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Nintendo Businesses Entertainment Games

The Revolution's Power And Launch Date 127

Posted by Zonk from the wand-of-power dept.
IGN is reporting on new details for Nintendo's next-generation console. They have discussion of the Revolution's graphical power, and some reflection on when the console might launch. From the former article: "Based on the information studios have relayed to us, Revolution is truly poised to cater to an altogether different game market than either Microsoft or Sony with their Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 consoles respectively. Nintendo's machine will simply not deliver the same graphic horsepower as its competitors. Revolution is all about the controller and what it can do for gameplay experiences. When Revolution was initially unveiled, a Nintendo executive said it would be 'two-to-three times more powerful than GameCube.' The company never commented on Revolution's horsepower again and we were later told that the initial statement was incorrect. However, according to development houses, that description accurately sums up Revolution's power. "
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The Revolution's Power And Launch Date More

The Revolution's Power And Launch Date

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  • There are no rumors about a revolution. Rumors are treason.

  • The gamecube is good enough (Score:5, Insightful)

    by sycomonkey ( 666153 ) on Tuesday December 06, 2005 @02:40PM (#14195992) Homepage
    Maybe I'm just not picky, but I haven't really been terribly upset with the Cube's graphics. In fact games like Metroid Prime 1 & 2, Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles, Resident Evil 4, and it would seem the new Zelda are just graphically stunning. (in fact Wind Waker was too, in a completely different way). Three times that is almost overkill. The Xbox 360 I would say, from what I've seen, is barely hitting that metric, except of course it can do HD, which really only matters for 5-10% of gamers anyway. Sure it's early, and I'm sure by the time we're almost done with the 360 it'll far surpassed anything I can differentiate (would anyone have possibly imagined a game that looks as good as Shadow of the Collosus could have come out of the PS2 when it launched in 2000?), but we're hitting the photorealistic barrier pretty hard as it is. There's only so much more graphical power is going to be able to accomplish. However, hype is everything, and having an "underpowered" console isn't going to help Nintendo regain their hardcore group. It seems like they've given up on them anyway. Which is fine, they aren't terribly good gamers anyway. With online I'm going to have to interact with fellow Revolution gamers and it will probably be a good thing that it won't be filled with the sort of people who eat marketing hype like candy and actually care about graphical powers that might possibly result in a fractionally better looking game.

    • Re:The gamecube is good enough (Score:4, Informative)

      by Metasquares ( 555685 ) <slashdot@nOsPam.metasquared.com> on Tuesday December 06, 2005 @02:53PM (#14196137) Homepage
      You also don't want to get too photorealistic unless you can manage to be completely photorealistic... otherwise you fall into Uncanny Valley [wikipedia.org].
      • I seem to be fairly resistant to that effect. Example: Other than some discontent about the way the charectors were portrayed, in that it was very hard to empathize with them and they didn't come across as having very strong personalities, other than that issue, I rather enjoyed FF:Spirits Within. It didn't bug me at all, I thought the animation was pretty good. I should probably finish FF7 so I can watch Advent Children.
      • I'd be happy for games to fall in there. More importantly, I think the vast majority of gamers perceive realism differently from the general population. Gamers are so used to non-photoreal imagery but have seen the quality increase towards photoreal that they will easily accept games that fall into the valley. It's like the CG Neo in The Matrix Reloaded's burly brawl against agent Smiths. Most of us could tell Neo didn't look quite real, but it still looked awesome and we'd love for our videogame charac
      • I consider the Uncanny Valley to be mostly a myth, or at least not a two dimensional graph, sure, there is some CGI art that looks creepy, but that has little todo with how photorealistic it is, its simply badly done CGI. There is a problem of having imbalanced capabilities, say photorealistic faces, but no realistic face animation, which just doesn't look good, but all this is solvable with a little bit more affort. As long as all aspect of some piece of CGI art are balanced there shouldn't be any problem
      • The reason uncanny valley exists is because nobody cares about emotion, only likeness. If you compare most current games to Ocarina of Time, Link looks the most human, (well, Hylian) because he has human emotions. The guys in the other games look like blow-up dolls. Nintendo jumped ahead, creating "uncanny mountain" with Ocarina of Time, making characters amazingly realistic with very limited graphics capabilities.
      • The uncanny valley effect is about *robotics* and NOT computer graphics. It's the things that walk & talk and pretend to be human that give some people shivers, NOT things they see on a screen.

    • Maybe I'm just not picky, but I haven't really been terribly upset with the Cube's graphics.

      Nor am I; although it could stand higher-resolution output. Otherwise, it's pretty much fine.

      The Xbox 360 I would say, from what I've seen, is barely hitting that metric, except of course it can do HD, which really only matters for 5-10% of gamers anyway.

      Pretty much. What I've seen has been pretty much crap compared to the current generation. Slight improvements at best; no high-poly models, particle

      • There's a few more functions that are terribly expensive, computation wise, like ray tracing and stuff. But at least it looks a great deal like what it's supposed to now. That's what I mean by "photorealistic", not actually indistinguitiable from actual photos. I'm sure that's where we'll end up, but the difference isn't that big between that and this, at least from my perspective. Technologically, yes, but not so much visually. All CG is supposed to be is a representation of something, an avatar. Thi
      • Pretty much. What I've seen has been pretty much crap compared to the current generation. Slight improvements at best; no high-poly models, particle effects, etc.
        Then I suggest you open your eyes and see some more. Take, for example, PGR3. Whilst in PGR2 (a pretty damn fine looking game by last-gen standards) they used 10,000 polys per car, in PGR3 it's closer to 100,000 [bizarreonline.net] on average. To me, 10x increase != "slight improvement". Add the fully scaled reflections, HDR lighting [bizarreonline.net], amazingly detailed buildings and

        • Then I suggest you open your eyes and see some more. Take, for example, PGR3. Whilst in PGR2 (a pretty damn fine looking game by last-gen standards) they used 10,000 polys per car, in PGR3 it's closer to 100,000 on average. To me, 10x increase != "slight improvement". Add the fully scaled reflections, HDR lighting, amazingly detailed buildings and you have something way beyond anything capable on last-gen hardware.

          "But it's shinier!" is hardly a decent argument against "slight improvement". So it's s

        • I will take "fun" over hard facts any day.

          Any way, 10x more polys is only interesting if you can notice the extra detail.

          PGR3 uses half of those polys to render a realistic first person camera, on the inside of the car. So you have a realistic steering wheel, velocimeter, etc.

          But I ALWAYS play on the third person camera on racing games. If a racing game doesn't have a third person camera, I just don't play. So that extra detail is lost to me.

          And the exterior of the car doesn't look so much better than the b
        • Funny you should mention PGR3. I've been hearing from various people that it actually looks worse than PGR2. Specifically, the trees. Which underscores the point: bigger numbers != better games, or even better looking games. Despite coming out on the lowly GameCube, Resident Evil 4 is far and away the best game of this console generation.
        • That car looks pretty wasteful to me, too many verts that do nothing. I mean, why the hell are there vertices in the side of the rear spoiler? Why do all those loops continue around the model? Why are there straight lines that have fifty vertices defining them? Is that really the ingame model? Was there not enough time to optimize the mesh?
      • People still complain that the FF8 demo was faked, yet we have games like Jak 3, God of War, Shadow of the Colossus, and others that far surpass it. Even the Cube has had various graphically awesome works (despite the involvement of some bafmodads). Unfortunately, the XBOX never really got that much spectacularly better than its first generation; maybe it never had the time to mature, or maybe there was just nothing else there. In the same way, maybe the 360 will... but maybe it won't, too. Especially if it

        • Shadow of the Colossus specifically, was made by a very dedicated developer, and quite literally maxes out what the PS2 can do. Graphically, that's as good as it gets, the hardware simply isn't capable of anything else.

          Eh. SotC isn't that great. Yeah, it does some neat stuff. But compare it to, say, God of War, Jak3, Gran Turismo 4, FFXII, Dragon Quest 8, and some other Nth generation games, and it's actually not all that great. Yes, it has beautiful moments. No, it's not the best the PS2 has.

    • for the programmers. Sure, Solaris for the Atari 2600 is amazing, but it'd be a heck of a lot easier to write the same game for the NES. More horsepower means less time spent optimizing and more on stablizing and tweaking gameplay.

      As a side note, I like the idea of the controllers. When I get old and decrepit and can't hold a ps2 controller I can still play a Revolution.
      • Actually, it's the opposite. The move to HDTV means games have to have higher resolution textures, which takes more time. Higher poly-counts on the models takes more time. Sure, you could write really sloppy, non-optimized code for a SNES game and it would run like buttered lightning on a 360. But it would look like a SNES game. People would not buy that game. If you make a game for the 360, they expect it to look better than the same game on XBox 1. Even if the game itself is identical except for th
    • "However, hype is everything, and having an "underpowered" console isn't going to help Nintendo regain their hardcore group."

      "Hype" doens't have to be about a/v. Besides, how much hype are you going to get for forearm hair in NFL 2KXYZ?
    • Why posts like this get modded up is beyond me. Well, it's not, because I understand the mindset on here about Nintendo...but you guys go way too far. Just because a console is more graphically capable, it does not mean that any extra power it has goes purely to graphics. It is able to process things faster....this means you can have more items on the screen and it can have better AI. There are a lot of things being more powerful gains you rather than just graphics.

      Also, you make some sort of assumptio
      • That's not entirely fair. Did I say I wasn't going to (eventually) buy a 360? Of course not! I fully plan on it, the new Treasure Sh'mup alone guarentees that.

        While the Revolution isn't real yet, there's enough info to make a comparison, at least for minor points like this. WiFi connection is allready live, and is a pleasure, primarily due to the fact that nobody can be stupid at you, due to the lack of voice chat.

        I didn't mean to come off as a Nintendo fanboy, but the Cube has been capable of hand
  • If they bundle the original Super Mario Brothers, and Duck Hunt onto the console at launch.. then I'm in man! I haven't shot ducks in duck hunt since I took a shovel to my old NES!
    • Since it's supposed to have old game download functionality anyway, bundling these two games is actually an incredibly smart idea. It WILL sell systems, and I hope Nintendo thinks up the same idea.

  • Say again? (Score:1, Interesting)

    by voice_of_all_reason ( 926702 )
    The entire controller is motion-sensitive?

    what?

    So basically, you can't even shift your body once you start the game, otherwise your character will end up doing some funky jig. Dunno about the rest of you, but that seems mildly uncomfortable to put it mildly.

    And what if you don't sit in a position that keeps the controller level? I use a beanbag, and my TV is several feet above the floor. So I'm usually at an angle towards the TV. Will Solid Snake be perpetually looking up as well since my contro
    • Or... you overthink things. It's not gonna be uncomfortable or force you to stand rigid. If it did, would any sell? Nintendo knows what they're doing.
    • "Will Solid Snake be perpetually looking up as well since my controller is raised 45 degrees?"

      No, but it will look like he's *very* happy to see you...
    • Either you need to go back and look at some old coverage of the controller, or you are seriously unable to break out of the current controller paradigm.

      The controller's motion sensitivity is the controller. It's not as if you'll be playing a FPS, and it'll react to motion and the standard "look up, look down" buttons, as if there's a conflict. It's just the motion.

      The controller is designed to enable this, too; it's not just a conventional controller with motion stuff tacked on. You won't hold it like a con
    • I would imagine you would be able to calibrate the joystick... But that brings up another annoyance... Having to calibrate it every time you boot up, or readjust your bean bag :/

      Who knows... I havent done any research on the controller at all
      • I would imagine you would be able to calibrate the joystick... But that brings up another annoyance... Having to calibrate it every time you boot up, or readjust your bean bag :/

        Yes. It's nearly as bad as using a PC. Every time my mouse goes over the side of the pad, I have to reboot. :(
      • Yeah, so far no one knows. Not much has been said about how the controller calibration works. I assume it'll work like current analog calibration, ie, it calibrates to whatever position you're in when the game starts.

        Also, realistically, it should be programmable (from the developer end) exactly how sensitive it is to movement, as different objects move differently. While you may want it to sense every little vibration of movement in an FPS, in a rhythm simulation game, general awareness of what directio

    • As someone else said, it could calibrate the stick on startup. What he forgot is it could auto-calibrate on booting, so the player doesn't have to.

      Moreover, games will use different movements for actions, so simply shifting on the sofa won't automatically do something on-screen. Worst-case scenario is the character is in a dangerous situation and the player has to pause before shifting themselves. How inconvenient is this to most people? Not very. For those with hemorrhoids who need to squirm, I sugges
    • when I'm playing an FPS on my PC right now, and I shift in my chair, sometimes my hand jogs the mouse a bit. so you get really, really good and not jagging your mouse around when you shift in your chair, at microfocusing your attention to detail in the movement of your mouse hand to pinpoint accuracy (in my case a trackball, but I digress). this is one of the reasons that certain FPS players on the PC are more badass than others -- they are incredibly skilled at pinpoint accuracy movement with their optical

  • 2x - 3x as powerful (Score:2, Interesting)

    by neostorm ( 462848 )
    You know, I'm thinking that 2x-3x as powerful as the gamecube is about the same power as the 360 (and PS3 as well). People flipped out about that statement originally, assuming it meant the revolution was going to be some underpowered system, but every 360 game I see looks pretty much like this generation with less compression on the textures and higher res video.
    I'm not too worried about the revolution giving us some good games, but I'm worried about mainstream gamers opening their eyes outside of MTV and
    • I know ghz doesn't mean much. But Game Cube has a 400 mhz processor and the Xbox 360 has 3 core processor running at 3ghz. Meaning Xbox is almost 8 times as powerful. As far as graphics, 360 probably won't look that much better than Nintendo. But with the extra processing power of the Xbox, developers can use more complicated AI, less load time, more monsters on the screen, ability to download stuff in the background, stream music, make you breakfast in bed. Etc...
      • "Game Cube has a 400 mhz processor and the Xbox 360 has 3 core processor running at 3ghz. Meaning Xbox is almost 8 times as powerful."

        That is entirely false. CPU's don't work that way, even though it sounds logical. For the sake of explanation, you could build a system with a processor that runs 2x as fast as another, but if that first system has twice as much bandwidth for its bus it will run at least the same speed as the latter. It also depends a great deal on the way software is coded, but those are
        • Processors do work this way, if and only if they are in the same processor family and if they are running at the same bus speed. Twice as much clock speed means twice as faster processor. Of course there are other factors which may mean that Xbox 360 is 20 times faster than the Game Cube or that Game Cube is actually more powerful than an Xbox. But its a good rule of thumb, like comparing cars with horsepower. A BMW with 200 horsepower will outrun a front wheel drive Honda with the same amount of horsepowe

  • Survey Says... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by rAiNsT0rm ( 877553 ) on Tuesday December 06, 2005 @03:09PM (#14196306) Homepage
    Based on my contacts at a few dev. studios, they all seem excited about developing for the system and the overall feel I have received is that it will be about 2x as powerful as a Gamecube powerwise.

    However, folks tend to forget that the Gamecube offered 8 layer texture mapping... 8. That is huge, however, the GC was simply not powerful enough to really do anything meaningful with a screen full of 8 layer polys.

    If the graphics chip ends up being a slightly updated GC chip, I'm cool with that. I have seen what can be done in demos on the GC and sweet Jebus is it amazing!... yet only graphic demos.

    So if the system ends up about 2-3x as powerful with a 1.5x GPU you now have a very capable system that can produce graphics plenty pretty enough to look stunning even on a HD set.

    I truly believe that the folks who are mainly concerned with numbers and horsepower will stay away from the Revolution - or maybe buy one in addition to another system - and that is FINE. There are so many families and casual gamers out there clamoring for a simpler system that the numbers will eclipse us "hardcore" gamers. While we are strong, we are few in the grand scheme of things. Realize that more Billions of dollars are pulled in by many forms of entertainment like Barbie dolls annually than out beloved hardcore gaming demographic. When Nintendo taps this wide market, Sony and MS will soon be doing an about face and targeting them too.

    I wish Nintendo and the true spirit of gaming nothing but the best, and I will be purchasing a Revolution on day 1 and have my pre-order in as soon as they become available to help show the amount of initial interest and garner as much developer support as possible.
    • Based on my contacts at a few dev. studios, they all seem excited about developing for the system and the overall feel I have received is that it will be about 2x as powerful as a Gamecube powerwise.

      Based on my contacts at the Ubisoft testing studio, they all fear the Revolution and expect it to be a testing nightmare, with whole teams of people swigning their arms all about all day long... I would actually like to see a Rev. game being tested...

    • See, I look at the people catering to numbers and horsepower as the casual gamers. All they need to hear is that they have the most "powerful" video game system and that their "mature" games will exist on it and they're sold.

      The company who is conentrating on pushing gaming forward, would be more geared towards the hardcore gamers like myself. That is the main reason I'll be buying a revolution and not the other systems. The fact that they are trying to make it accessible to a wider audience is only a b

      • Re:Survey Says... (Score:1, Insightful)

        by rAiNsT0rm ( 877553 )
        It all depends on your perspective, but I agree. I've spent years on the game industry side. To them the "hardcore" market is the exact opposite of what you or I would define it as. They define the hardcore market as their target demographic right around 18-30yr old immature/fanboy types. The ones who wait in lines for 12+ hours for a game launch, or who eat up the average crap games/sequels like candy.

        My definition of the hardcore gamer is someone like you or I... I use the term "True Gamer" for this demog
        • I use it all the time but it is the truth. Last year the number one game sold for the holiday season was not on any of the current gen systems... it was the hand held retro controllers that plugged straight into your TV and contained 6-12 games. Outsold all console game sales combined! This coupled with the fact that online flash/shareware games are seeing massive sales numbers means that there is a large untapped audience out there hungry for a simpler, fun, game system.

          I have one of those. Someone bought
          • I think you may have misunderstood me. I'm not saying you have to be a nostalgic gamer to be a "true gamer." Even young gamers fit in this category, ones who started gaming with a PS2. A quick look through a persons game collection will quickly reveal it all. If the collection is Madden, Madden, NBA2kwhatever, GTA, GTA2, GTA3, Racing, Racing, FPS, FPS, Fighting... and that is all then you are the current "hardcore" demographic being targeted by the 360/PS3.

            If your collection spans a few systems and genere's
            • Don't worry, some of us got it the first time. There definitely is a difference between a hard-core gamer and a true gamer though.

              hard-core:
              competitive,
              spends money on the latest and greatest,
              highly skilled at the games they play

              true-gamer:
              more focused on fun
              buys a wider range of games (some latest and greatest, but some obscure and hard to find)

              Basically to be a true gamer, you have to game across genres and if you dis a game or system because it doesn't do a hojillion vectonoxals at 1000fps then you are
              • QFT, and thanks for affirming that there are actually similar minded intelligent /. readers. I really get tired of the petty smart-allec types which are in such abundance.
    • Well the gamecube is no slouch, graphically. That little 400 mhZ PPC and ATI GPU can do some amazing things when the dark lords of Nintendo open up their box of secrets(RE4 on the cube is still one of the best looking games to date). 2-3 times more powerful than that, with a decent amount of system/graphics RAM, plus more storage on disc from the move to 12cm discs and it should perform beautifully at 480i and 480p.

      Nintendo has yet to produce a real slouch of a console(not handheld) in a competitive marke
    • For $99-149 I will to :)
      Just bought my gamecube 1-2 months ago to, have played to little thought ;/
      • Methinks you have no games for your GC if you are not playing it much. What do you own? Pikmin 1/2, Donkey Konga, Mario Party (if you have friends), Metroid Prime ($4.99 at EB), Mario Kart DD, RE4, and the list goes on and on of solid GC titles that will have you using the hell out of your GC.
  • This is why the Revolution will sell more than expected, maybe more than the PS3. The Rev will debut for probably $200-$300 less than the PS3, yet on your television, in the commercials for the games THEY WILL BOTH LOOK THE SAME.

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