Throughout this coming up console generation, people have been complaining about how the Nintendo Revolution will more than likely not stack up next to the Sony PlayStation 3 or the Microsoft Xbox 360.  While this may be true to an extent, since those companies have dabbled in other fields of electronics, this may not be true for what Nintendo is going for: games.  In this field, Nintendo has always played down their specs when comparing it to other systems in the more recent generations while still delivering on power.

When Nintendo first revealed that they were going to release a new system, codenamed the Revolution, they openly stated that this wasn’t going to be a battle of technical power, but one of trying to change the way that games are played now and in the future.  Many gamers see this as a weakness (while others as the second coming of Jesus) because in the most recent generation, it was all about the graphics and the technical “oomph” that was under the hood of the systems.  While this may seem valid, it isn’t entirely the truth with the first system that was released in the previous generation.  The PlayStation 2 was hailed as the most powerful console created and even had rumors of the ability to launch nuclear weapons.  This type of public perception made the people overlook the fact that its first generation games were less superior to the already released Dreamcast.  Sadly, people found the PS2 to be worth their while and abandoned the Dreamcast, which ultimately led to its death, and caused the user base for the PS2 to skyrocket.  Next to come are the GameCube and the Xbox.  With these two systems it was all about the competition and, seeing as they’re later technology, they should blow the “outdated” PS2 out of the water.  Microsoft touts the Xbox as being the most powerful system created due to the partnership with nVidia and Intel to give it custom chipsets to be used for gaming.  Nintendo on the other hand partners with ATI and IBM to supply its custom chipsets to be used.  Then Nintendo makes a blunder.  Instead of going the route that Microsoft and Sony did by releasing the raw power of the system Nintendo releases actual numbers.  While this may be beneficial to developers, the mainstream audience that amounted took this to be that the GameCube was underpowered.  Although games like Star Wars: Rogue Squadron II, Pikmin and StarFox Adventures showed that the GCN was on par with the Xbox and surpassing the PS2, it no doubt hurt the GCN in the end. 

With the Revolution being rumored to have less specs than its competitors, does that mean we may be seeing games that are completely inferior to the 360 or PS3?  In a sense it does.  With the coming of, what Microsoft likes to call, the “HD [High-Definition] Era” there are going to be a lot of things that Nintendo doesn’t have to do in order to make games look as “great” as the other systems have to.  For starters, in order to make a game look great in HD you have to up the size of the bitmaps in order for them to look great at higher resolutions.  This has always been the case with upgrading to a newer generation, the resolution of the images have always stayed the same, whereas in HD you have to quadruple the resolution in order to have the “HD experience.”  This may not seem like much until you realize that images are the third space hogging files that make a game, followed by video and then audio.  With audio there are many upgrades being done to make the experience come alive.  The inclusion of Dolby Digital audio in the 360, while making the game sound extremely well, uses a chunk of the DVD-9 space that Microsoft has chosen as their format.  Fortunately Microsoft has already dabbled into this field with the original Xbox and knows how to get the most bang for their buck.  Video, on the other hand, is going to become the biggest consumer of space to plague Microsoft.  HD movies aren’t very forgiving when it comes to space, hence the format war looming between HD-DVD and BluRay.  With Microsoft choosing for the DVD-9 format, it doesn’t leave that much to video after all is said and done.  But that’s what compression is for, is it not?  Sadly, that’s the reason why HD is a space eating monster.  Compression is what DVDs use now in order to fit their picture upon a nine GigaByte disc.  The same type of movie using no compression, or HD, fills up roughly 25 GB.  All these may seem to be spelling doom for Nintendo with its rumored “weak” specs, but the point of the matter is that the Revolution isn’t supporting High Definition.  This helps Nintendo in many cases because the bitmaps don’t have to be upscaled for HD purposes, the resolution doesn’t have to be outputted over 480p which saves a lot of the processing power for spitting out more characters on screen.  Again, only on a high end HD TV will these things be noticed.  This may seem like it’s going to go in the same direction as the previous (GCN, PS2, Xbox) generation since it seems to be more about power than anything else, but there is one example where the oddball is standing out above the rest.

With the Nintendo DS, there was much skepticism as to whether or not Nintendo was going off the deep end with its dual screens.  People also saw the touch screen as a gimmick that would fade away when the PlayStation Portable (PSP) and the upcoming, what I like to call “Game Boy Evolution”.  Fortunately this has been the opposite perception for over 15 million people worldwide.  Though the Nintendo DS is a graphical powerhouse in comparison to the Game Boy Advance, it doesn’t stack up against the PSP when it comes to shear power and functionality.  The games are what have made the DS so appealing to all types of gamers world wide.  It has successfully transformed many of the genres that were started on the GBA and evolved them to be used with touch screen, dual screens or even the microphone.  This is significant because it shows that it always isn’t about the graphics that are appealing to gamers [except in America] that gets them appreciative of a console, be it handheld or home.