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Halo 1 And 2 In Hi-Def On 360
Bungie has confirmed via one of its weekly updates that Halo 1 and 2 will be playable on the 360. Moreover, they'll look even better as gamers will have the option of watching in 720p as opposed to the original console's 480p. From the article: "But here's another bonus - the hardware in the 360 can do a lot of nifty stuff, and specifically in the cases of Halo and Halo 2, it can display the graphics in wide screen, at 720p, with full scene anti-aliasing. And it doesn't look kludgy, artifacty or smeary like an upscanning DVD player. The best way to describe it is that both games look like they're running on a PC at those resolutions."
So, they're saying the newest 3D renderer can run the engine at a higher resolution? I never would have guessed on my own. Looks like the "Patch" to make Xbox games run on the Xbox 360 might just be replacing the engine, rather than trying to emulate x86.
To further maintain this illusion, Microsoft has said that the games will randomly crash to a faux "desktop" and occasionally display a Blue Screen of Death, requiring the system to be restarted.
In related news, MS recently announced the addition of Clippy to the multiplayer modes. "It looks like you're trying to pwn n00bz..."
The biggest limitation they talk about is not being able to instantly do a 180, but that seems semi-realistic anyway.
I'll give you credit for trying, but that's pretty weak. Don't you mean that your $400 console looks as good as your $500 PC? If you don't want to buy an xbox then don't, but that's just weak.
"And it doesn't look kludgy, artifacty or smeary like an upscanning DVD player"
Are they really trying to make something out of nothing? I personally have not worked with a modern gaming console, but (being that these systems are, unlike a PC, typically designed around 1 or 2 standard resolutions) wouldn't it make sense to have the Resolution controlled by the system's API? Even if it wasn't, it would be trivial for the 360 to recognize a XBox game and reject it's settings for Resolution, Anti-Alaising and Antisotropic Filtering in place of its own settings.
Seriously, I could understand 'bragging' that they used image processing algorityms to improve texture quality, or possibly that they used subdivision to improve the models, but bragging about increasing the resolution and improving Anti-Alaising?
And it doesn't look kludgy, artifacty or smeary like an upscanning DVD player.
What kind of shit hardware does this guy use to "upscan" (upconvert) his movies?
I guess the whole home theatre community obsessed with picture quality has been wasting hundreds of dollars on upscaling DVD players, because apparently they look kludgy, artifacty, and smeary -not better.
Heh, imagine that. A console that looks as good as last years PC. What will they think of next?
I don't know what games other people are playing, but high-res Halo is maybe up to the scale of PC games, if we were back in 2002. Seriously, there's no comparing X-Box 360 graphics with the mainstream computer graphics of today. Take a screenshot of Half Life 2 and compare it to Halo 2, and Halo 2 will be blown out of the water, hands down. Seriously, consoles haven't been cutting edge in graphics since what, the Atari? Even with all of Microsoft's muscle, there's only so much they can fool people into thinking that this will be the panacea for the gap between consoles and computers, beacuse it's not.
But they're not simply upscaling, the game is actually rendered at 720p, so it will have sharp edges, and sharp-to-semifuzzy-textures. It will look just as sharp as a PC playing at 1280x720.
;-) One of them is slightly better, with anti-aliasing on a lot of edges, but what's going on with Sarge's holster? Chunky pixels!
It looks a bit odd, though. Take this screenshot as an example - there are some really lumpy pixels on the cables and archway to the left of the picture.
Actually, I've just spent the last ten minutes making some rubbishy animated GIFs comparing differences between screenshots.
Here's one comparing Xbox and Xbox360 shots - there's definitely a difference, but there are horrible jagged pixels on the wires to the left on both of them.
Here's another comparing Xbox and Xbox360 shots again - go on, tell me which one's which.
And finally, my favourite. Comparing the 1280x720 image with a version scaled down to 640x360 and back again. Here I chucked away three-quarters of the information in the screenshot (I did a nearest-neighbour scale down to 640x360 in The GIMP, a cubic scale up to 1280x720 and applied 40% sharpening). First of all, try to tell them apart - there are some slight differences on near-horizontal lines, but otherwise the 1280x720 image might as well have been rendered at 640x360 then scaled up to the larger size.
Either these are extremely bad screenshots (they did mention having to grab the video), or there's something very strange going on. I hope it's the former, but there still isn't much improvement over the original Xbox...
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