After Microsoft showcased their Xbox 360 on MTV last Thursday, and Sony revealed their Ps3 yesterday in Los Angeles, Nintendo has finally spoken out and stepped up to take part in the next-gen console wars in which it was long absent.usatoday.com are reporting on some details that Nintendo have let out concerning their upcoming console codenamed "Revolution".
The revolution is reportedly about the size of a stack of three DVD cases and has no visible knobs, buttons or ports for joysticks. Instead the console will use wireless controllers, and can sit flat or stand vertically.
Also it will play games on full-size DVDs as well as being backwards compatible with older GameCube games on mini-DVDs and will play back video DVDs too.
Nintendo, which mostly ignored the Net with GameCube, also is catching up with the online wave. Revolution will offer broadband access to a free Internet-based player matching service, similar to Xbox Live, that also will have downloadable versions of nearly every Nintendo game × from arcade classic Donkey Kong through current titles such as Mario Sunshine. (Nintendo hasn't decided whether downloading will be free.)
Xbox spokesmen have pointed out that 360's specifications are 10 to 13 times more powerful than those of the original Xbox; Sony said Monday that the processor in Play-Station 3, which will come in several colors and be out next spring, will be 35 times more powerful than the PS2 processor.
Nintendo makes more modest claims that Revolution is two or three times more powerful than GameCube. "It's not all about having 'turbo power,' " Nintendo's Perrin Kaplan says. "It's about what you do with it."
Analyst Richard Doherty of The Envisioneering Group says one of Revolution's chief advantages is that designers will find it far easier to create games for Revolution than for competing systems. "They do not need to make major changes from the games they were designing," he says. "They have better performance without having to do a lot of extra work."
Read on
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