In
their
Question of the Week feature,
Gamasutra recently asked their audience what kinds of games would
be most suited to the Revolution controller and which specific concepts they'd like to see using it in the future. The
overall response?
"
OMG the Lightsaberz0rz are teh rule!"
Not
that there's anything wrong with prancing around the room and hacking off limbs with a beam of light, but we feel that
the Revolution has a bit more potential than merely indulging us in our geeky
Star Wars fantasies (though
admittedly, that's an important feature of any console). Luckily, some of the other responses raised some more
interesting issues.
"
My big fear is
that the Revolution is going to over-popularize shallow physical gaming such that everyone starts doing it and suddenly
cooking simulators and orchestra-conducting games are going to be popping up on all formats," says
Lionhead's impossibly named Tadhg Kelly. This is known as the Eyetoy phenomenon, where developers get stuck on
gimmicky features and fail to take true advantage of the platform's capabilities. We have no doubt that several lazy
developers will be satisfied with releasing shallow adventures in fishing, fly-swatting and carpentry--that's just the
nature of this kind of technology. Fortunately, we won't be buying lame games like that. We'd rather go for intricate,
first-person
Harry Potter role-playing games.
"
Imagine having to speak the spell you want
to cast, and using different wand movements to create variations on the spell (maybe the closer you are to a 'correct'
movement the more powerful it is, or maybe you can flick it in different directions to throw people about)."
Ben Droste from
Krome Studio sure makes a convincing pitch for the next Harry Potter film tie-in which, just
like the previous entries, will be "the darkest one yet."
Finally, the prize for most spot-on
comment goes to Johnnemann Nordhagen, who works for
SCEA of all companies. "
Trying to shoehorn
existing genres into the controller concept is not the exciting part of the new system, although I don't doubt we'll
see some excellent interpretations of things like RTS games. To me, the promise of the new controller is that it allows
new types of games." If the Revolution hosts nothing but old genres with new controller schemes, it wouldn't
exactly be living up to its namesake. The whole point of reinventing the controller is to allow for gameplay that
couldn't possibly work on traditional controllers. You know, like lightsaber duels.
This is yet another confirmation of what every gamer has been waiting for since the first time we saw the Wii controller. At the Hollywood & Games Summit, panel moderator N'Gai Croal asked LucasArts president Jim Ward about the possibility of a Wii lightsaber game. 
