Click here to read this week\'s twoplayer game comic.The Nintendo Revolution is the best-kept secret of the console wars at the moment. While we had pictures of the Xbox 360 before its official release on MTV, and everyone knew what the Cell processor was before it showed up at Sony\'s press conference, Nintendo has kept everything very tight. We know virtually nothing, and certainly nothing that Nintendo does not want us to know. Speculations abound about the system, though, mostly focusing about the controller. Will it have a touch screen? Will it have gyroscopes? Will it sing and dance and carry a top hat?
We don\'t know. And I\'d really like to know.
What amazes me is the willingness of people to accept pretty much anything as possible evidence of what the Revolution will end up looking like. A few days ago,
this image here showed up on the Internet claiming to be the Revolution controller. I look at this picture and laugh; other people seem to look at this picture and post comments on the forums about whether or not this is really the mythical beast. This particular rumor was debunked by a number of Japanese speakers capable of reading the text on the poster that started it all (which apparently read, Nah nah nah nah, like a little kid pulling a good prank - just kidding, but it should have), only to be replaced by a
patent that Nintendo filed in 2003. Not only resurfaced, but resurfaced and reported to be a Nintendo Revolution controller patent. A quick glance at the images included with the patent, though, shows that it is very GameCube and GBA era, not next-gen, despite making mention of tracking where you are in relation to the game system, and changing how the game acts based on how you tilt or turn the controller.
It makes me tempted to start a whole line of art, though, one to accompany our We Do Damage graffiti movement started in an earlier Twoplayer post. This one will be a web page composed of random photos of items that might, if looked at correctly, be some sort of next generation system. You could submit random images to it, and the person that picks the random household object that most closely resembles the Revolution controller when it releases could win a prize of some sort.
Then again, when a fan created video appeared on the net a few days before E3 this year, showing the Revolution as a VR system, I was secretly hoping that it would turn out to be true, even when I knew full well that it was not. I can\'t claim to be immune to the hype, honestly.
Aaron Stanton
cartoons[AT]gamesfirst.com