Nintendo Revolution and its specifications

Nintendo Revolution and all of its rumors has most likely caught your attention one way or another. Now and then new reports arrive telling us what the hardware will be like, fgiures about this and that in almost bizarre attempts to create news from anything, even the smallest rumor. The last comes from IGN as they report that Revolution would in fact be even slower than the earlier rumors stated, rumors that back then shocked many as the even earleir rumors had hyped it to beyond the skies. It was the same source that revealed the Xbox 360’s specifications and it stated that Revolution would get a similar setup as Xbox 360 and Sony’s Playstation 3. The second rumours arrived after that USAToday had printed that Revolution would only by a few times faster than GameCube.

IDG launched its news, even though it had contaced Nintendo without getting a reply in time. Its source is a developer, I don’t doubt for a second that they received this information from such a source, but what I do question is how they can believe that this source actually knows something about Nintendo’s console.

At this time the console should be ready, but from what I know about the Nintendo organization there is three people, give or take a few, that knows what IGN, and many others, claims about Revolution. It will be presented in all of its glory on the day before E3 and there everything will be revealed. Nintendo is a family company and has always been controlled almost like a dictatorship where honor and a good reputation is more important than anything else, even money. They’ve displayed it several times in the past and I have a hard time believing anything has changed over the past few months.

If these specifications would leak it would hurt Nintendo tremendously because right now they’re riding a wave of mystery and even though I’m convinced that the console will sell, very well even, it is defintely not becuase of a possible HD resolution support, which would’ve been nice though but it’s a lot to hope for. Sony and Microsoft has managed to hype the performance of their consoles very well and at the moment I have a great fear that one of these two will fall, fall long and hard, very hard. I sincerely hope I’m wrong, because both of them still have a lot to add to the industry further ahead.

One important thing that IGN points out though is that MHz and MB means very little. E.g. despite that Xbox 360 has a CPU with triple cores, each capapble of handling two threads it is not a specialized architecture intended for video games, Cell is no exception, far from it. They are monsters though, no doubt about that. They can process huge amounts of data, but they are not built on dedicated platforms making them far from as efficient as they could be.

Then we have the money aspect of course, it’s not cheap nor easy to develop a completely new architecture for a new video game console. Nintendo has 30 years of experience doing so. Microsoft comes in no way even near that, not even Sony does. They have money on the other hand, money to get what they need, but the results aren’t the same.

Revolution will not be able to run games at 720p, not a fact yet but anything else would come as a great surprise. It will perhaps have some sort of surround sound, doubtful at best. It will have a controller that makes it possible to experience a true new generation of games, while at the same time making it possible to experience the ol’ time classics with a simple 90° turn. It will be launched with a library of games containing top titles from the last 20 years, games made by Nintendo, but from what we reported a few days ago also from Sega and its MegaDrive/Genesis era. More might be added later on, who knows, I just hope so.

I’m not bitter or out to get IGN, or anyone else for that matter, I’m just tired of people not doing their homework. We know nothing, Nintendo knows everything and this is how things will remain until it deicdes otherwise. So keep your fingers crossed and don’t be afraid to turn away when the next person claims to know what the Revolution will contain.