"Information leaked about the specification of Nintendo's Revolution console has confirmed that the company's approach is radically different to its rivals' - so much so that it's hard to characterise it as part of the next-gen race at all, argues Rob Fahey.

One of our first reactions upon emerging from Nintendo's conference in Hollywood just prior to E3 this year, where the Revolution console was unveiled for the first time, was that the company had effectively just conceded the next-generation battle to Sony and Microsoft. It was the most triumphant, optimistic concession we'd ever seen, but reading between the lines, it was a concession nonetheless. Nintendo had just told the world that it didn't want to play with the bigger boys any more. The specification battle, the endless bickering over media functionality and parallel processing and teraflops and supercomputing, were of no interest to the Kyoto-based company that had played such a vital role in defining what videogames mean in our culture. Nintendo wanted out.

Last week, our first really solid look at the hardware that developers are working on for Revolution proved that our assumption about the company's intentions was correct. Nintendo is building a system somewhere between two and three times as powerful as GameCube - no parallel processing, no troublesome cutting-edge chips with their inherent manufacturing problems, no next-generation storage devices, no high definition output. It's got a bit more memory, some internal Flash RAM storage, an attractive, slimline case and built in wireless networking. Back of the envelope calculations suggest that it could launch for as little as $150." [more]