A History of Game Controllers

Next Generation has an excellent piece, looking back on the history of game controllers, leading up to the Revolution's fascinating controller. They look at controller design, as well as the usage that some games wrest from the controllers. From the article: "There are ways to mess with the system; in Shadow of the Colossus, the player stabs a beast not by pressing the attack button but rather by letting go of it, making the violence a release, a consequence of the player's action. Still, there's not a lot of room for subtlety or nuance. The most subtlety you can get comes from analog control and state-shifting, and both of those are just jury-rigs to the system."

More of the same?

[rylin]

While the article is very well written, it ruins everything by going with the same old "Nintendo is dying"-message we've been hearing for the past couple of years - something that's getting quite annoying.

Re:More of the same?

[hattig]

Maybe we could get the cops [slashdot.org] onto him for harassment?

I agree. Nintendo is doing just well. No loss on the hardware, massive portable game system sales, interesting concepts and more mean they'll do fine. It's as if people think that selling the same number of consoles as the XBox (~20m) is crap, even though the XBox made a loss on every console, and the Gamecube arguably made a profit on every console.

The Revolution may be a lot of peoples first choice of console, with many people growing tired of more of the same from Sony and Microsoft. It certainly is the second choice of a lot of people, and even then the lower price tag may encourage an earlier purchase. It might suck for the 'ooh, another racing game' or the 'ahh, another sports game' crowd, especially as they'll probably want Racing Game 2k7 or Madden '07 in HD, as that'll be the only real difference from the previous 5 versions of the game.