Nintendo Announced last year that their next generation counsel is in most definitely in development. Tentatively called the revolution. Nintendo also mentioned that unlike their competitors they are not going the route of high definition graphics. This is not saying the revolution cant pump out some pretty slick looking graphics, its just saying there focusing more on what games should play like as opposed to what games look like.

The revolution had a few surprises of its own in store, one of which features backward compatibility thats not been seen like this before (on a Nintendo counsel). Allowing users to connect via internet connection to download pretty much any Nintendo game past or present from Super Mario Bros 1 all the way up to Super Mario 64. Whether or not a price tag will be attached with this feature is still unknown, but being able to play any game in the Nintendo library when you want to, is quite a beautiful thing. Speaking of backwards compatibility did I mention it plays Gamecube discs aswell.

The second surprise that came with the announcement of the Revolution was the new innovative controller, which looks more like a T.V. remote than anything. It features some sort of the tilt and axis pick up. Meaning that if your in a game where heavy sword play is ensuing, you actually swing the controller around like a sword and based on the motion of you controller it transfers it to your character and in return moves his sword. Pretty cool huh? I can see this opening up many doors for upping the fun factor and how we interact with games. This style of control + FPS could equal orgasmic goodness, in my opinion anyways.

The exact hardware specs aren't exactly known yet. Here is what we know.

The processor is being developed by IBM "Broadway" CPU coupled with a ATI Graphics chip. It also features 512 MB or ram, SD Media expansion slot for saving games, a pair of USB 2.0 expansion ports and some sort of built in WI-FI support. It also reads from 12cm discs, as well as utilizes some form of hardrive. Again the hardrive is only speculation. One thing the revolution doesn't support as is I mentioned earlier high definition output. Which could cause a problem with developers, lets hope not. As for a definitive release date, there isn't one set yet, sometime mid 2006 most likely after the ps3 is launched. As for a price one can only speculate right now the word on the street is between $100 and $350.

I also found this little tidbit of info, courtesy of 1up.com

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