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First Xbox 360 Reviews Hitting the Web
An anonymous reader writes "The first reviews for Xbox 360 games are starting to hit the web! 1UP has reviewed Kameo, Project Gotham Racing 3, FIFA Soccer 2006, NBA 2K6, and Amped 3, while IGN has reviewed Madden NFL 06, Kameo, and NBA 2K6. Judging from both sets of reviews, it looks like Project Gotham Racing 3 - which scored a 10/10 on 1UP - is the only sure winner of the 360 launch games thus far."
Where are the first person shooters and Adventure/RPG games? Or better yet something completely diffrent. Are there going to be any launch titles like that?
How good is it as a multimedia machine? What file formats and codecs does it play? Should I go for a chipped xbox, or wait for the xbox 360?
Slagborr
Does anyone else see what I see? All but one of these is a sequel! Where, O where, have the original fun-to-play games gone? :(
From the Project Gotham Racing 3 review: "PGR3's use of motion blur is similarly effective. Every object in the environment blurs realistically as speeding vehicles tear through the tracks"
I've driven pretty fast. I once drove a Dodge Viper around a race track and got some pretty wicked speed, hitting about 150mph on the back straight. What didn't I see? Motion blur.
I understand that the designers want to give the player a better sense of speed, but real environments don't blur, they simply move by too quickly to see any detail. It's even worse when the reviewers start to declare unrealistic effects as very realistic. It's like in a movie when a car careens over an embankment and explodes. Sure, the explosion looked realistic *if cars actually exploded when they crashed* (even the Pinto didn't explode like that). Same thing here... I'm sure the bluring is very close to what it would actually look like *if environments actually did blur at high speeds*.
On an unrelated note, I loved the special effects in Star Wars Episode III. Those lightsabers looked very realistic.
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I'm on the fence right now. I think I want a console. It'd be my fist console since the SNES, I've been a PC-only gamer for that long. However the 360 is tempting me. There's lots of titles that sound interesting, and I have a nice HDTV and surround setup now that I want to play on.
The deciding factor is going to be how good the games sound. If there's enough 360 games that sound really good, I think I'll take the plunge and get one. If not, I'll stick with my PC as my only game platform.
Sure, all the hype is in place, and the X360 looks like a great platform... maybe I am just not paying attention, or have become jaded. But all my gaming friends are totally ambivalent on the X360. Some want to pick it up, most are going to wait and see what the PS3 is like, and in general there seems to be a collective shrug about the thing. Is it lack of Halo 3, or some really huge A-list title? Shouldn't be... the PS2 launched with basically SSX and Ridge Racer...
I dunno. There is some kind of elusive piece missing from the X360 launch to get me excited. I saw the posters for the pre-sale and thought Hey, I guess that IS out soon, huh.... I guess I'm just an old coot now. I play almost nothing but Warcraft these days, maybe that is it. :)
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Interesting, all I hear online while in game lobbies between the games on XBC and KAI is how much people would run and buy it on the first day.
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I have only 2 consoles (ps/2 & xbox) and only play a few hours a week, however I decided that I had to wait for PS3, see their relase titles first as I'm absolutely unhappy what I see about the xbox, and the games list leaves me uninterested
there is only one title that would interest me: the new Ghost Recon, but I won't buy a console for one game, and I am really pissed about all the crap I have to buy again to have a usable console
AV pack (again), hdd, wireless (if you want), remote control
Games: OK, they look good, but these screenshots are not as nice compared to what I saw on the sony presentation... OK, now 100s jump on me that they weren't playable demos, etc
I was really about getting one on the first week, but I started looking at all that, and just stepped back
I wait at least half a year and see who wins, I really do not want to end-up with 2 consoles like now, because one will be just sitting there untouched, now it is my ps2, next time it might be my 360, and it is 2x as much $$ to waste
For those geeks that need a reason to purchase this thing (outside the games), here's some stuff to note:
1.) Practically any hardware works with it. People have plugged USB keyboards, iPods, digital cameras, etc into the thing and everything has been recognized so far. Even some PC controllers and steering wheels work. It's a very Mac-like hardware experience.
2.) Like Windows Media Center, the Xbox 360 will play saved, unencrypted DVDs off a file server somewhere. The only catch is that Windows Media Center needs to be on that box (or connected to that box) to share out the movies. I have a "DVD jukebox" server with Windows Media Center that currently dishes out 50 movies on my TV. I can move that to the basement and just have my Xbox 360 now.
3.) MS has pulled off a seemingly impossible feat of emulation in getting Xbox games to run. Not only have they emulated Intel to Power PC, but nVidia assembly to ATI. Better yet, the software for that emulation is updated constantly and will be released on their website to burn to CD. Can anyone say "reverse engineering"?
4.) The 360 has some fairly cool gamer features that'll make people say "why hasn't this been done before"? For example: universal settings. You like your games set to Difficult mode and controller's Y-axis updown for shooters? Set it into the dashboard and it gets applied universally.
5.) Numerous other bits of geek happiness: VGA, an impressive fab of the boards to fit that "squeezed" shape, that power brick (well, maybe not the power brick -- that thing sucks).
All in all, I was waiting on buying this thing based on the Perfect Dark reviews. Now I'm considering getting one just based on the hardware. If nothing else, it'll be fun to rip apart a 3-core Power PC board.
Actually, ask a scientist and they will tell you a linear scale is most effective when you use the full range. That's the big problem people have with, for example, ice skating: the worst performance of the night will score 5/6 with glaring painful to watch errors, and the most perfect performance of the night will score 5.9/6.
Taken to a logical extreme, you should really never rate a game higher than 0/10, because surely the same game with significant graphics enhancements could be made 10 more times, and surely you would agree that each major step in graphics enhancement should deserve at least a one point improvement in score?
I take a 10/10 score on a game review to mean: reviewer didn't find anything he didn't like in the time he had to play it before the review came out. A reviewer with even a minor nit to pick will drop the perfect 10 and harp on his pet peeve, hoping to get the company to fix his pet peeve in the next version.
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That's Methuselah, whipper-schnapper.
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"Qua!?"
Unfortunately, myself and many other gamers out there are disgusted to see this become a selling point You see, content that USED to be free and downloadable will now be charged for. Be prepared to be nickle and dimed on every single game element they can think of. I wouldn't be surprised if they introduced an "arcade" style function where you have to pay per play.
And if you think this hasn't started to happen yet, I invite you to take a look at what Valve's Steam has done to the modding community. Now every single mod that has a decent player base and used to be free is trying to charge about the price of a retail Expansion for their mod. And don't get me wrong...I'm happy to see the modding community rewarded for their effort, but I am not happy about the fact that it is at the expense of the players. I always thought it should come directly from the game company for causing more people to buy their game.
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The motion blur in film is for the same reason that you would get a blur on any still picture of something that is moving fast - the amount of time the film is exposed is large enough to capture multiple locations of the object. This would lead to a blurred picture of the original object, as nothing moves in exact jumps to be captured by film without blurring.
The problem with blur in games is the fact that computers know the exact positions of the objects and do the calculations based on that. The general thinking for gaming used to be to get the most clarity, the most details that you can for an object from the hardware and do that at highest frame rate. However that results in very crisp, but as GP said unrealistic, pictures. Adding more frames doesn't really help because they are still too sharp. On the other hand, to create a blur in games requires calculations involving more than just positions of objects and their polygons in one frame, but the locations of them in previous frames. That means that your memory requirements have grown for something that used to be considered the anticedent of perfection - non-crispness.
Xbox360 looks cool and all, but if Sony will allow us to develop with 1-2 Cells in Linux on the PS3 unmodded, they just got one buyer.
I'm a pretty heavy gamer (8-12 hours a week), but would never buy a dedicated machine for it. But the specs on the PS3 are way to good to pass up. Seeing most of my programming work these days revolves around video editing, the PS3 sounds to good to pass up. Get a Cell machine and a killer gaming console, all in one for
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