Time With The Revolution

IGN managed to get their hands on a Revolution Developer's Kit, and have put up a tantalizing hands-on impressions article. Folks who are very much looking forward to Nintendo's entrance into the next-gen war may find things of interest here. From the article: "One thing is crystal clear from the controller-based development kits, though: Revolution will definitely operate as an extension of the GameCube hardware. These preliminary kits include only a wired Revolution controller, a wired nunchuck attachment and a wired motion bar, which some studios have labeled the 'wand.' So the obvious question is, how can developers possibly hope to test any of this gear out? The answer is simple: the controller and its attachments plug into existing GameCube development hardware."

Drawing specious conclusions...

[Quarters]

Just because Nintendo made a low-cost controller dev kit by interfacing their new controller technology to their existing hardware doesn't mean that you can infer that the Revolution will be built on Gamecube hardware. All you can infer is that Nintendo has possibly made their prototype Revolution controller a derivative so that current Gamecube developers can explore the new controller paradigm without having to either buy, or wait, for the new Revolution dev kits.

Game formats

[DumbWhiteGuy777]

Isn't the Revolution going to be backwards compatible with GC games?

Now that I think of it, what format are Revolution games going to be in? Certainly they won't use the mini-discs again.

Re:Drawing specious conclusions...

[TeamSPAM]

I'm a bit of a nintendo fanboy and look forward to the Revolution coming out. The article may be jumping to conclusions, but they may not be that far off. Does it really matter if the Revolutions is just an updated GC? Other than the new controllers, Nintendo is just intergrating alot of existing technology.

• Wireless controllers rock. I think this technology is mature and cheap enough to build it in.
• Ethernet adapters. When the GC came out, I don't think the market was ready for online consoles. The Xbox changed that, just throw the ethernet chipset in and be done.
• Cell Processor. The GC was already using a PowerPC chip, it'll just have one that is going to be about 5x faster.
• Same thing with the video chipset. They market has moved forward, take something off the shelf and keep moving. While no HD resolutions may be a drawback. Nintendo isn't about pushing more polygons on your screen, they are about making fun games.

I think if they can keep the core of the Revolution similar to the GC, then Nintendo might get third party developers on board a bit easier. They're keeping the learning curve low.

Re:Drawing specious conclusions...

[lurker4hire]

Actually not really, since the GC CPU is already PowerPC, and IBM is making a new, presumably multicore, powerpc cpu for revolution.

MS needed to emulate intel on powerpc, which is a much harder proposition.

l4h

Re:Microsoft Odd Console Out?

[Headcase88]

"People seem to be in a fevor pitch about the Revolution and PS3, one has to wonder what is going to happen to the Xbox 360. Only a little more than a million have been sold and almost all of the big name games for the console have better pc versions of its games coming out."

Replace "XBox 360" with "Nintendo DS", "Revolution and PS3" with "PSP", and "pc" with "console", and you're getting pretty close to the general feelings of the DS when it launched.

Re:Drawing specious conclusions...

[chrismcdirty]

I would assume that since [presumably] it's a multicore, PPC CPU, it would be capable of running, in hardware, instructions designed for a PPC CPU on the same evolutionary line.

Re:Drawing specious conclusions...

[Anonymous Coward]

"While no HD resolutions may be a drawback. Nintendo isn't about pushing more polygons on your screen, they are about making fun games."

While I'm not saying Nintendo is all about the graphics, the fact that they don't support/require HD means the Revolution can output significantly more polygons per frame - it's not going to be spending all its power creating higher resolutions that won't even be used by most setups.

Re:Drawing specious conclusions...

[lion2]

Yeah but the Xbox 360 also has the difficult task of emulating a different graphics chipset. If Nintendo wants to keep costs down and compatibility up then the Revolution graphics chip must be based on the gamecube's. Microsoft had no choice but to use a software solution since they did not own the rights to the Xbox graphics chip. Adding the xbox graphics hardware to the 360 would make the system even more expensive. Nintendo is still working with ATI so they wont have the legal issues that Microsoft had with Nvidia.

Re:get it right

[Anonymous Coward]

Not only that but they could also quickly port an existing game over to the new control set-up to see how it works before they spend millions of dollars developing a next generation game. If you're UBI-soft do you want to get the Revolution Dev-kit, spend a month porting your engine to the Revolution, wait for new content to be at a level to do an appropriate play test (which could take months), or would you want to plug in the controller and have your team port XIII's controls to the device and start playtesting your setup in a little over a week?

(Although XIII was a pretty crappy game, it would work well as a test for a FPS because it maintained pretty standard FPS controls and suffered [more than most] for this inelegant control setup)

I'm skilled enough at wasting time w/o this trash

[Headcase88]

Which is why this article is so worthless.

"Uh, we agreed not to take pictues, but, like, it's 'surprisingly' smaller than we expected. So, you know, in case you didn't see all those pictures at E3 showing it being held by hands, this article might be worth a shit".

But since it's about the Revo and they use the term "hands-on", every gaming blog in the Universe has to link to it and give IGN undeserved ad revenue.

Re:Drawing specious conclusions...

[Jacius]

the Revolution will in essence be an evolution of the GameCube hardware.

For the armchair developers out there, this is a good thing. The more similarity between the Gamecube and the Revolution in terms of architecture, the more quickly development studios can get the hang of it and start putting out some really interesting games.

Every time a new console with a different architecture comes out, the studios have to start back at square one, and learn the intricacies of the new hardware. After a couple years of working with the system, the studio has built up their own custom library/engine to handle the basics, and they have learned several tricks for squeezing that extra "oomph" out of the hardware. This is why games that come out several years after the console often look, sound, and feel much better than lauch titles, even though they are using the exact same hardware. Compare, for example, Ocarina of Time with Majora's Mask on the N64: They both use the same hardware, and MM is obviously based on OoT's engine. But because MM didn't have to reinvent the wheel, the developers were freed to create an intriguing, even beautiful, experience.

So if the Revolution's architecture is mostly a beefed-up Gamecube, studios should be able to quickly adapt their libraries to work on the Revolution, so they can spend less time worrying about memory management and polygon-pushing, and more time creating interesting ways to use the new controller. Nintendo, by using the Gamecube architecture as a base, has essentially given studios 5 retroactive years of experience with the Revolution devkits, and the launch titles should be must more interesting as a result.