Here's what I posted on GAF regarding the news (grammatical and proof reading errors retained for authenticity):
I think Ninty should keep the "Revolution" name. I mean, a next generation console with last generation technology...that's Revolutionary indeed. </sarcasm>
In an industry where Tony Hawk and Madden (the bastion of all that is wrong with this industry) still sell millions of copies, original games will fall by the wayside. Nintendo will learn this the hard way. Nintendo's vision is too good for the industry as it stands now. If I were Nintendo, I'd just wait for the inevitable industry crash to hit and then revitalize it.
This industry works like a forest. The big trees form a canopy over the forest that doesn't allow light to pass through and nurture the smaller foilage that the animals feed on. So they die. So the forest floor is left with dry, dead foilage that's no good for anyone. Then a lighting storm comes, strikes a tree and the whole forest burns down. This revitalizes the forest and allows for new growth. The foilage comes back, the animals feast and all is good until the trees get too large again and the whole cycle starts again.
We have a few big trees like EA, Ubi Soft, Activision, Square-Enix, Namco, Konami, et. al. that steal all of the sunlight from the smaller developers who make the most revolutionary stuff. However, if it's not Tony Hawk or Madden, it gets no advertising dollars and therefore no exposure and stays in the niche. However, the industry needs these new ideas to survive. However, these smaller devs are choked out and either close their doors or get on the cookie-cutter-shit bandwagon. Then the industry gets dry and stale and eventually collapses. That's going to happen soon, I don't know when, but soon. People are going to get sick of playing the same old shit over and over again.
Maybe Nintendo realizes this and Revolution could possibly ride out the eventual collapse of the industry and take it in a new direction. Fuck the establishment. Perhaps we're all dead fucking wrong. Perhaps it has nothing to do with better visuals, better sound or better physics. Perhaps it has everything to do with game mechanics and ideas. Perhaps its the way we think about games that need to change. Nintendo's vision is that the next generation has little to do with having better graphics. However, that's how our jaded asses have been programmed to think over the years. Shit, if a console doesn't have better graphics, better sound, and better physics then it's not "next gen" in our view. However, the shit that we fail to realize is that the thing that seperates games from music and movies is that we "PLAY" them. It's the interaction that distinguishes games from the other mediums. So why has graphics become the benchmark in a medium where GAMEPLAY is the unique identifier? Who knows. Graphics should be the benchmark for movies and sound should be a benchmark for music. How backwards have we become?
Do we judge a music album based on the music video? Hell no, that doesn't make sense since it's the SOUND that matters. Do we judge a movie by how good the soundtrack is? Hell no, that doesn't make sense since it's the VISUAL PERFORMANCE that matters. Do we judge games primarily by how good the GRAPHICS are? Yes we do. In a medium where graphics should take a backseat to interactivity, the majority of us have been trained like Pavlov's dogs to salivate at graphics and put gameplay in the backseat. Case in point: The whole MGS4 "unveiling" (or the whole PS3 unvieling for that matter). Like little trained monkies we jumped up and down at these graphics and claimed that "The next generation is here!" That's stupid. I'm stupid. We're all stupid. We've all been duped. Now most of us are all but ready to write-off a console that could be just what this stale fucking industry needs just because it doesn't meet our bastardized benchmark of what constitutes a "next generation" console, namely better graphics. We're a bunch of marketing tools for lazy developers who'd rather get rich by just improving visuals, animation and physics while giving us the same gameplay experience as the Playstation.
That's like McDonalds adding one more piece of bread to the Bic Mac and calling it the "Next Generation of Burgers." Then they brainwash consumers into believing that a real next generation burger is taller than the rest. No matter that it tastes the fucking same as the regular Big Mac...it just looks better. That's the way the game industry has trained us. We now believe that next generation games are games that primarily LOOK BETTER than previous games. The evidence is that companies like Sony get away with showing reels and reels of game movie footage (whether or not they are real-time or not is moot) and we get excited as if graphics are the foremost benchmark of a next generation console. It's a fucking joke and this thread proves it.
But then again, it's called VIDEO games. So I guess the visual aspect of it all does play an important part. But should it be more important than the interactive aspect. It is called video GAMES, you know GAMES that are played on a video screen. However, it seems that Sony/MS main aim is to make game VIDEOS.
So I guess this is what seperates the next generation of consoles. We have Nintendo with it's VIDEO GAME machine and Sony and MS with their GAME VIDEO machines. Let's just agree to create that distinction so that we don't confuse ourselves.
I'll probably have to read it tomorrow.
