Iwata expects Rev controller to become the standard gaming interface
CNN's Chris Morris recently took a shot at those eight Revolution controller demos that everyone's been raving about since TGS, and offered a few pennies for the thoughts of a few of Nintendo's higher-ups in the process. His insights on the controller itself aren't anything we haven't heard a hundred times before (it's so light/intuitive/subtle/revolutionary!), but some of the quotes he snags from Iwata and the Regginator do shed some new light on Nintendo's ultimate scheme. Iwata doesn't just expect the Revolution to bridge the gap between gamers and non-gamers alike, he also expects the Revolution's control scheme to become "the standard in video game controls." That's some big talk, implying that Microsoft and Sony would abandon the hyper-evolved NES interface in favor of Nintendo's newest implementation. Rather than dreading, is Nintendo perhaps expecting their competitors to imitate their designs?
When asked how the general public would react to such a radically new interface, Iwata compared selling people on the idea of the Rev to selling people on the idea of the DS's touch screen, and how the lessons learned from marketing the DS will help them communicate the idea of the Revolution's remote. However, if you stop and think about it, not all that many DS games have made great use of the device's touch screen (by which we mean that the game couldn't have functioned at all without the inclusion of a touch screen in the first place). Only Kirby: Canvas Curse, Meteos, and Wario Ware DS immediately spring to mind (Animal Crossing may have suffered without a touchable interface, but it was by no means necessary). Should we really expect third-party developers to push the boundaries of gameplay on unproven technology?
Reggie had less grandiose words to offer for our consumption, though he did remark that he earnestly hoped that the Revolution would realize a massively multiplayer online game on a console, an endeavor which has in the past been met with merely mediocre success. Could a Nintendo-developed MMORPG be in the works? They've got more than enough untapped intellectual properties—is an Earthbound MMOG really that hard to imagine? Finally, Reggie reminds us yet again that we'll be seeing more from the Revolution before E3 rolls around. Come on, Reggie! Enough with the demos, we want Smash Bros. dammit!
