Ok, this may be considered speculation/ranting, I don't care. Sue me. 
For a long time now I was actually quite angry at nintendo for continuing to be, well, nintendo. Not speaking to their fans/"community", not disclosing any future plans, not wanting to raise the bar in the specs war et cetera. The tiny rev prototype case they showed clearly states - IMO - that Rev is not going to be about high specs hardware. Nintendo's suggestion they might not support HD resolutions could be a further indication of the same. This discouraged me further and made me convinced Nintendo was out of touch with the market, and pretty much reality as a whole.
Since they showed off their - quite frankly WEIRD - controller though, I've more or less turned around 180 degrees.
Many console games today are immensely frustrating to get far into. Even on easy mode. Prince of persia for example is legendary in this regard, but even many other games suffer from the same basic problem. It was an effort for me to clock zone of the enders 2, I didn't even get past the first miniboss in devil may cry 3 on my first casual attempt at the game, nor did a friend of mine either moments before. I put god of war on hold because I felt I might be about to hit a rock wall, as did I with metroid prime 2, demon stone and Jak 2 also.
Games are becoming too frustrating to play to be fun. I don't know where I'm supposed to have time to hold L2, triangle, press X and pull back on the stick to do a beeblebrox strike on an enemy when I'm being swamped by four-five guys at a time. These button combinations - although perhaps impressive when they do trigger - is taking the fun out of gaming.
I used to be good at twitch gaming. I could clock the original SMB with more than 20 lives to spare and not having died more than 3 times, maybe less. It was so long ago now I can't recall my best result. Now however it seems I suck. Maybe I'm just getting old, I don't know... The old instincts sure aren't kicking in the way they used to, that much is certain.
However, I'm dreaming, hoping, that Revolution will bring new ways of gaming into the console era. Ways not relying on hopeless combos of X and Ys and sticks and triangles (because the Rev controller hardly has any buttons at all...). Frankly, it's getting tiresome with games that introduce ever more ways to do special moves by ever-increasingly contrived ways of mashing buttons and spinning the sticks around.
So, I've decided I DON'T CARE if Rev isn't outputting a bajillion pixels and polys a second, if it doesn't do HD res, if it doesn't calculate a gazillion dot products in a heartbeat. So what? Rock 'n' Roll Racing ran at 30Hz on a system that had a completely anemic CPU, yet it was probably the most fun I've had in ages when console gaming. No game, I repeat, NO GAME EVER on either the N64, GC or PS2 has made me laugh as much as when I totally devastated the competition in yet again on the humble SNES.
It isn't about the specs, it's about gameplay! (And having a really cool announcer voice during play, heh.)
The one thing that still makes me a little uncertain (or perhaps more than a little) is Nintendo's spotty track record when it comes to dealing with 3rd parties. Back in the day they could piss on 3rd parties (and they DID), and still have them come crawling back for more, because Nintendo was the market. Sure, there was sega etc, but if companies wanted to make money they did business with nintendo.
Then SNES was a little late and further on, playstation happened. And the rest is history. Still, Nintendo hasn't shown it has learned. Quite the opposite, they've continued to not really be all that interested in 3rd parties even on the GC, because they sell millions of copies of their own games and that keeps them happy. This makes people - including myself - wary, because people tend to want the games available on other platforms too.
The Rev however with its novel interface might be both a blessing and a curse in that regard. It's going to be damn tough to port the devil may cries and gods of war and other button-mashers to a controller like Nintendo's bizarre remote thingy. Perhaps even impossible. So we perhaps won't see the stapleware from EA, such as The Marginally Changed Version Of Last Year's Football Game, and The Marginally Changed Version Of Last Year's Baseball Game, and The Marginally Changed Version Of Previous Splinter Cell Game, and so on. Yet, do we really need that? Is the gameplay of Madden 2006 fundamentally any different from, say, Madden 2003?
So there lives the dream of different gameplay on Revolution. Something we haven't seen before, perhaps it is some pie in the sky pipe-dream, but still, it's there. That finally, after nearly 25 years of The Same Old Stuff since NES released but with more buttons and some sticks tacked on (and shaking motors), someone finally dared to try something new, something DIFFERENT. Not many buttons at all, and NO stick (or one, at most). How will we play old games with a crazy human interface like that?
Only with difficulty I'm sure most will say, and that will likely be true as well! Perhaps we won't at all? Perhaps these games will be released on Rev, like token products because they'll sell regardless, and if Nintendo continues their policy of easily developed-for hardware they can be ported effortlessly and run well with little effort in the way of optimization, but the true side of Revolution would be the games that take the new interface seriously.
My dream is that I could play a game casually laid back and wave my hand around like a conductor of a classical orchestra, instead of frantically bashing buttons like a madman trying to execute a Proteus Bodyslam at the right moment to finish off the cheating boss that will otherwise regenerate all its health unless it's slammed, but of course not quite getting it to work because I press square instead of circle every damn time or don't press forward quick enough or whatever.
Hopefully, Rev will be noticeably cheaper than the competition, assuming it is less powerful that is (and hopefully it'll be cheaper anyway), this enables it to be that alternative side console for the hardcore gamers, it'll also hopefully attract those that feel the "big guns" of x360 and PS3 are too damn expensive, and Nintendo's usual crowd of parents of pokemon kiddies.
It's going to be real interesting to see what Revolution brings, and how many of my hopes and dreams actually get fulfilled.
For a long time now I was actually quite angry at nintendo for continuing to be, well, nintendo. Not speaking to their fans/"community", not disclosing any future plans, not wanting to raise the bar in the specs war et cetera. The tiny rev prototype case they showed clearly states - IMO - that Rev is not going to be about high specs hardware. Nintendo's suggestion they might not support HD resolutions could be a further indication of the same. This discouraged me further and made me convinced Nintendo was out of touch with the market, and pretty much reality as a whole.
Since they showed off their - quite frankly WEIRD - controller though, I've more or less turned around 180 degrees.
Many console games today are immensely frustrating to get far into. Even on easy mode. Prince of persia for example is legendary in this regard, but even many other games suffer from the same basic problem. It was an effort for me to clock zone of the enders 2, I didn't even get past the first miniboss in devil may cry 3 on my first casual attempt at the game, nor did a friend of mine either moments before. I put god of war on hold because I felt I might be about to hit a rock wall, as did I with metroid prime 2, demon stone and Jak 2 also.
Games are becoming too frustrating to play to be fun. I don't know where I'm supposed to have time to hold L2, triangle, press X and pull back on the stick to do a beeblebrox strike on an enemy when I'm being swamped by four-five guys at a time. These button combinations - although perhaps impressive when they do trigger - is taking the fun out of gaming.
I used to be good at twitch gaming. I could clock the original SMB with more than 20 lives to spare and not having died more than 3 times, maybe less. It was so long ago now I can't recall my best result. Now however it seems I suck. Maybe I'm just getting old, I don't know... The old instincts sure aren't kicking in the way they used to, that much is certain.
However, I'm dreaming, hoping, that Revolution will bring new ways of gaming into the console era. Ways not relying on hopeless combos of X and Ys and sticks and triangles (because the Rev controller hardly has any buttons at all...
). Frankly, it's getting tiresome with games that introduce ever more ways to do special moves by ever-increasingly contrived ways of mashing buttons and spinning the sticks around.So, I've decided I DON'T CARE if Rev isn't outputting a bajillion pixels and polys a second, if it doesn't do HD res, if it doesn't calculate a gazillion dot products in a heartbeat. So what? Rock 'n' Roll Racing ran at 30Hz on a system that had a completely anemic CPU, yet it was probably the most fun I've had in ages when console gaming. No game, I repeat, NO GAME EVER on either the N64, GC or PS2 has made me laugh as much as when I totally devastated the competition in yet again on the humble SNES.
It isn't about the specs, it's about gameplay! (And having a really cool announcer voice during play, heh.)
The one thing that still makes me a little uncertain (or perhaps more than a little) is Nintendo's spotty track record when it comes to dealing with 3rd parties. Back in the day they could piss on 3rd parties (and they DID), and still have them come crawling back for more, because Nintendo was the market. Sure, there was sega etc, but if companies wanted to make money they did business with nintendo.
Then SNES was a little late and further on, playstation happened. And the rest is history. Still, Nintendo hasn't shown it has learned. Quite the opposite, they've continued to not really be all that interested in 3rd parties even on the GC, because they sell millions of copies of their own games and that keeps them happy. This makes people - including myself - wary, because people tend to want the games available on other platforms too.
The Rev however with its novel interface might be both a blessing and a curse in that regard. It's going to be damn tough to port the devil may cries and gods of war and other button-mashers to a controller like Nintendo's bizarre remote thingy. Perhaps even impossible. So we perhaps won't see the stapleware from EA, such as The Marginally Changed Version Of Last Year's Football Game, and The Marginally Changed Version Of Last Year's Baseball Game, and The Marginally Changed Version Of Previous Splinter Cell Game, and so on. Yet, do we really need that? Is the gameplay of Madden 2006 fundamentally any different from, say, Madden 2003?
So there lives the dream of different gameplay on Revolution. Something we haven't seen before, perhaps it is some pie in the sky pipe-dream, but still, it's there. That finally, after nearly 25 years of The Same Old Stuff since NES released but with more buttons and some sticks tacked on (and shaking motors), someone finally dared to try something new, something DIFFERENT. Not many buttons at all, and NO stick (or one, at most). How will we play old games with a crazy human interface like that?
Only with difficulty I'm sure most will say, and that will likely be true as well! Perhaps we won't at all? Perhaps these games will be released on Rev, like token products because they'll sell regardless, and if Nintendo continues their policy of easily developed-for hardware they can be ported effortlessly and run well with little effort in the way of optimization, but the true side of Revolution would be the games that take the new interface seriously.
My dream is that I could play a game casually laid back and wave my hand around like a conductor of a classical orchestra, instead of frantically bashing buttons like a madman trying to execute a Proteus Bodyslam at the right moment to finish off the cheating boss that will otherwise regenerate all its health unless it's slammed, but of course not quite getting it to work because I press square instead of circle every damn time or don't press forward quick enough or whatever.
Hopefully, Rev will be noticeably cheaper than the competition, assuming it is less powerful that is (and hopefully it'll be cheaper anyway), this enables it to be that alternative side console for the hardcore gamers, it'll also hopefully attract those that feel the "big guns" of x360 and PS3 are too damn expensive, and Nintendo's usual crowd of parents of pokemon kiddies.
It's going to be real interesting to see what Revolution brings, and how many of my hopes and dreams actually get fulfilled.
