A few weeks ago I was reading EDGE whilst flying towards the frozen wastelands of Siberia (alright, the rather westernised metropolis of Moscow). I don't really sleep that well on planes, and it was a short flight, so reading seemed like the best option. That said, I find it unusually hard to concentrate on reading while flying...I definitely read the words just the same, but they don't seem to sink in. However, on this particular flight and in this particular issue something jumped out and me and stuck in my head. It was an article on Buzz!, the music quiz game for PlayStation2 that Sony has apparently pinned its Christmas hopes on. Up to this point, I had absolutely no idea what all the fuss was about. But then I noticed the pictures on the controllers, a simple one-hand affair with minimal buttons, designed specifically to be accessible to family members during the slow periods on Christmas Day.
Fast forward a couple of weeks, and Nintendo has finally unveiled the controller for the Revolution. They said it would be different, and whilst certainly a serious sidestep from traditional design, I can't help but be reminded of the Buzz! controllers. But it's one thing to build a singular game around such a device, especially a game with no desire to hide its gimmick nature. Building an entire console around it? Lunacy, surely?
Maybe not. Buzz! is the product of the lessons Sony have learnt from EyeToy and Singstar: give non-gamers something they recognise and understand and they will play. After all, who doesn't like to enjoy themselves? And after all, what do gamers offer but enjoyment? Listening to Shigeru Miyamoto's presentation makes it abundantly clear that Nintendo have realised the same thing, but have thought it through that much further. Make it look just like a TV remote and it can sit proudly on display all day along, inviting curious questions from visitors. Make the movement of the controller itself an interface device and suddenly a controller with only a very limited number of functions, as in the case of Buzz!, and it becomes potentially the most versatile Human Interface Device in history.
There is the possibility that the Revolution will be a dismal failure; that the controller options will cater well to a handful of quality in-house titles but that the rest of the output simply won't cut the mustard. Personally, I have a rather different prediction. Look at the PSP and the DS. Ostensibly, the DS should be the outright loser in the handheld war. On paper, it's certainly the weaker of the two, and if you believe Sony hyperbole, there's simply no contest. Nintendo agree, but in a totally different way. They seem to understand that the two handhelds aren't really in competition at all. Anything the PSP can do, the DS can too, but arguably less well. Compare Ridge Racers and Ridge Racer DS and that becomes painfully obvious. But it is simply not true to say that the PSP can do everything that the DS can. Show me the PSP versions of Yoshi's Touch & Go, Pac Pix and, most crucially of all, Nintendogs. They don't exist, and they aren't coming.
In the ensuing console war, Microsoft and Sony are going to be at loggerheads all the way through, probably with no clear winner. It will be a war of attrition, of polygon counts and online subscriber totals. And then there will be Revolution. Miyamoto confirmed that, through controller expansions, Revolution will be able to handle multiformat titles. But that was little more than a footnote in the presentation. Regardless of whether not the Revolution will be able to handle Soul Calibur 4 or Burnout 5: Skoda Edition as well as Xbox 360 or PlayStation3, it will clearly be able to offer gaming experiences unavailable elsewhere. And as with the DS, that serves two purposes: it works for gamers because we always want the best of all worlds and the Revolution will offer something we can't get from the others, while for non-gamers it just entice them into trying something new entirely.
Will the Revolution `win` the incoming console war? I sincerely doubt it, in the conventional sense. Will Nintendo still be fighting fit when the next-next generation rolls around? I for one plan to stake my faith on the barricades...
Fast forward a couple of weeks, and Nintendo has finally unveiled the controller for the Revolution. They said it would be different, and whilst certainly a serious sidestep from traditional design, I can't help but be reminded of the Buzz! controllers. But it's one thing to build a singular game around such a device, especially a game with no desire to hide its gimmick nature. Building an entire console around it? Lunacy, surely?
Maybe not. Buzz! is the product of the lessons Sony have learnt from EyeToy and Singstar: give non-gamers something they recognise and understand and they will play. After all, who doesn't like to enjoy themselves? And after all, what do gamers offer but enjoyment? Listening to Shigeru Miyamoto's presentation makes it abundantly clear that Nintendo have realised the same thing, but have thought it through that much further. Make it look just like a TV remote and it can sit proudly on display all day along, inviting curious questions from visitors. Make the movement of the controller itself an interface device and suddenly a controller with only a very limited number of functions, as in the case of Buzz!, and it becomes potentially the most versatile Human Interface Device in history.
There is the possibility that the Revolution will be a dismal failure; that the controller options will cater well to a handful of quality in-house titles but that the rest of the output simply won't cut the mustard. Personally, I have a rather different prediction. Look at the PSP and the DS. Ostensibly, the DS should be the outright loser in the handheld war. On paper, it's certainly the weaker of the two, and if you believe Sony hyperbole, there's simply no contest. Nintendo agree, but in a totally different way. They seem to understand that the two handhelds aren't really in competition at all. Anything the PSP can do, the DS can too, but arguably less well. Compare Ridge Racers and Ridge Racer DS and that becomes painfully obvious. But it is simply not true to say that the PSP can do everything that the DS can. Show me the PSP versions of Yoshi's Touch & Go, Pac Pix and, most crucially of all, Nintendogs. They don't exist, and they aren't coming.
In the ensuing console war, Microsoft and Sony are going to be at loggerheads all the way through, probably with no clear winner. It will be a war of attrition, of polygon counts and online subscriber totals. And then there will be Revolution. Miyamoto confirmed that, through controller expansions, Revolution will be able to handle multiformat titles. But that was little more than a footnote in the presentation. Regardless of whether not the Revolution will be able to handle Soul Calibur 4 or Burnout 5: Skoda Edition as well as Xbox 360 or PlayStation3, it will clearly be able to offer gaming experiences unavailable elsewhere. And as with the DS, that serves two purposes: it works for gamers because we always want the best of all worlds and the Revolution will offer something we can't get from the others, while for non-gamers it just entice them into trying something new entirely.
Will the Revolution `win` the incoming console war? I sincerely doubt it, in the conventional sense. Will Nintendo still be fighting fit when the next-next generation rolls around? I for one plan to stake my faith on the barricades...
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