Gaming professionals respond to Revo controller
In their Question of the Week feature, Gamasutra recently asked their audience what kinds of games would be most suited to the Revolution controller and which specific concepts they'd like to see using it in the future. The overall response?
"OMG the Lightsaberz0rz are teh rule!"
Not that there's anything wrong with prancing around the room and hacking off limbs with a beam of light, but we feel that the Revolution has a bit more potential than merely indulging us in our geeky Star Wars fantasies (though admittedly, that's an important feature of any console). Luckily, some of the other responses raised some more interesting issues.
"My big fear is that the Revolution is going to over-popularize shallow physical gaming such that everyone starts doing it and suddenly cooking simulators and orchestra-conducting games are going to be popping up on all formats," says Lionhead's impossibly named Tadhg Kelly. This is known as the Eyetoy phenomenon, where developers get stuck on gimmicky features and fail to take true advantage of the platform's capabilities. We have no doubt that several lazy developers will be satisfied with releasing shallow adventures in fishing, fly-swatting and carpentry--that's just the nature of this kind of technology. Fortunately, we won't be buying lame games like that. We'd rather go for intricate, first-person Harry Potter role-playing games.
"Imagine having to speak the spell you want to cast, and using different wand movements to create variations on the spell (maybe the closer you are to a 'correct' movement the more powerful it is, or maybe you can flick it in different directions to throw people about)." Ben Droste from Krome Studio sure makes a convincing pitch for the next Harry Potter film tie-in which, just like the previous entries, will be "the darkest one yet."
Finally, the prize for most spot-on comment goes to Johnnemann Nordhagen, who works for SCEA of all companies. "Trying to shoehorn existing genres into the controller concept is not the exciting part of the new system, although I don't doubt we'll see some excellent interpretations of things like RTS games. To me, the promise of the new controller is that it allows new types of games." If the Revolution hosts nothing but old genres with new controller schemes, it wouldn't exactly be living up to its namesake. The whole point of reinventing the controller is to allow for gameplay that couldn't possibly work on traditional controllers. You know, like lightsaber duels.
