Microsoft bods - including Bill himself - have been talking Revolution, but did they have anything nice to say? Click inside for their comments...

First off, talking to gaming site Next-Gen.biz, the Xbox Live Arcade group manager Greg Canessa talked about the retro game "Virtual Console" download service the Revolution will have:

"I think it was interesting to see Nintendo's announcement for the Revolution downloadable games service which, of course, came over a year after we launched our initiative internally and around nine months after we already launched the first generation of Arcade for Xbox. I think it was a responsive move. Their service is interesting in sort of a 'retro' way, but I view Arcade as being so much more than what they're planning on doing. Their service is kind of a subset of what we're doing...

"When I look at Nintendo Revolution's retro story, with all due respect to Nintendo, I think it's a small subset of the opportunity here. To be honest with you, a lot of those games are fun in your head when you think, 'Oh, yeah when I was 12, this was really fun,' and you have these great nostalgic reasons to play them. Then you do play them, and they're just not very fun anymore. But, there are some games like Joust or Gauntlet or Pac-Man that are as fun today as they were back then. A lot of those Nintendo games, you know, aren't gonna hold up."

Meanwhile in an EGM interview posted here on gaming site 1UP.com, Microsft bigwig Peter Moore had these slightly more positive comments about the controller:

I found it very intriguing, and I'm always a big fan of companies that try and innovate in a space where we need to do things a little differently. It still remains to be seen [how well it'll do], because there's no game to demo against it yet, to get a feel for it, but I still respect and admire the fact that they're willing to take what is clearly a huge risk to innovate. Let's see if it works out for them.

Finally, Microsoft head honcho Bill Gates was asked if he wished Microsoft had come up with the idea for the Nintendo Revolution controller.

Uh...no. [Laughs] We'll watch and see. Holding two different things like that? Anyway, Nintendo... you've got to give it to them. They march to the beat of a different drummer. Sometimes that makes them incredibly right and sometimes that makes them incredibly wrong. They're certainly making a very different bet in terms of how much they're putting into the graphics this time. I do think there is a question as to whether they can get outside the young age bracket at all. That's been tough for them.

Let's see if they're still saying the same thing this time next year...