This is how a Revolution begins

With a hum, and not a whimper?

1UP has a great write-up of Nintendo's new controller. It's not likely to knock your socks off completely, but I'm actually pretty interested. Let's face it - very little innovation would have had the escape velocity to avoid the gravity surrounding the hype on this one, so unless it involved alien technology I think everyone was going to get a little disappointed. A motion detection one handed controller isn't going to make anyone feint, but it's not a bad step forward.

Essentially, if Nintendo has succeeded in their goal of creating an "everyman" controller then they've done something good. Also, they may have taken a lesson from the DS here and created a setup which will provide for truly unique exclusive games. Titles you really couldn't do just without the motion detection. It's not, I don't think, that the Revolution will be devoid of multiplatform titles. I'm going to guess that Nintendo has been smart enough here to be sure that the major genres will be playable with their wandstickthingy. I do wonder what it would be like to develop for something like this ... it has to have some odd input data. Perhaps it is no more than determing an X, Y and Z location instead of the usual two dimensions, but still ... while this hurt the potential of smaller studios getting on the platform? It's one thing to port from a gamepad on a PC to a gamepad on a console ... another with a magicstickamabob.

Or, on the same vein, will it be able to work with all of these classic titles the Revolution was supposed to give access to, or will they just sell NES and N64 controllers that fit?