NINTENDO UNMASKS "REVOLUTION" CONTROLLER

Today at the Tokyo Game Show, Nintendo debuted the new game controller for the Revolution ending speculation as to what their breakthrough with the system would be. The controller essentially is not a controller at all, rather a traditional style wireless remote control looking device with fewer buttons than a typical game controller. Furthermore, there will be motion sensors mounted on top of the TV or nearby to detect the position and location of the "wand" remote in the player's hand sending the pitch, yaw, and position of the unit. This is allegedly supposed to allow for a more interactive gaming experience by allowing players to use the remote to feel more immersed with the gaming environment, essentially swinging it, pointing it, jerking it, snapping it, etc. A promotional video was shown displaying the way the controller might be used, in fishing games, swatting flys, a conductor's baton, swinging a sword, etc. (The promo reminded me of some bad 80's commercials on video games) In some aspects it acts like a virtual PC mouse, with a point and click like functionality, possibly useful in First Person Shooters. Various crude demos of the technology showed how it could be used to navigate a 3-D environment to find a Pikachu ("Where's Pikachu?") amongst a scene of other Pokemon characters. The remote can connect by a short wire to an analog stick to use in the other hand, essentially taking a traditional controller and separating it into to hands. The remote can also be placed inside of a shell that resembles a traditional wavebird style controller for standard gameplay, and it would supposedly retain it's functionality. Nintendo had no actual games to play with the controller yet, just some basic technology demos to show off how the technology will eventually work, and a brief stint of Metroid Prime 3.

According to the Nintendo the control design is supposed to attract traditionally non gamers to their console, people who might not otherwise play video games implying older adults and more female players. They want to set themselves apart from the competition to making gaming for 'everyone' supposedly. "The feeling is so natural and real, as soon as players use the controller, their minds will spin with the possibilities of how this will change gaming as we know it today," explained Satoru Iwata, Nintendo president. "This is an extremely exciting innovation, one that will thrill current players and entice new ones."

Although I commend Nintendo's efforts at ingenuity and the notion of utilizing a virtual 3-D space in reality to play games, essentially trying to imply psudoholodeck experience of interactivity, there are are some serious trepidations I have about this device and the likelihood of there being many games utilizing it. Essentially, it would be a little fun to swing it around and clang swords with some enemies in a game like Zelda, however I can't imagine I would find myself wanting to play 5 hours of this, standing in front of the TV swinging and swinging. There also appear to be some serious ergonomic issues, where using that could become exceedingly uncomfortable over an extended period of time. And two handing the analog stick and connecting it by a cord seems pointless when a single controller would do the job just as well. My first thought when I saw it was, "Gee didn't they do this over two decades ago with the Atari 5200 and the Intellivision!"


Nintendo has tried to put forth some wacky peripherals and control schemes in the past, a laundry list of failures that didn't catch on although they were indeed very innovative for their times. For example the original Zapper for the NES allowed for shooting at the screen like in old school arcades, surprisingly back then the genre of First Person Shooters didn't exist, and today gun peripheral use is very obscure despite the popularity of FPS games like Halo, Quake III, Half Life 2, Counterstrike, and Doom III.

The Power Pad was a mat rolled onto the floor that you could interact with games like Track and Field for the NES. This was long before the appearance of DDR, and had Nintendo realized the fun in dance based video games the peripheral may have had far more use than it ended up getting.

The Power Glove was indeed an impressive idea during the late 1980's produced for the NES, basically it was a guantlet worn with controller buttons on it to interact with video games in almost a similar fashion as this new wand remote. You essentially could punch at King Hippo or Bald Bull in a game like Mike Tyson's Punch Out. And there was one game called Klax I believe made specifially for the unit. No developers made any good games that utilized the glove and it flopped failing to gain very much appeal with game players.

R.O.B. the robot, was more of a gimmicky toy. It was supposed to be controllable etc, but in fact it wasn't very fun or impressive. It threw colored discs. There was one game made for it, and that was it. I suppose it was hoped that with the popularity of Sci-Fi Robots like "Johnny 5" from Short Circuit during the 80's, kids would want it in droves, but with no game support there was no reason to keep playing with it. Although R.O.B. was ahead of it's time in thinking you could have a toy controlled by a game or computer, something manufacturers today are trying to emulate, it didn't gain acceptance or support in the gaming industry.

Then there was the Virtual Boy. There were some books during the late 80's and early 90's touting the coming age of VR. Nintendo wanted to be innovative and start employing such a notion with a unit they created called the Virtual Boy. The virtual boy ergonomically was a nightmare, you had to set it up on a desk or table and look through the device's goggles at a red outlined wireframe environment. I think only 1 or 2 games were made for it, and this unit disappeared from retailers who had unsold inventory collecting dust in their stockrooms.

For the Super Nintendo, they made one game for the Mouse pointer called Mario Paint. Their mouse had so much potential but alas they failed to support it and no third parties made use of the peripheral so it made a rapid disappearance from production. Some unexploted examples could have been RPG's, First Person Shooters, and strategy games like Warcraft, Starcraft, and SimCity2000, at the time only available on PC's.

The Super Scope 6 looked cool, again another gun peripheral, and it came with a rather unexciting set of 6 mini games. Again another failure.

Gameboy also had it's fair share of bombs. The gameboy Printer. The GameBoy Camera. The GameBoy bar code reader. Where are any of these items today, and where are any games for them?

Nintendo's competitors also learned the hard lesson of missing peripheral support. Developers all but ignored the Menacer and the Activator for the Genesis. With the Dreamcast, brought the possibility of surfing the internet, and the Dreamcast keyboard allowed you to use the console with the same functionality of a WebTV set top box. This was a cool idea, but the Dreamcast only had a 56k modem during a time when broadband use already had legs and getting into many homes across Japan and the United States. SEGA's Dreamcast controllers also incorporated memory cards with small screens on them. The memory units or "VMU's" could store small Tomigotchi type games on them, very few games interfaced with the VMU aside from using it for game saves. Similar to Nintendo's "Nintendogs" SEGA made "SEAMAN" and you could plug a microphone into the controller and talk to your fish-thing as it evolved. The game (I use the term loosely) was boring and slow, and this was the only game to support the dreamcast Microphone. No other games were made for the microphone.

Facing stiff competition on software from it's competitors who cater to the core gamers, males aged 13 - 35, Nintendo is looking for new markets, however it may find that difficult to accomplish. I can't speak for the Japanese, but that's going to be a hard sell in the United States, indeed to this day most gamers are still male, and anyone who didn't grow up with gaming or at least have some passive interest in it as a child is likely not a gamer with little intent on becoming one today. If you grandmother can't program the VCR to stop flashing "12:00," then how can this untapped market essentially become a new class of gamer? I don't care how much you dumb down a controller to look like a DVD/TV remote, these people are not tech-savvy as a general rule. And girls? Many of the girls I've encountered who play video games, tend to like fantasy RPG's, Platformers, and Adventure games like Zelda, many like RPG's with emotionally deep and engrossing storylines or games that contain some kind of social element like Everquest, Dark Ages of Camelot, and Worlds of Warcraft. This isn't to say that girls don't play the traditionally guys games like First Person Shooters and Sports titles, but their choices tend to lean on less thumb/mouse twitching experiences. Contrary to marketing attempts, girls want immersive gaming experiences. Games like Nintendogs cater to the cute ("Kawai") factor and the novelty of it is admirable, but this is a very nitch genre, and it's been done before with limited success.

Nintendo is truly betting on this all or nothing. Bringing forth bold, unconventional, and innovative control schemes is all well and good if you're at the top of the industry and have a stranglehold on the market like they did in the 80's, but when you're lagging far behind your competitors in terms of market penetration and unit sales as they are now, this is a fast way to back yourself into a corner. Innovation is wonderful, but if you don't have decent games to support what you've done, you're wasting your efforts, gaming history proves this. Nintendo to a degree is alienating third party developers and forcing themselves into the position of making games themselves that support the device, and considering Nintendo's track record and interminable timetables of first party release dates on top titles, they're in real trouble. If "Revolution" doesn't debut with A+ list of several games that players will be clamoring to play, they face utter embarassment. Could this be the end of Nintendo? Possibly. Should they fail to attract a crowd of gamers to their camp, they very well may exit the console market entirely in the same fall from grace that SEGA experienced with the Dreamcast. Should things play out like this, I predict their declaration of discontinuence in the 3rd or 4th Quarter of 2008, leaving behind a duopoly of Sony and Microsoft to occupy the console gaming industry. Nintendo's prime market still continues to be children 3 - 12, with the parade of E rated titles they produce. That can keep them alive, but if they want to become a major player in the industry like they once were, they're going to have start really focusing on great games that impress not only with graphics and sound, but with dialogue and storyline. Zelda is Nintendo's gateway to redeem themselves, the game has a very broad appeal, amongst, kids, teenagers, adult gamers, and girls.

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