ThisIsTheGirl wrote:the interface will be a touch-screen, maybe with a couple of shoulder buttons and possibly even a d-pad. I am so convinced of this, I'm willing to bet a large amount of cash on it.
Sooooo, I lost my shirt on that one, eh? Well, I've been off work a couple of days, and only heard about this little bit of news last night from a friend who phoned me up to check why I hadn't been frantically ringing people asking them for their opinion on the Revolution controller.
One of the first things I thought about was this very thread, and how I would probably return to find opprobrium already heaped lavishly upon my head. So, firstly, let me just thank you all for not ripping the shit out of me in my absence. But, being a masochist, I feel I have to enter into the spirited little round of gleeful Nintendo-bashing which all you Sony and Microsoft catamites have been engaging in for the last couple of days, with a view to perhaps giving some of you a different perspective, since nobody else seems interested in figthing Nintendo's corner.
As some of you may remember, I work in finance, in a fairly IT-oriented role. I hate pretty much everybody I work with, but some less than others. I prefer to take my lunch on my own, but every now and then get invited by one of our traders to come out for a lunchtime pint. He (Sam) and his trader mates are midly amusing, and he supports Liverpool, so I forgive him a multitude of sins and occasionally go for a drink with him.
Now, I don't know how much you know about traders but they work incredibly hard and play even harder. They mostly entertain themselves by either going to strip clubs and blowing thousands of pounds, or consuming huge amounts of Class A drug while attempting to pull birds in nightclubs. They don't have much spare time apart from that, and hence rarely own or play consoles, even if some of them are smart enough to understand that ISS Pro Evo is the greatest football series of all time.....
So, imagine my surprise when one of the traders came running up to me this morning and excitedly blurted out "have you seen that new Nintendo thing??!?". Now, although these boys are obviously familiar with the names Sony and Microsoft, I'm fairly sure I've never heard this guy utter the name Nintendo for as long as I've known him - which is almost 5 years. It turns out, Sam had been alerted to the Revo controller on Monday morning, and spent much of that day trying to finds out more about it.
Sam and a lot of the guys on the trading floor seem to be obssessed with it - he's even printed out a picture and has been showing some of the secretaries, probably in a feeble attempt at striking up a conversation which may lead to sex. But all of these slightly dippy, secretaries in their early 20s , also seem highly impressed by the controller, and I've been wondering what this might all mean.
Then I looked around at all the money-obssessed people around me, and it clicked; the Revolution controller is simply not designed to appeal to people who bought one of the existing consoles - it's designed to get the money of people who have never owned a console in their lives - and, as such, it's clearly doing what it intended, judging by the interest a few pictures and video footage has generated amongst the anti-gamers in my office.
From a cynical city-boy marketing point of view, it's actually a masterstroke. Whereas I thought the easist way to attain mass-appeal would be via touch-screen, they decided to go for an even more radical interface with a much less radical look. IE, instead of asking the uninitiated gamer to master a standard control pad, with all the myriad complications which come with that (standard x-box controller, anyone? I didn't think so, since it's generally regarded as the worst joypad EVER.), what Nintendo has done is to design something which is immediately familiar to somebody who has never played a game in their lives. Few parts of the world have yet to see a remote control, and the parts which haven't yet seen one, probably have bigger things to worry about than console wars anyway.
And.....have you guys actually SEEN any of the videos of the controller in action? You know it has motion sensors both inside and out, right? You know that you can use two at once, play games like Metroid with a single hand, using the motion sensors, or for different functionality, use this other component?
Have any of you played Yoshi's Universal Gravitation or Tilt n Go on the
GBA? Because these can give you some idea of how the interface works. But for the time being, I'd advise this: watch the videos, wait till you actually get to use the thing - and be especially observant when watching the reactions of non-gamers when they see this, because I'm fairly sure that after the Revo comes out, some of those people will no longer be non-gamers.
My comment from last month still stands: the 360 will be the most powerful, PS3 will have the widest selection of games, and the Revo will give you something unique which you can't get elsewhere. But here's another bet I'm gonna make (I know,I never learn - compulsive gambling runs in the family, that's why I work in finance) - I'll say it here first: The Revolution will sell a lot more units than the NGC.
ONe last question, and I don't mean this in a sardonic way, but out of all you X-Box owners: how often do you play a game other than Halo 2? And what game(s) would that be? Are there any games in your collection, other than Halo 2, on which you have clocked up more than 20 hours' playing time? What are they?
There's something to ponder, I'll come back to face your ire tomorrow.....