…seems to actually be a remote control. I’m gonna go on the record here as an official xenophobic luddite and say that this seems, to me, to be a completely backassed idea. Nintendo keeps trying to be new and innovative, but, IMHO, just ends up making worse and worse products. See:
- The Virtual Boy, which gave several hundred games migranes, sore necks, and eyestrain.
- The N64 controller, which was allegedly designed to give game designers more options (not really for three-handed people) but in reality just ended up having the 2nd and 3rd ‘branches’ used in nearly every game, while the 1st branch sat, for the most part, lonely and unused (but still in the way).
- The GameCube, with it’s lack of DVD friendliness and really annoying (IMHO) controller (not as bad as the Xbox controller, but much worse than the PS2 controller).
- The Nintendo DS, which managed to both be nearly impossible to play for people with smaller hands (but isn’t that Nintendo’s “niche”?), causing cramps in weird places if played for too long; and too heay to comfortably play for more than a short period of time.
Now this comes aong, and seems to be the worst idea yet. Sure, the ability to plug the controller into other stuff (like dance pads) is cool, but the necessity to tether a second controller to get an analog stick (which will be needed for fine controls, as in most 3d adventure type games) in the ‘nunchaku’ position will be incredibly annoying every time you need to, say, free up one hand to get a drink or something. Of course, the fact that the default configuration uses only one hand would make it very easy to eat snacks or drink beer while playing (especially since I don’t imagine most of the games would be very action packed, seeing as they expect you to be able to easily play them using just the one hand). In fact, I can only see the default setup being useful for driving games and first person shooters, so this may all just be a ploy to make more people buy more peripherals disguised as innovation (actually, a lot of ‘innovation’ is like that…).
Given further evidence I may still change my mind, but as it stands now the revolution just seems like it will hold nothing really fun. Sure, it will be innovative, but what’s the point if it stops being fun, right? Needless to say, I probably won’t end up buying one (unless I get proven wrong, which has happened before), and I may just swear off nintendo products in the future should they keep up this trend of sucking (unfortunately, I still have a NP subscription until October 2006 [they give really good deals to sucker you into resubscribing... like $60 worth of stuff, plus a magazine subscription, for $18]).
(via Stefan Gagne)
