March 23, 2006 by

Meh. Iwata's GDC keynote has come and gone. While I was disappointed by Kutaragi's horrific "live and 4D" fartations about PlayStation 3, I'm actually a bit more disappointed with Iwata's reiteration-nation keynote.

Yep, this is the Game Developers Conference and not E3, so I wasn't expecting title announcements and big demos. But folks, here's Nintendo's chance to convince developers that they should be making Revolution games. Because honestly, the ratio of third-party Revo games in development compared to PS3 and 360 projects is stunningly small. I don't think the DS needed a ton more evangelizing. Developers and publishers are either into creating handheld games or they're not. But developers and publishers need convincing on Revolution beyond "release your old games for it." Revolution sounds like a fun console to develop single titles on, but Nintendo has the uphill battle of convincing companies to put serious resources behind it. And without this support, we'll most likely end up with a 5 to 10 title launch (new titles) and then a serious dead period and possibly short system lifespan as with N64 and GameCube.

Brain Age has been in the news for a while. It's a great success in Japan and everyone's eager to see it. It was a good choice to show to developers -- but Metroid Prime Hunters is in stores and available to all. And worse, we've heard almost the entire disruption speech before several times, complete with iTunes references. The problem is, iTunes works with MP3s. Revolution needs specialized software. And since it won't be a console you can "port" games to easily, it requires a significant development effort and commitment on the game design side. Nintendo needed to give developers something. A demo concept of how the remote can change gameplay for a genre is what it took, not just an announcement that you can download Genesis and TurboGrfx games and a lot of "as I have said before" business.

So, in summary -- I was a bit underwhelmed. I wasn't expecting much and the retro-game announcement's cool. But with a 2006 launch ahead, fierce competition from MS and soon Sony, Revolution should've shown itself in some form.

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