Team Fremont.com-Revolutionary Controller Review

Revolutionary Controller

It’s fair to say that since E3 backing May there have been more than a few Revolution rumours finding their way into our homes via the ever persistent medium of the internet. It seems like every day has found a new ‘insider’ creating their very own blog to try and tell everyone in the most ridiculously long winded way exactly what the Revolution is going to be. Thankfully the Tokyo Games Show didn’t take an age to get going and Nintendo President, Satoru Iwata had picked this event as the place to show off another piece of the Revolution puzzle, possibly the biggest, in the new controller interface. Interestingly, amongst the slew of speculation and hype that appeared following the E3 show, pretty much no-one managed to predict what we were due to see on September 16th. And no-one could.

I’ll admit myself to playing along with Iwata’s Revolution game. I had many, many ideas at what the controller could possibly be but nothing prepared me from the WTF?! moment that occurred when I saw the Revolution controller for the first time. Now I’ll say this, it takes a lot to stun entire crowd into complete silence with something like this but Nintendo pulled it off. Heck it took me a good 30 minutes to fully take in what I had just seen and at least a day in the office day-dreaming to fully appreciate exactly what Nintendo are offering up gamers in the Next Generation.

So what exactly do we have? A remote control that resembles an I-POD in style with a D-Pad and a much simpler button layout than anyone could predict. I’d guess that for at least the first 2 -3 minutes of seeing a picture of the controller most gamers will be totally confused as to how a remote control can be used to control most of today’s console games, it really is that different. Part of the uniqueness of the controller is its ability to sense to a high degree any movement in a 3D space and track it to the action going on in the game itself. It is able to tell the distance away from the screen, movement forward, backward, left, right, up, down as well as any twist or tilt you could imagine. One way to imagine this would be to think of it as a 3D mouse pointer that you could move anywhere in a 3D environment really intuitively. The controller may also be turned on its side to be used in the same way as the original NES controller which is a nice touch.

Part of the true unique nature of the controller is through expandability. There is a convenient expansion socket at the bottom of the remote which can apparently be used with a number of peripherals and devices to transform this into the ultimate control method and the first truly Next Generation control method out there. The first expansion to be announced and shown is the ‘Nunchuk’ analog control which is basically an analog stick with two triggers attached to the main remote controller via a cable. This is something Nintendo plan on bundling with the console from the get-go and looks to be a totally awesome method for playing FPS games. Of course the controller won’t be limited to just this peripheral and I’m sure we can look forward to a variety of interesting and most likely wacky contraptions from the get go. Nintendo did however also mention that there would be a classic style controller shell that the remote can be inserted into that will provide a more familiar approach to playing retro games and of course ports from other consoles. Whilst plugged into the controller shell, the 3d position functions of the remote will still function which again gives the Revolution a lot of options.

So I guess the question would be whether this is enough of a side-step to move Nintendo into a new market and go around the competition. We still no nothing about any of the technical specs of the console so I won’t go into that for the time being, but it is safe to say that this controller is so radically different to any other that Iwata’s comment about a ‘paradigm shift’ seems very appropriate. One of the advantages Nintendo will have with the added functionality is the difficulty of porting games to other consoles. This is good news for Nintendo as it would most likely mean more exclusive content and when it comes to porting games to the Revolution the added functionality may make the difference between the formats. Only time will tell exactly how well the Revolution will fare and how many new gamers are brought into the market. The future certainly looks good for Nintendo right now and if they keep on this path we could see some truly great things from the big N in the coming years.

Article By: Phil Haymes