller(s), which suggests some form of motion detection is going on. Anyone in the know, please offer corrections.

You should also look into how the Zapper (the "Duck Hunt gun") worked. "Accurate" isn't how I'd describe it. When the trigger was pulled, the screen went black, then flashed a white rectangle around each target sprite, one frame at a time. The Zapper detected a sudden drop then spike in light intensity, which, combined with timing, indicated a hit. Modern light guns make use of the scan line, instead. The entire screen is brightened (to make sure every phosphor is lit), and the system times how long it takes for the electron beam to hit the phosphor the gun is aimed at. Obviously, this method only works with CRT televisions. The less accurate Zapper method will work with any display. I'm hopeful that the Revolution will do away with both the CRT requirement and the annoying flashing. (Note: Most of what I know about light guns I learned from Wikipedia [wikipedia.org], so corrections are welcome.)

Also, and I admit I'm nitpicking, to the best of my knowledge there has never been a two-handed D-pad. The D-pad isn't the entire controller, or the sticks, or whatever you were trying to refer to, but the cross-shaped multi-directional switch. I'm afraid I can't think of a better description than that other than "d-pad," so I apologize if that sounds wordy.