Went to see Thumbsucker after work and then raced home to find the Gaming Age forums unreachable. It was 10:50 EST and I was dying for information. I started to scour the Internet and finally found a forum that wasn’t clogged up. 1up has graciously summarized the debut here. For a company that officially doesn’t have a presence at the TGS 2005 the Big N sure stole the thunder from everybody.

I’m just bowled over. As soon as I saw the first images I immediately thought of those fake images of two one-handed controllers. Even though the Internet was awash with fakes from people trying to think outside the box Nintendo still ends up being ahead of the curb. This is why you either love or hate Nintendo.

Besides the obvious applications of what this means for player interface and to us gamers, I’m just in awe at how this could possibly attract the “non-gamer” market. First off the controller mimics in usage and appearance your average tv remote. In the past Nintendo has spoken of how intimidating a game controller can be and this new controller utterly destroys that preconception. A power switch on the controller is such a simple, amazing idea that I’m surprised no one had implemented before. With this new motion awareness system they’ve just managed to replicate a DS on the home console level. So don’t be surprised that Nintendogs or Meteos lands on the Revolution. Now the DS makes a lot more sense in the grand scheme of Nintendo. If (more a question of when) Nintendo offers “simple” games other than your typical puzzle/card games I think they can easily seize a substantial portion of the casual market.

Now for us gamers I can finally see how traditional PC games can easily translate to the home console without players losing control. Finally, I can see a Star Wars game where lightsabers aren’t as random and clumsy as blasters. No more, “How do we configure the RTS experience into these controls”. Wario Ware just got more manic. Mario 128 is going to be insane. Nintendo really raised the bar.

But we still haven’t seen the Revolution’s graphical prowess or system capabilities. And there’s always Nintendo’s perpetual problem with third-party support.

From what was shown today The Revolution holds tremendous promise and I’m sure Nintendo will regain a chunk of the market while at the same time expanding it. Touché Nintendo… well played.

Oh, and Thumbsucker was great.