It's all good news, except that we're going to need to wait until 2006 to see some games.
MeriStation, a games website based in Spain, got the chance to talk with Nintendo of Europe's Director of Marketing Jim Merrick. Merrick has given up some good information on Nintendo's next-generation plans lately, and this latest interview is no exception.
On the Revolution front, the plans for a worldwide launch were further explained. Nintendo hopes to release the new console in the three major regions —Japan, North America and Europe—all within a 14 week period, about four months altogether. Nintendo President Satoru Iwata had already mentioned that the Revolution would not launch until Nintendo's next fiscal year, which begins April 1, 2006. A Japanese debut would likely come first, followed by the American and European launches.
Disappointingly, Merrick confirmed that Revolution games will not be shown in any form this year. Games will not be shown off for the first time until they are playable with Nintendo's new freestyle controller, to emphasize that games are about gameplay first. Because of this, it may be a while into 2006 until we see software, but it was stressed that key third parties do have development hardware, so at least games are probably in the early stages of development.
The marketing maestro then talked about the Revolution's graphical ability. He strongly believes that there won't be that much of a difference between how games look on the Revolution compared to "the competition," presumably the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3. Since we won't be seeing any next-gen Nintendo games until next year, we're going to have to take his word for it as Sony and Microsoft continue touting their respective system's graphical prowess.
Another interesting and unique feature of the new system was also disclosed in the interview. Similar to how the Nintendo DS has a Download Play option for playing multiplayer games with only one copy of a title, the Revolution will have a similar feature so multiple consoles in the same area (a la Xbox system link) can all play a multiplayer game together with only a single game disc. No further details on how exactly this would work were mentioned. Given the small size of the console and the wireless connectivity the system offers, using this feature may be extremely easy.
If you'd like to check out the whole interview, check it out at MeriStation. Be advised that the article is entirely in Spanish, so dust off your Spanish-English dictionaries if you want to read it yourself.
