Typical Xbox360 game. Lots of shinyness and blood. Just what the 360 market wants. Or is it? Sales results will help us understand that breed a little better.
As for the game itself ... I havent played it so I can't comment on the gameplay. Graphics, however, are quite obviously mediocre. The textures on the ground and some of the surrounding areas are PS2 quality and to compensate they've simply turned up the shine and color variety. It even fooled the eurogamer reviewer ...
Better lighting (far better)
Better textures (sometimes slightly, sometimes a lot)
Better character models (always much better)
Better real-time physics (COD4 everything was canned)
Better effects (such as things falling apart realistically)
Saying it's in the COD4 league is the latest attempt to take away the game's hype without being obvious about it. Killzone2's ground textures alone are absolutely incredible for a game of that scale. It is simply the...
Just because MS has bought off everybody and anybody looking for a handout (press, Toshiba, Universal) and has a bunch of indians cooking the blogs doesn't mean that Haze is a particularly good game and deserves success. I'm not saying it's not a good game. But we should look at it objectively.
Having said that, the success of a game has more to do with it's marketing and emotional appeal than anything else. Games like Gears and Halo were successful because of great marketing...
The so called "hardcore" gamer tends to prefer gore and shinyness. I'd expect them to prefer Gears of War 2.
If Resistance is going after the same market segment as Gears of War then it has a serious identity problem. What Resistance offers is not what "hardcore" gamers want. Not enough blood. Not enough over-contrasted shinola. The kind of people GeOW caters to want blood and guts, chainsaws, mutilation. They want maximum sensory overload. They want to...
Yet another clown making a fool of himself online:
"Finally, we move to Sony. The company was barely beaten in hardware sales by Microsoft -- a mere 900 unit margin separated the two companies -- and it did relatively well in software sales. That said, it only captured 35 percent of GTA IV sales, which the company attributes to a smaller installed base. Of course, a more logical notion suggests the robust online component included in the Xbox 360 version was the main reason....
These words should never come from someone who's primary responsibility is to make the product succeed:
"they don't like the system as it's set up at the moment"
It's called having a severe case of foot-in-mouth syndrome.
What Nintendo needs to do:
1)Fire this idiot
2)Enable seamless use of SD as if it was internal memory by
a) reserve part of the internal memory to cache the content from SD
b) copy only the conte...
UE3 based games all look the same because of they all have the same simplified lighting model and blockly, low polygon characters. The upside is that because the lighting is simplified, they can kick up the normal map size and simulate a higher level of detail than there really is. The sprite-based effects are still UE3 cheesy as well. I'm not impressed by the "100 locusts" since the original xbox was kicking out 1500 enemies or more in certain games. Even Kameo on Xbox360 had h...
Unreal Engine is about reducing the complexity of the lighting to from a smooth gradient to a few steps. This is great for simplifying lighting calculations and therefore increasing the sampling of normal map coordinates but it just reinforces the "gameyness" of the graphics since everything shiny has the same amount of shinyness and everything flat has the same look, and so on. Unreal Engine also uses simple baked lighting. When the gun is fired the same areas on the character's...
Gears is still a small scale affair. Graphics are about the same as before, worse in some ways (worse character models, less elegant lighting), better in others (more characters on screen and better sense of action). Unfortunately the effects still look like crap. Particularly the fire effect in the clip is just dreadful. UE3 games will always be about monotone shinyness. It's built into the engine.
KZ2 looks real because everything is real-time. Instead of having a few steps between shadow and light, all the lighting is calculated correctly providing smooth, natural transitions as objects move in and out of shadows. In one of the GeoW2 cut-scenes, as the vehicle moves out slowly from under a shadow, you can see the lighting on the vehicle change step by step.
BTW, the simplified lighting model is why they can easily use high resolution normal maps in UE3. However the c...
I've seen better fire effects on the PS2!
http://www.pro-gamers.fr/im...
GoW2 continues the tradition of excessive shinyness to compensate for the lack of realism.
How did this guy get hired to work at the most powerful technology company on the planet? He and the moron who hired him ought to be fired ASAP.
The Xbox360 has had a very tough 6 months and it seems like it will only get worse now that they've already played their highest card (Halo3) and it has not resulted in a consistent boost to sales. Bashing the opposition in this unprovoked manner just reflects the desperation felt inside the XBox division. However, this man's job is t...
Easily the best shooter graphics I've seen on consoles. The dust, smoke, textures, animation, character models, and most of all the lighting ... wow. Someone mentioned COD4 but the reality is that it's not the same league as this game. COD4 had good art direction but was technically lacking. The first time I've looked at a shooter (Crysis included) and experienced anything close to suspension of disbelief. Having said that, PC/Console graphics arent quite there yet.
Kudos ...
How can they call this an "elaborate demo" when it has full online racing and more cars than $60 games like Need for Speed?
Incredible animation if in-game matches the cut-scene shown. As for IQ, I have a feeling they'll be rendering at a lower resolution with software AA to enable FP16 HDR then upscaling to 1080P.
The lower resolution on the PS3 (despite superior pixel processing capability) is due to the lack of sufficent SPU driven back-face culling (to reduce the amount of unseen pixels rendered), better draw-distance (there fore the PS3 version has to render more objects), and greater use of cinematic post-processing (software driven on the pixel shaders).
What's surprising is that since the PS3 GPU, while better at rendering pixels, cannot handle as many polygons as the Xbox360 GPU un...
The Xbox360 lacks true hardware HDR and hence does not have the color range of the PS3. This is why Rockstar themselves say they prefer the way the PS3 outputs color. The XBox360 has hardware FP10 MDR (Medium Dynamic Range) hardcoded into the graphics chip whereas the PS3 has hardware FP16 (High Dynamic Range). In case you did not know, FP16 gives you vastly more dynamic range that FP10. The EDRAM chip has circuitry that attempts to compensate for the lack of dynamic range by exaggerating...
The bad pop-in & frame-rate issues on the xbox360 is because of 3 reasons:
1) Tiling: Since GTAIV uses 2 tiles per screen, all the geometry has to be processed twice per frame. This limits the amount of geometry the scene can handle.
2) Bandwidth: Because of tiling and high CPU overhead (AI, gameplay, NPCs, etc) the shared memory bandwidth eats into the amount of data that can be squeezed through to the GPU
3) No standard Hard-drive: Because the X...
Rockstar was never able to get as good performance out of the PS2 as other developers and I don't see why people expect anything different with the PS3, which also has a very complex architecture.
Having said that, they obviously made a very good game so I'd recommend buying it anyway.
As for PS3 vs Xbox360, despite the lower resolution, the Xbox360 version has inferior lighting, less stable frame-rate, and really bad texture and geometry pop-in, particularly when yo...
Finally a review who understands that Shinola+Crayola!=Good Graphics.
They put it at 7/10. I'd put it at 5/10 for the poor textures, mediocre character models, lack of modern graphics requirements like quality self-shadowing, etc... Making it colorful and shiny doesnt cut it anymore. As the review said, its just like a higher resolution Xbox game.