IGN Speaks on Recent Revolution Developments

From IGN Forums:

Please excuse the aggressive headline. I just wanted an attention grabber here. I figured I couldn't not post some feedback on Revolution the night we launch our official channel. I am still a Nintendo nerd at heart, heir to the IGN64 and IGNcube sites.

Anyway, people are really getting hooked on the whole idea that Revolution is 1.5x GameCube, or slightly better than Xbox, etc. Okay, I can understand the concern: we're talking about a system that will potentially have 25% the main RAM as a system like Xbox 360 or PS3. It's going to have some graphical drawbacks. But, at the same time, developers don't have a chipset in their hands yet. Until they do, you can't start talking about who kind of specific tricks IBM, ATI, and Nintendo have hardwired in there. It's unlikely that ATI has worked with Nintendo for years to create the exact same chipset as GameCube, only with a little more clockspeed. No, it's likely there will be some of the latest shader tricks, etc.

Aside from all that, the main point I wanted to put out there is that in Nintendo's mind, I'm sure Revolution is PlayStation 3.5 -- it's supposed to offer all the entertainment of games you're used to playing now, plus something completely new. If the company can provide enough software that truly takes advantage of the new control system to create new experiences, then you have something that the other consoles don't.

I've played with the Revolution controller, and I think it's just way too early to make any kind of judgement. There's a lot of potential, but there's also plenty of things that could go wrong (whether it just be the main functionality or something like software support). Nonetheless, I do know that as much as I love my HD gaming, or just high-end visuals, I wouldn't mind if Revolution games found themselves graphically on-par with something like Kameo in standard definition. That's not a level that I think is too far from achieving when you consider how much developers learn to pull off over the generation of a console's life.

So, while it's pretty easy to dog on the potential graphical performance, I think it's ultimately going to come down to just how intuitive/precise the controller is and what developers really can achieve with it. I believe E3 2006 will be the first real chance we'll have for answers to that.

And let's not forget how backwards compatability and other subtleties like that add to the experience... "