TOKYO — The Revolution will be televised, and so will every movement of your hands.
After months of teasing, Nintendo has pulled back the curtain on the controller that will accompany its upcoming home game console, called Revolution, when the system launches in 2006.
Its Japanese designers call it a "game remote control." Nintendo’s American employees have taken to calling it "freehand style." Whatever you call it, the controller — which uses motion-detecting hardware to pinpoint its distance from the screen, location in the room, and even pitch and yaw — promises a whole new way to play console games.
The controller itself, which is wireless, has a surprisingly different form factor. It looks very much like a television remote control; it is vertically oriented and held in one hand. Your thumb can rest on a directional pad or large A button, and your index finger curls around to grip the B trigger on the underside.
With its daring controller design leading the way, Nintendo hopes to attract a wide new audience of non-traditional gamers. Someone who would be intimidated and confused by the standard two-joystick, ten-button layout of a PlayStation 3 controller might find the Revolution’s default controller to be intuitive and comfortable.
Nintendo has not announced what other additional controller features might be added in the future. But since the company announced during the Electronic Entertainment Expo that the system would be able to download and play games that were originally released on its previous consoles, it must be assumed that some sort of option with a traditional analog-stick-and-buttons layout will be available.
Related Posts
- Nintendo prices Wii at $250 for U.S. market
- Nintendo bets on Wii’s novelty, but software rules
- This week in game consoles
- Sony cuts price of PlayStation 3 to $410
- ‘Father of PlayStation’ says ‘Game Over’
Loading ...
