It would appear that the assumptions many have made about the expected power of the forthcoming Nintendo Revolution console falling short of the XBox 360 and PlayStation 3 are true. The raw capabilities of the machine will not match those of it’s rivals in terms of sheer processing power and polygon throughput, the two main areas where consoles tend to be compared. Instead, we can expect a machine that is roughly 2-3 times more powerful than the Gamecube, according to reports of developers who have had access to devkits.

So are Nintendo mad? Well, maybe not. From the moment it was announced Revolution was always going to be different, and when Nintendo showed us their odd waveable remote control device at E3 this year as the primary input device most people realised that Nintendo were going to do their own thing, which is nothing new for Nintendo.

What Nintendo are hoping is that this new method of control will attract new gamers who have never played a videogame before in their lives. People like your gran for example, who may be confused by all the buttons and levers on a typical joypad, yet will immediately recognise a remote control from her TV set. The big question is, do these current non-gamers want to play games? At the moment the answer is obviously no, otherwise they would already be playing wouldn’t they?

But what if there were some games out there which appealed to these different kinds of people, would they play then? Imagine a Tennis game where you hit the ball back by swinging the controller like a tennis racket. No buttons involved, just the exact same movement that you would do if you were really playing Tennis.

The success of Revolution will revolve around the types of games which are released for the system, rather than how many trilinear anisotropic mip-mapped triangles it can draw. The current generation consoles are still more than capable of producing some great experiences, so raw power is not necessarily that important. The popularity of things like the PS2 Eyetoy has also shown that it is possible to get people who’ve never played a game before to do so. There’s no denying Nintendo have their work cut out for them, and the real excitement about this system will only appear when Nintendo announce the most important part of the equation, the games themselves.

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