Nintendo has a patent on hardware optimization for displacement mapping (that’s, basically, describing mountains, for instance, not as polygons but as a a height bitmap — looks better and more natural). So maybe those “first Revolution screenshots” that were all over the web, always followed by a “those guys don’t even have a Nintendo dev kit yet” disclaimer, weren’t actually so off the mark. Cool. Reminds me of the old Comanche game (the first), the only flight simulator I ever found pretty: it used voxels for terrain mapping (which amounts pretty much to the same as a displacement map) and looked much better in 320x240 than the latest Flight Simulator on any hi-res screen. (But I’m nearsighted, so I may have a slightly peculiar vision of the world.)

P.S. Oh, yeah, it can do that, too (but I don’t think Nintendo plans to put in several gigs of video RAM). I’d much sooner buy a cheap, sturdy Revolution that outputs pretty, lifelike 3D, than a Sony- or Microsoft-produced HDTV-ready behemoth with sharp, pointy polygons and lens flares.

Actually, now that I put it that way, I’d be all the more tempted to buy a console for the first time in my life just to spite Microsoft and Sony.