A creative gamer going by Tsietisin sat down and assembled a Nintendo Revolution controller out of pieces and parts of computer equipment he had around the house, using a Gyration Ultra mouse (compare prices), an ASCII Grip one-handed PS1 controller, and a PSX to USB converter to simulate what the Revolution will be like. By using commercial products to assemble the system, he was able to have a functional version of the Revolution to take on a death-match run through Half-Life 2.

Videos of the controller (torrent link) in action seem to indicate it works pretty well, even on a game that\'s not designed for the controller, as we assume games on the Revolution will be.

\"Regular gamers will take some time to get used to it,\" Tsietisin wrote in his posting, \"but once they get it down right, it will be the best controller out there.\"

How well the controller simulates what Nintendo will release in a final form, it\'s hard to say. For one, while Tsietisin\'s controller does a pretty good job of imitating what we expect the real deal to be like, the genius of the system will be in its refined adjustments. As games are built specifically to take advantage of the Nintendo Revolution\'s controller, little details, such as sensitivity and calibration - perhaps an ability to ignore the slight shaking of the hand while playing - will make the difference between a good controller and a bad one.

\"(Half-Life 2) does not have the joystick commands as I would like them,\" Tsietisin writes, explaining how he configured the controller to work with a standard first person shooter on the PC, \"so (I) used Joy2key to map out the... buttons... on the PS1 controller to the required keys on the keyboard.\"

The result was a controller that got the job done, proved concept, and inspired excitement; how closely it matches the final product is hard to say. For example, Tsietisin writes that the controller is good, but takes quite a bit of getting used to, while nearly every report from the Tokyo Game Show where the Revolution controller was made public, indicated that Nintendo\'s controller was very natural to use, and required surmounting very little learning curve.

The difference, I imagine, is all in the details.

Still, our hats go off to a creative thinker with a really solid idea. The system isn\'t that difficult to put together; we\'re thinking about assembling one ourselves here at GamesFirst. No matter what, the video is worth a look.