The Importance of Being Idle

You Say You Want A Revolution?

This morning the web (or at least the parts of it I frequent) is full of the news that Nintendo has finally unveiled the controller for its forthcoming Revolution console. I encourage you to go hunt these things out, and make up your own mind, but this is what I think: Huh?
What follows is going to be incoherent and poorly thought out (no change there then), cos it is literally the things that are flooding through my mind right this minute.
Don't get me wrong, there's very little in the PS3 or Xbox360 that's getting me excited, they look like being exactly the same games systems we've got now, but with improved graphics and yet more online capabilities that I'm not interested in. As a fairly hardcore Nintendo fanboy (with 'em since the NES days) I was looking forward to seeing what they had in store for us with the next generation, and all along they were saying what I wanted to hear: other companies concentrating too much on graphics, no innovation in gameplay... it all sounded good. And they warned us that something crazy was coming, over and over again. But this? It's... it's a tv remote control isn't it? I mean, its a clever one, with motion tracking and tilt sensing and all that, and it's expandable with extra bits you can plug in, and parts of the promotional video look interesting... but I for one feel disenfranchised by this new approach. I know its very stuck in my ways of me, but there you go. I mean, obviously until we see some actual games and get to play with the controller ourselves I won't really know what I think and feel about it, but one things is abundantly clear from this: Nintendo don't want third party support for the new system. I mean look at the DS, for all its wonderful new ways of interacting, only Nintendo do anything new or interesting with it, everybody else just shovels on the game they've designed for all the other consoles and puts a map or something on the second screen. And this is gonna be just the same, except maybe the big guns won't even bother this time. I know this is an incredibly negative opinion of the Big N, but rather than being inclusive I think they've been incredibly divisive. People who don't pick up and play games now aren't staying away cos they can't handle the controller, they're not playing cos they don't WANT to, and designing a controller that looks like a TV remote isn't going to make them want to play games, because they're just not gamers. And the gamers who did want to play, well it looks like Nintendo aren't interested in us anymore. Then think about what has happened with the last two generations of Nintendo hardware... once bitten twice shy eh? Well now we're twice bitten, and with hardware this eccentric it looks like we're gonna be losing another chunk of flesh... I mean I love my 'cube, don't get me wrong, but the last time a decent game (or any games that I can think of) came out on it was Resi 4 which was like six months ago (admittedly it was the greatest video game of this generation so far, but that's hardly the point) and the next time we see anything is gonna be sometime next year when the new Zelda game comes out. What do we have in the meantime? More fucking Mario Party, and more bloody Mario themed sports games. Who are those aimed at? Why, the casuals, that's who, I know I could care less. I don't know, I really don't. I mean its BECAUSE of the innovation that we love Nintendo, and I have almost always thought they were right in the past, hell they probably are this time and it'll become obvious once you get the controller in your hand, but all I know is that right now, this is one Revolution I don't want to be a part of.

posted by BadMonkey @ 1:00 PM