Joystiq and Engadget got our grubby fingers on the Nintendo Revolution box (yes, the one behind the locked door in the secret room guarded by a beefy muscleman). We picked it up, we played with the buttons, we poked, we prodded, and we slipped a CD into it. Oops! We weren't supposed to do that. Guess what happened?
The CD just fell into the box. No mechanism grabbed the edge of the CD and pulled it in slowly, even though the box was plugged in. The CD just slid in cleanly and quickly except for brief resistance at the entrance. There wasn't any scraping or messy sound to it, so the CD didn't collide with any internal mechanism that one might expect it to collide with were such mechanisms present. To get the CD out, we just tipped the box over and it slid right back out. Really, it was as if the CD had been dropped into a small, rectangular box with smooth sides.
All that glowing slot does is just glow.
When we picked up the Revolution and turned it over in our hands, we noticed that was hefty and had a good, solid feel to it. All of the cables and plugs looked like they were functional as well. There was nothing obviously fake about this prototype except for the funny CD mechanism, but this is certainly curious. We also shook the box vigorously to see if there were any loose or moving parts inside of it but there were no sounds; everything appeared to be fixed inside the box.
Does this mean that the actual unit on display is a pure dummy model with a few weights inside it to give it heft? Does this indicate anything about how far along Nintendo is with the development of the Revolution? If we were to load a disc into the Xbox 360 or the PS3, what would happen? Is the lack of a working slot-loading mechanism worrisome, or typical in a prototype at this stage of development?
Edit: Anybody know if the Xbox 360 or PS3 models have working drive mechanisms?
