Slashdot Mirror
Halo 1 and 2 On The 360
Next Generation is reporting on possible graphical improvements for Halo 1 and 2 on the 360. The source? The folks at Bungie mentioned some surprises in their most recent update. From the article: "Some better anti-aliasing would be a nice touch, though more computationally intensive. While we're asking for pie in the sky things, some up-rezzed textures for use in the now higher resolutions might also be a great addition, though this would require content resources (e.g. real money spent on games that aren't likely to continue selling to 360 owners) so this is even less probable than the previously mentioned upgrades. Also, those textures would either have to ship on the hard drives (very unlikely) or be downloaded via Live (more possible but still unlikely)."
Better anti-aliasing isn't pie-in-the-sky for the XBOX-360. It's a given.
First of all, it's not a matter of "better", Halo 1/2 didn't have ANY. As for it being a pie-in-the-sky idea, the 360 was designed from the ground up to run FSAA on every single game. The GPU has specific on-chip cache to accelerate anti-aliasing. So turning on AA in the backwards-compatibility patch is a no-brainer.
As for higher-res textures, it's not such a crazy idea. As I understand it developers often produce media at higher resolution than the final in-game res, and then scale it down. So the media probably already exists, meaning it's not a major monetary investment to produce it. The problem is of course, as mentioned, distribution. Selling a high-def content pack isn't out of the question. Throwing it online could work, but we are talking about a fair chunk of data here. A few gigs most likely. Certainly possible, Valve has proven that by pushing multi-gigabyte games through STEAM, but it might not be practical on a console like it is on a PC.
Something else to keep in mind is that the 360 ships with an overpriced 20GB drive, so there isn't exactly a lot of room there. Before you point out that it is a notebook drive, you must understand that it is overpriced even for a notebook drive. For $100 US, I expect an 60GB 4200RPM notebook drive, considering that such drives cost about $90 US at marked-up retail. Anyhow, if you throw a few gigs onto that drive, right off the bat you're eating up a pretty hefty chunk of the drive for one single game.
Just so you know, in case you are a closet Nintendo lover, the Nintendo Revolution is confirmed to be backwards compatible with Gamecube games right out of the box, so CAN SOMEONE ON /. BASH NINTENDO ONCE IN A WHILE???
Here Microsoft, Intel, and to some extent Sony get automatically bashed in a totally biased attack, while Apple and Nintendo get automatically praised in a totally biased love-fest
Amen. The anti-Microsoft arguments would actually be more persuasive if the posters here at least gave the illusion of being non-biased. Right now, that ain't happening, and you can practically guarantee that the top 3-5 comments are going to be:
1) Microsoft-bashing, like the one you've just read. As a bonus, this one contains gems like:
"It's entirely possible that when everyone puts in their precious halo they will crash the compatibility engine, what a fine way to start the launch of a new system."
Yeah, and it's entirely possible that a giant space chicken will descend on us from the Vega start system and peck Europe to utter destruction. And both events are about equally likely... do you honestly think Microsoft wouldn't, you know, *test* their code before shipping it?
2) Diatribes about how gameplay is always better than graphics which sometimes go as far as saying that games with poor graphics have better gameplay. (Players of ET on the Atari 2600 might want to dispute this one.) Of course, you have to mention that Nintendo is the *only* company out there that understands this and releases games with good gameplay.
These posts always get modded to +5 regardless of how off-topic they are, or how repetitive it is reading the same goddamned arguments in every single game thread which is, more than anything, proof that the moderation system doesn't work.
3) Completely off-topic rants about how good Nintendo is, sometimes from people who admit that they don't even own any other consoles to compare their experience to. Despite being posted in topics like "Xbox Live to carry mini-games" and "Splinter Cell Next Gen to be PS3 Exclusive", these posts will never be moderated as Off-Topic, but will instead get +5 Interesting.
Comment of the year