Revolution: "It's like a souped up Xbox"

[A Black Falcon]

Still, I dont see how going from a few kb's to 8 MB's across 3 home consoles is any more of an upgrade compared to the GC's 40 to Rev's 128. In fact, am I wrong or is that a much larger jump forward than their previous consoles? That certainly looks like 'trying' to me.

A larger leap in raw numbers, but that's not the important statistic, the multiplier -- 'how many times more does this have than the previous system' is the important one. And that's the one that is less, across the board, with Revolution.

2 to 3 times the power of the last generation is definitely the margin to which new consoles are measured. Going all the way back to Atari we can see how 4 bit became 8, to 16 to 24 bit (Remember the Neo Geo?) then the 32 bit era, the 64, the 128 (now) and the next gen which is at 256 (360 and I believe PS3 as well). Those "bits" as you probably know simply meant the capability of the processor, but you can litteraly cut open the consoles and see that these are basically doubled or trippled in power when compared to their last incarnations. 360 is no different except for its desire to be an HD machine which requires different architecture and massive amounts of power to even do the simplest things.

I think Neo-Geo was actually 16 bit, but I'm not sure, and it was definitely substantially more powerful than any other console of the generation... Neo-Geo games still look pretty nice for 2d, actually. :)

As for 'bits' that doesn't really matter... other things are more important, and consoles fudge that sometimes anyway... (like the "64-bit" Jaguar or the "16-bit" TurboGrafx 16) I mean, by many definitions PCs are still mostly "32-bit" (though some now are 64), but does that affect much? Consoles are usally a lot more powerful than their predessors. X360, despite just a four-year turnaround, is a lot more powerful on paper than xbox. Revolution just isn't quite as big an upgrade... this isn't necessarially a bad thing, because Nintendo fans will buy Revolution anyway and if Nintendo succeeds people won't really care if the Revolution has HDTV or not because the games will be too good to resist (for gamers and nongamers alike, like the DS), but it's a fact. Nintendo is trying, this time around, to not play the same upgrade game... we'll see if it works.

How good will Revolution graphics be? We really don't know. They will certainly look much better than current generation graphics, but they won't look as good as PS3 or X360, especially on an HDTV where the difference will be very clear (due to resolution). Nintendo is just hoping that enough PS3 and X360 owners buy a Revolution too, because of Nintendo's games, and that they can succeed in spreading gaming to people who don't play videogames and for whom the best graphics don't matter... we'll see. It's too early to tell how successful the Revolution will be, but it's certainly got a good chance... though I think a lot will depend on the quality of the launch games and how good the marketing is -- GC's marketing, for instance, was pretty bad...