The HD Era Begins - 360 Fnazzle

When they actually get some interesting games

ofcourse, that should be IF, i don't like HALO so that's out.. if they managed to snap up exclusive rights to MGS, GTA, PES etc..

regarding the HD, too much focus on something A LOT of people don't have. theres (afaik) no hd service in the uk yet and when it comes it'll be severly limited. i think ninty have made the right call on this round

also i think i'm in a minority tha doesn't need AA on all the games stick AF up and that's prettier

I think that the 360 and PS3 have plenty of power to manage both AA and AF, thank god

Mazy, I hate you. You aren't even excited, yet you still get one at launch. I can't wait until I'm an employed and earning citizen as opposed to skint and scrounging student I'd love one for PGR3, Condemned, Amped 3 and DOA4, not to mention half a dozen other later games that tickle my fancy. I've had all the current gen systems for a while now so not been limited in what games I can buy, but I will be for at least a year now, which is gonna be painful. At least when I finally get one I'll have dozens of tempting games instead of a handful...which maybe isn't such a good thing.

I guess that means I voted "when they actually get some interesting games", but that decision isn't made by choice

I'm not that excited about the Xenon launch. As I'm broke so I'll have to wait before I can get it anyway, so I'm just going straight to Revolution.

Aside from Oblivion that is for PC and DOA4 there just isn't anything that interests me enough to keep my attenttion up from day to day.

As for what comes to HD, well it's nice feature for those who have HD tv, but I don't think that people will change their TVs just for some console, maybe when they start airing HDTV quality programming and HDDVD/Buray comes. I don't think it's complete waste of resources, but I don't think that Revolution is going to lose anything without HDTV support.

Quote from ReNo

I think that the 360 and PS3 have plenty of power to manage both AA and AF, thank god

For a while, yes. Developers will probably want to drop it to push the graphics a little bit more in its dying days. Rather have pretty games with no AA than not so pretty with AA, even if it does have the power.

still rather drop the AA requirement completely though

The HD support is the one thing I have been thinking about.

Xenon and PS3 are both very powerful machines, there is no doubt about it. Revolution has been criticized because Nintendo has said that Revolution has less power thatn Xenon or PS3, while that may be true on the hardware side, I'm pretty confident that Revolution can afchieve comparable graphics since it has the advantage of lower resolution.

All HD games to be specced HD, need to be atleast 1280x720 resolution, which compared to 640x480 and 768x576 is resource heavy to the machine. Also, if it's true that ALL games support the higher 1080i/p resolutions the machines have to have alot juice to push the 1920x1080 resolutions, again compared to standard PAL and NTSC resolutions, is a major resource hog.

So Revolution might not have as impressive hardware as Xenon and PS3 has, but I'm fairly confident that Revolution players (AND the people who play Xenon and PS3 games on a ragular TV) don't miss on anything so spectacular.

Also, I'd like to add this. I was going through the first releases for Xenon and watching the screenshots and I am fairly sure that the quality of the graphics is lower than what they have been showing to us from Call of Duty 2, Perfect Dark Zero, Kameo and other games for the last 3 months or so. Sure, most of the videos and screens have been shown on a PC or some development platform, and some videos have been prerendered. But the quality loss is there. Were they just bullshitting us or what is going on?

I want the new xbox, but the games are so ridicilously expensive!

I was almost certain that I will purchase one right at the start like one month ago, but right now I think I will a little bit until there is a really good game for it out there.

Quote from Kosmo

....Also, if it's true that ALL games support the higher 1080i/p resolutions the machines have to have alot juice to push the 1920x1080 resolutions....

I don't know about the PS3, but that's not the case with the 360. The 360 runs all games in 720p natively, and scales them up or down to fit the resolution.

Mine should be arriving today... we got a nice order deal for being developers on it. Still roughly the same price, but got a few extras included for the hard drive version. Probably wouldn't have gotten one until the frenzy settled down otherwise.

Played the Kameo demo here at work; really enjoyed that... already picked up that and PDZ, and I'm planning on snagging Kong for this platform and Condemned at some point as well. Pretty solid launch as far as titles and variety as far as I'm concerned.

What should be nice is some of the titles that got delayed from launch hitting early next year in what is usually that void of nothingness. Would love to see more titles make their way out in the early part of the year.

apparently, it would cost around 4 thousand bucks if microsoft released it in Brazil

well...the games certainly look better than xbox games. the levels can be a bit larger in shooters (for example)...

Fro the 360 launch, as with most console launches, it's all about eye candy and whizbang features. As for gameplay, well, more graphics horsepower and the like can yield a more immersive gameplay experience which you can argue means better games. But how much better are the new games? This is the age old question we ask ourselves with any new console.

Any Madden players here try Madden 06 on 360 yet? The game should still sell a ton just because of the marketing muscle and the fact that it's the only licensed NFL game franchise (gg, EA). But how much new gameplay innovation is made possible by having a more powerful console? I'm guessing not much. But sure, if it looks like a lot prettier, than may be wha the mass Football gamer market really latches on to whether they admit it or not...and hence by the game.

.....so the question we really need to know is: how much do graphics matter to the various segments of the core<-->casual gamer spectrum?

I've actually heard that the 360 version of Madden was missing out on some features of the other versions, but I haven't done any sort of investigation to weed out what truth there is behind it.

I'm bored of rehashes and the done to death.

Big whoop they look better on PS3 or Xbox 360, they are at the end of the day the same games.

The revolution however, yes the graphics are better, but the way you interact with it is new and interesting, with the new controller interface it uses games might not be 100% fresh, but the way you play them will be.

The video I saw in Edge magazine a while back had people using the controller as a sword, a flash light and gun, and other interesting uses.

Quote from Gaz

I'm bored of rehashes and the done to death.Big whoop they look better on PS3 or Xbox 360, they are at the end of the day the same games.

The revolution however, yes the graphics are better, but the way you interact with it is new and interesting, with the new controller interface it uses games might not be 100% fresh, but the way you play them will be.

The video I saw in Edge magazine a while back had people using the controller as a sword, a flash light and gun, and other interesting uses.

Got to hand it to Nintendo for trying new was of thinking. While not a massive re-invention of handheld gaming, certainly the DS tried something different with dual screens...now just gotta see what interesting games will evolve to use it.

The Revolution is bigger gamble. Nintendo has blown it before with some "revolutionary" ideas for sure: Virtual Boy and the Power Glove. One could argue the Revolution controller is just another gimmick. But if it breaks through it could really be a revolution. I have not seen it up close so obviously I can't say yet. They have their work cut out for them to make it a winner, for sure.

Back to the X360 and PS3....

Yes they will have greater graphics and capacity than Xbox and PS2, but besides that the strategies behind them are fairly clear: extend the reach of the gaming console to be an entertainment/media center for the home. The 360 has all those features for displaying media content from your PC etc and to be a DVD player (like the Xbox) and I'm sure the PS3 will have all the same crap. These seem like evolutionary changes of what a platform can do. Even the online marketplace Microsoft is trying to launch with the 360 isn't all that hard to believe. We all saw it coming. It's basically a way to sell more crap and draw more revenue from the gaming audience, all the while hoping to expand the audience.

One thing is important to note with the expansion of graphics and presentation capabilities: the more "cool" something looks (meaning better graphics and presentation) the more non-gamers might be tempted to cross over and start playing. Sure, they need something they can understand that's easy to play (using a controller) so that means stuff they can relate to: sports games, racing games, fighting games, etc that look pretty. So is it any wonder that at consol launches the typical lineup is mostly sports, racing and fighting? Sure, the Xbox had Halo and that worked well for the "core gamer" who bought the Xbox. This time at launch we have a few shooters like CoD2, Quake4, Perfect Dark...maybe one of them will take off like Halo. The point is that Microsoft's strategy isn't all that different in terms of game content compared to the Xbox launch.

Is this bad? Too early to tell. If you get a 360 and hate the games or are otherwise dissapointed, yeah it's bad. In the end, the only measure of the success for Microsoft will be how it does financially in the long haul, but that will probably correlate to the average gamer's acceptance and fun with the platform.

In a way, that puts part of the onus on the game development community to come up with compelling new content. If that means a pretty shooter with a better story and better level design (meaning an evolutionary change as opposed to revolutionary) is what gets my attention and give me fun, so be it.

Ok i can ramble on but I'll stop now...

woo! got mine!

going home until monday

Download Geometry Wars Retro Evolved from the Xbox 360 Live arcade - the original minigame from PGR2 was an absolute blast and the videos and review I read of this update make it sound even cooler. It's a panic inducing retro game with crazy particle effects - pure adrenaline pumping fun