Revolution Easy To Port To

Despite suggestions that the Revolution will not be as powerful as the other next-gen systems, 1up is reporting the system will be easy to port games to. From the article: "It's easy to see Nintendo's logic, though. Even though Revolution won't have the same memory bandwidth as Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, the familiarity with current generation development and tools that Revolution takes advantage of means most companies shouldn't have much trouble working Revolution into the mix."

Re:Why?

[MindStalker]

People are still making games for midrange computers and cellphones. As long as there is a market games will be made. There is a drastic demographic difference between these systems so no don't expect many of the high end games to be cross ported. But do expect many developers to make some very interesting games aimed at the Nintendo demographics made especially for the revolution controller.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

I honestly don't know how much 'weaker' the Revolution will be; the handful of people I know who are game developers are mostly programming peons so they don't have too much information. One of my friends did say he thinks that a lot of people are under a serious misconception about the system because of what Nintendo has released as a 'Pre-Alpha' development kit to certain companies. He claims that Nintendo has released an improved Tri-Force based (for those that don't know, that's the Gamecube's arcade platform that is ~2X as powerful as the Gamecube) development kit that emulates the new features of the Revolution (like per-pixel shading); the purpose of this kit is not to produce something that performs in the same range as the Revolution but is to enable developers to Port/Develop the engine and test new features on a small scale. I'm told that it is not that uncommon for companies like Nintendo, Microsoft, or Sony to provide the developers with different hardware inorder to allow them to progress so I think that this sounds reasonable.

The only other thing I have heard from developers is that Nintendo is undercutting their performance on purpose in order to send the message to developers that they're not going to pressure them to produce games which they can not afford to make and to send the message that they want more creative and enjoyable games rather than prettier games.

Now, everything I have been told could have been a pack of lies but none of it sounds unreasonable; the initial development kits for the 360 were just Power Macs (and in a tight NDA agreement several people might be under the impression that this is the final hardware and leak it to news sites), and Nintendo announced that the Gamecube would only produce 12-15 Million Polygons per second (While Microsoft promised 155 Million with the XBox and Sony Promised 66 Million with the PS2; the XBox 360 may approach 40-60 Million and the PS3 may get into the 60-100 Million range but no hardware can sustain 100 Million + Polygons per second in a game situation) so it's not unreasonable to say Nintendo may make claims at the lower end of what is possible on their system.

Courting Third Party Vendors

[DrWho520]

According to the Nintendo mastermind (psssst, Miyamoto!), Revolution software development can take place on existing GameCube development kits. [advancedmn.com]

This is a key fact to keep in mind. The preliminary development kits were actually tweaked 'Cube kits. I cannot speak to the fulfledged dev kits, but they should be very similar in practice. Nintendo is hoping to see their efforts at courting to third party vendors to start coming to fruition here. If it is easy to develop for, third party vendors will develop for it, right? This generation should begin to answer that question.

Early release games are always inferior to late lifecycle games. This is partially due to the learning curve inherent in new development kits. If a developer has learned the 'Cube dev kit, they should be able to easily come up to speed on a Revolution dev kit. Hardware optimizations will take some time. This could also explain why the current 360 games are so similar to current Xbox games. The development kits must have changed drastically from one console to the next. It is an entirely different chipset. I am making some assumptions and have no personal experience with either dev kit.

As for the controller, if you have not read about the controller shells that will be available for the control stick, you have not business commenting on any story about Next Generation consoles. I am sure a Wavebird shell, 360 shell and a Dual Shock shell (or something very similar to each, probably released by MadCatz or someone similar) will be available soon after the console launch. Ironically enough, the Revoltion may have a traditional Playstation controller before the PS3 if Sony sticks with that boomerang design.

I always liked the N64 controller. It was big enough for my ginormous bear paws.

Re:GameCube?

[fujiman]

It worked well for the following reason: PS2's market share made releasing on that platform MANDATORY. It didn't matter how hard porting to PS2 was... there were 4x the amount of PS2s than XBoxes or GCs. In fact, most cross-platform games were coded PRIMARILY for PS2, since it was the hardest to port to.

I dare say Sony won't have that big of a lead this generation, so yes, now it is relevant for them.