Slashdot Mirror
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."
Personally, I'm holding off til later I think. Unless Perfect Dark Zero scores a massive 9 something everywhere (ala Halo at Xbox launch), there just won't be any great games til Christmas at the earliest.
Does this come as a shock to anyone? This just in, reviews for a new games for a new console!"
"You won't eat our meat, but you'll glue with our feet.." --Some cow
Jehovah fucking Yahweh, I curse you in the name of Satan the Almighty. Evil lives in me and I walk with Satan all the days of my life cursing and mocking you god (the dog), filthy fucking maggot. My hate grows by the second as I dream of the day when you are under my feet begging for my cock.
God I rape you and hurl blasphemy into your mind. I demand you to come down from heaven right now and get down on your stomach in front of me, lifting your asshole up to receive my cock. God I promise to fuck you and I long to rip your eyes out, kick you in the face, mutilate you, and bathing in your blood. Listen to me, I'm screaming
in your ears to come to earth and in this room for I will have my way with you, oh most cursed god of heaven (you foul piece of shit). Satan is my God and he will force you to drink cum from my dick. I will never stop sinning and blaspheming your name, presents, existence, and most of all the rotten, putrid holy spirit that fucked the mother of gOd and pregnanted that slut with jesus christ.
I stand before all the angles and saints, gOd, jesus fucking christ, mary the whore of gOd, the filthy holy spirit, and they are witnessing my denouncement of you gOd, and my ongoing blasphemy of the holy spirit. I am purposely cursing the holy spirit and its purity and will defy you god and the holy spirit all the wicked days of my sin filled life. My soul is full of evil thoughts and sins, its black with pure hatred of anything holy.
God, I will find new ways to defile and blasphemy you, because I'm seeking evil every second of my life. That is all my mind can think about. You're pain is my desire, you're name I mock, your son I defy, your mother I fuck, and your spirit I cum in.
The only prayers from me are prayers of hate and blasphemy, evil is a part of me, it dwells in my soul, cursing everything about you is the most important part of my existence, total darkness is inside of me. gOd I will rip you out of heaven and force you under my feet you fuck pig. You will listen to all my demands. I will slip into heaven and I will rape all the angels and saints and will kill them in your unholy putrid name. God I will kill you and bath in your blood. Holy spirit I demand you to listen to my hatred of your foul existence, drink my cum, and remember my blasphemy against you, you putrid, rotten, vile spirit of gOd.
I'm the meaning of gOd's pain. This is the way that you will die dog gOd. It will be a slow death, the joy of killing you will make my cock hard, I know you will feel my showers of hate and you will feel extreme pain as I beat your body and make every inch of your body black and blue. I force you bastard Jehovah to the ground and I will
put you under my feet where you belong, you putrid bastard. God you will try to run but I will strap you down and fuck your soul before I rip it out of your body. God "the dog", your life is worthless, for I'm the angel from your new God "Satan". I destroy everything holy, you are felling my hatred pierce your mind intensely, inferior god "dog" you fucking maggot. You will be screaming in pain as I strap you down under my feet, you will look up at me and I will piss down your throat.
I'm so consumed with hatred of you that I will masturbate, and when I feel that I'm about to cum, I force my evil cock full of Satan's cum down your mouth and fill it up with my vile hot cum. I will be pumping your body full of my hot cum. Inside your brain is my blasphemy. The pressure in your skull begins push through your eyes,
burning your flesh, and I laugh as it drips away. Heat burns your skin; your mind starts to boil with my blasphemy, and pure evil hatred of your fucking existence. You will not last long; it's just a matter of time until your ripped apart with my hands. You will be floating in a sea of your blood, smelling your death as it burns. My wicked cum is deep inside you as I skin you. You're eyes will bleed as you pray to me for the end of you're wide-awake nightmare. Waves of pain rap around you're soul, death is staring down a
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?
The Last Person to find LGPL code in Microsoft 360 spyware, is a rotten egg! We already know that Sony is the rotten egg in the last race.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
What I find interesting about reviews during this time is that those who have to have the 360 have already bought, and likely already know which of the 20 or 30 games available they will buy. It's not like there will be anyone with a 360 who has not already been planning on buying one. So, just how useful is a review like this when, pretty much by definition, the likely consumers have already made up their minds?
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
8.0/10.0
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
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
I know you can play games, but can Linux run on it as well? No really, I heard stories of people running linux on XBOX.
-Haxhia
meh!
(and the same will apply to the ps3, less evil, more quality, thanks)
the 360 will be a total hit its looking amazing
there are 4 games i want at release and the other look sweet but i cant afford them all
microsoft has defantly done something right here
Someone made an X-Box 360 topic icon?
Windows has detected an undetectable error.
Xbox 360 review you!
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? :(
I am surrounded by gamers, including myself. My friends and I all play games on consoles and pcs. We go buy games constantly, both new and old games for our rooms full of the last twenty years of consoles.
No one and I mean NO ONE has even the slightest interest in the 360.
Even the couple guys I know who were hardcore xbox owners have no intention of buying a 360 - ever. They are bitter and disillusioned with Microsoft and the 360.
Seriously, if your sole purpose is to play movies, get a computer. The graphics hardware, which is the majority of the power and cost, is almost totally wasted on that kind of thing. What's more, it's not x86 so there will be a much smaller software library for it than an Intel or AMD box.
Get a small form factor Athlon box with a cheap graphics and sound card and call it a day, that's all you need for multi-media. With that, you can easily upgrade components as needed, and software to play new formats.
I mean let's be real: This is a GAME console, if you don't care about it for playing games, there's little reason to get one, espically at the current prices. $500 is plenty to build a media PC better than any X-box.
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.
The global economy is a great thing until you feel it locally.
Review talks about the "realistic" motion blur.
Having recently played such a game I can say that motion blur in racing games are generally unrealistic. Anyone seen this one? is it overdone or just right?
Tecmo support is the only reason I am going to buy a 360, and actually the only reason I bought a XBox too. Love or hate Itagaki(sp), he puts out really solid games with good game play and graphics. Gaiden still stands up strong against anything new.
I'm sorry, I actually just took my old one and spun it around really fast.
It Doesnt really surprise me... I recently visited the local walmart, as i walked by the xbox360 display, laughing at the suckers smothering the controler, i actually paused, and became the sucker. (not saying console players are suckers :) ). Medal Of Honor 2 was playing, and i must admit, i was impressed (ofcourse it was on a hd monitor to tease the crowd) Im a PC gamer.. and my attitude towards consoles are (were) ... they could never come close to a high end gaming machine... IMHO i believe the pc has met its match with the xbox360...
-- I Dont Deserve A Sig I Have Bad Karma
Having tried out Kameo on it I can safely say that the console's potential is top-notch. Aside from the average starting bundle of games, there are just no flaws I can put to it; except maybe the jaw-dropping price tag. That alone will make me stick to my Atari2600/NES/PC/PS2/DC/GBA collection. While I'm a tad crazy about videogames, I'm not 900$CDN crazy.
How long before a ModChip comes out? Will they port XBMC, or is there a reason to? How good is the 360's media player interface?
Giving a game perfect score doesn't sound like something a respectable reviewer should do.
10 out of 10 possible indicates perfection, something that can't be improved. Suppose that a year later,
the game gets a sequel with some improvements. More cars, more levels - the usual sequel stuff. Shouldn't
that also receive a perfect score of 10, since it is the same "perfect" game, but just... better?
I do understand that scores are meant to be read like the bible, that they are just general guidelines and
that you really need to read the review. But scores are what will be quoted on advertisements, and a pretty clearly hype-influenced perfect score is just sad.
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.
I'm not a console gamer myself, but I do play games on the PC, and I try to keep up with the games market in case I find a console I do want. What is it about the XBox 360 that your friends don't like?
1UP
Kameo: 7.0
Project Gothem Racing 3: 10.0
Fifa Soccer 2006: 7.0
NBA 2K6: 7.0
Amped 3: 7.0
IGN
Madden 2006 : 8.0
Kameo : 8.4
NBA 2K6 : 7.8
I recognize that most of these are sports games, and sports game revies have been dropping lately, but these scores seem pretty 'Average' (that is, not very impressive). Certainly PGR 3 seems to have scored well, but is one racing game really going to move systems?
Seeing these scores for Kameo is a real dissapointment; I really enjoyed Rare's games for the N64 and wanted them to recapture their greatness.
Racing games (and sports games in general) are trying to reproduce television reality, not actual reality. Television images are where the blur comes from.
Well another smashing piece of hardware hits the streets, so what ? The games are still lame. They are much more beautiful than on the previous one sure but what about interest ?
Blasting monsters or whatnot is not my cup of tea (or coffee or mountain dew or whatever), I'm fed up with micromanaging my armada in the 3565654684th copy of the click fest called warcraft and I don't care much to see sprites living their own lives on screen. MMORPG are a bug nightmare and a support pit. So what's left ?
(Answer : another useless shiny box full of top of the line hardware gathering dust somewhere on a shelf)
malheureusement la stupidité n'est ni curable, ni mortelle.
That's actually always been one of the problems games have had next to movies for realism. I mean films are still shot at 24fps. It's rare to play a game at less than 30fps, and many people insist on 60fps or more. Yet the film, despite it;s low frame rate, still has a smoothness that games don't. Why? Motion blur.
If you look at a game screenshot with lots of motion, everything is crystal clear. It's a snapshot of precisely what was happening at that given instant. It's like having a still photo with an infinetly fast shutter speed. If however you look at a movie frame with teh same kind of action, you'll notice it's heavily blurred. The camera is leaving the shutter open long enough to capture more than just a single instant.
Now the net effect, when played back is that the blurred scene looks more smooth. The faster something is moving, the more true this is. I mean let's say you have a game running at 30fps, and you have a rocket fly across the screen in just 3 frames. The way it will be rendered, without blur, will be with huge gaps inbetween. You'll see it on the left side, then the center, then the right, then gone. It looks jerky, cut up, unrealistic. However if that rocket were blurred as it moved, it would look more smooth and realistic to you.
Like any effect, it can be overused or used wrong, but blur can really enchance teh smoothness of images changing at high speeds.
Nice NDA's the review sites had to sign.. not a single actual gameplay screenshot! (from a sensible camera angle anyway) I suppose that's because from afar the graphics look exactly the same as they did on the old systems.. blocky and unsharp due to the low resolution.
I had an original Xbox shipped to me on release day but this time, there are simply no games that interest me - _at all_ - available at launch. Elder Scrolls III got me interested and so do some of the shooters.
What I did pre-order and what should arrive on release day is DDR Ultramix 3 - for the Xbox000.
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. :)
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
I think there is some serious "astroturfing" going on in this thread. Comments like yours, that are critical of the XBox, are being modded down as flamebait.
I've noticed the same thing as you, none of my friends are very excited about the 360. There doesn't seem to be much buzz surrounding it. Personally I think it is because all the games are just sequels, more of the same but with fancier graphics.
It will be interesting to see what happens when the Playstation3 comes out.
If you don't see motion blur, then either your eyes or brain work differently than those of normal mammals.
Try the following experiment:
1) Stare straight ahead
2) Wave your hand quickly back-and-forth in front of your face
If your hand doesn't appear to be blurred, then somehow your eye is not integrating incoming radiance over time.
Please seek immediate medical attention.
Ignoring the fact that you can't pick a winner from "both sets of reviews" when it's only included in one of them...
The "games have to get nine out of ten to be worth playing" mentality bothers me. A lot. Scores are inflated to the point where they're almost meaningless anyway; even though Black and White was a good game, do you really think it would have been consistently rated at the 90% level if it wasn't so anticipated and so hyped? The 10/10 on PGR3 means jack except for it's the obligatory launch title that everyone is expected to buy with the console. What console hasn't launched with at least one game in the 9/10 or above range?
Personally, I know I'd have more fun with Kameo than I would PGR3. I've got racing games, and plenty of them. I'd much rather have an experience that's new instead of something that we see modified and released anew every six months in some form.
It's also a letdown to see how the scores are determined. Kameo was scored lower because it's only going to last "weeks, not months?" Give me a fucking break - weeks of entertainment for $50 is still pretty darn good, all things considered, and Kameo also seems to be one of the few 360 launch titles that has a plot of some kind. Apparently, that's become a bad thing.
Goo goo g'joob.
MSFT just uses the money to make new versions of Windows. Friends don't let friends support ... O, never mind, just don't do it, man!
How good is the rootkit? $sys$
Top 10 Reasons To Procrastinate
10.
Agreed. EA is forcing you to rebuy their repolished stuff for the 360. No Burnout backward compatibility. What a shame. Hopefully they make me a fool but fixing that little omission by releasing a emulator for the 360.
....... Thus ends my attempt at wit or whatever
Weeks, not months?
They said it's a 15-20 hour game. That's a week, maybe two, at most. And that's not two weeks of constant entertainment- that's two weeks of being entertained for about an hour and a half. That's not worth $50; not to me, anyway.
I actually modded the XBox (the current one, not the 360) once, and let me tell you one thing... It felt TOO easy. Making the DVD region free, connect to the web, replace the built in HDD with a bigger one and copy the games to the HDD so they load much faster.. Absolutely amazing how easy it was. ;) Simply install one chip on the board, where it seems to have a perfect place reserved for it, and one extra wire going from one leg of the chip to one point on the board.
It was as if the XBox was designed with modding in mind
What I wonder is: will it be that easy with the 360? or will MS make it harder this time? Is it in their interest to make it harder? or is modding basically an encouraged sub-culture that benefits XBox?
(for example, I think the XMC [XBox Media Center], a software developed for the modded XBox to make the Xbox a home entertainment center so to speak, is bascially what I think MS had in mind when they changed the XBox 360 into a home entertainment center.. so... maybe it also benefits MS?)
"From the moment I could talk, I was ordered to listen" - Cat Stevens
Walmart has had a demo machine for over a week and I just saw one in Target. The graphics are damn sweet and I'm sure it will be a fantastic platform. That, alone, won'tmake the games better, but I can see myself buying one when the library is built up and the prices drop a little.
The 360 doesn't play most of the games I already own. Why should I throw good money after bad?
Yes, they're creating patches to allow some of the older games to run, but you can bet that once the 360 is actually released, that development effort will be tapered off.
Chip H.
I actually disagree with the parent. Films might only do 24 fps, but I notice an extreme difference from films that actually run at a higher framerate. It is very different, it makes games go smoother than film. Having to use these tricks to make things work on a bleeding edge new console, that's just sad. I expected the XBox 260 to be a really smooth console.
I've played the CoD2 demo, which was rather disappointing. Yesterday I saw a bit of gameplay for PGR3 the XBox 360, which was even more disappointing. The lack of use of real graphical features, ie. dust was really.. PSX-ish and everything looked plain and dull. Next to the fact that both in CoD2 demo and PGR3 I noticed a -lot- of choppy graphics, things ran far from smooth.
Also concidering that TES Oblivion was delayed -and- they took out some of the graphical features, makes me believe that the XBox 360 is basically just a huge anti-climax. To put it simply, the machine can't perform. I hope Sony doesn't go down the same road with the PS3, because I'll be buying a Nintendo Revolution if this goes on.
Note: I don't like Microsoft, but I really tried my best to look at it objectively. In no way can I see any justification for it being this bad. Folks, this is a -down- grade.
Motion blur is "realistic" for the same reason games add in all the fancy "realistic" lens flares... Because we all watch so much TV that we think how images come across on film are really how they look. Nevermind the fact that human eye doesn't suffer from lens flare effects and a long list of other side effects created solely by pushing light through a series of lenses.
No, no love here either. But I'll go further and say I'm not feeling it from *any* of the consoles. The interest I have for the Revolution, based on its controller, is tempered by the fact that it seems the only other selling point is that it can play all the older games. Note to Nintendo: Retro gaming is cool, but not for very long. Yes it's fun to fire up Super Mario Brothers once in awhile, but I'm not going to slog through those games *again*.
But as far as the 360...PGR3 looks okay, I guess, but so does PGR2 and I'm not 1/3 of the way through that. To be fair, the same goes for GTA:SA...it's fun, but so was Vice City, and frankly I've moved on.
I'm beginning to think this new generation is the harbringer of some kind of gaming apocalypse...everybody, including nintendo, is pushing "more of the same" but with minor twists (better graphics, innovative controller). It's depressing when you look forward to the next systems for more of the same, but better!
Frankly, I see the only hope coming from giving away or making dev kits unbelievably cheap so that anyone and their dog can create a game and distribute it online (a la xbox live). Will a lot suck? Oh boy will they ever! But it's the only way any kind of innovation will happen, I think. But I guess as long as the big three get their royalties per disc, no one is going to care.
was the wheels. It appeared in every screenshot showing wheels that the wheels were smooth, semi-reflective surfaces. Most racing wheels are not giant mirrors but have some amount of openness for airflow and weight savings. At different speeds, the eye tricks you into seeing the wheels spinning at rates different than those at which they actually spin. An enhancement to realism that would improve this game vastly would be realistic aliasing effects on the wheels. Kajillion polygon real wheels would not be necessary if one instead used an alpha channel for transparency and a texture on the surface to give the illusion of spinning.
I'll be your candy shop of infinite deliciousity if you'll be my discotheque of endless rump-shaking.
I played Call Of Duty 2 at the neighborhood Best Buy, which has a kiosk set up with a widescreen Samsung LCD HDTV. I was thoroughly impressed. Having been a fan of the PC version of Call of Duty 1, call of duty 2 played with a great framerate, intuitive controls, and great lighting effects, all at widescreen 720p. There were also lots of little 'effects', such as the smooth blurring upon taking damage, the directional lighting from explosions, and the detailed character models that really made me stop and pay attention.
Granted, its a niche genre that probably won't sell a lot of systems, but if I can expect PC-calibre games on the system, then I'll probably get one.
Reason, free market capitalism, and individualism
8.0 for Madden360 is seriously an abomination for a game with ZERO competition. As an avid 2k gamer since 1999 on Dreamcast, I am appalled at a second game in just a few months times that has disappointed the gaming public.
EA is resting on their laurels and doing exactly what a MONOPOLY would do to improve their product...next to nothing. If you are a football gamer who feels like I do (the mainstream gaming press like IGN and Gamespot have no intention of serving the interest of gamers) please make your voice heard about what should be done about having only one choice for a football game. My blog is pretty much dedicated to letting fellow gamer's voices be heard about EA and their football monopoly. http://monopolion.blogspot.com/
-Santoro
"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"
No.
Madden is the only football game that is NFL licensed, and football in Amercia is like, well futbol in all those other insignificant countries.
Madden will sell a ton. The rest of them, I dunno.
How pathetic are you that you follow me from topic to topic and waste all your mod points at once modding me down?
I didn't realize that soccer players were so shiny.
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
Here at GarageGames we have had XB360s since Alpha hardware. Currently, we have about eight dev-stations in place while we are finishing up Marble Blast Ultra for distribution through the Live Arcade feature of the system. I can tell you that with everything that I know about the system, I will be the first in line at Best Buy to get my own system for home. Here's why.
I could care less about processors or GPU's, but even if I did the XB360 is great in this area. But, it is everywhere else that the system shines even brighter. The wireless controller feels JUST RIGHT, and I can finally sit on my couch and play games on my HD television (which has precious few other HD signals where I live). No other wireless controller in history, other than Wavebird for Gamecube, has felt right. This time MS nailed it.
If I'm not feeling like I want to play game, I can easily plug my iPod into the front of the system and listen to my music. Currently, I'm not much of a techie, so I listen to my music by plugging my iPod into one of those cheesy little self powered speaker systems. This might not impress the Slashdot crowd, but I don't care enough about this kind of thing to take even five minutes to figure out which input, which cable, etc. it takes to hook up to my myriad amps, etc. to make it work.
Live Arcade downloadable games are the biggest thing that will make this system a hit. Being able to sit on my couch, and choose from hundreds of games without going to the store is a HUGE WIN. Many other things such as transferrable memory cards that allow "roaming" so you can take your downloaded games to a friend's house, micropayments so you can easily buy add-ons to your game (or allowing parents to give their kids purchasing power) all add up to a system that is light years ahead of current systems.
Microsoft has done so many things right with this system that we continue to be amazed.
Jeff Tunnell
www.garagegames.com Independent Games
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.
That's actually always been one of the problems games have had next to movies for realism. I mean films are still shot at 24fps. It's rare to play a game at less than 30fps, and many people insist on 60fps or more. Yet the film, despite it;s low frame rate, still has a smoothness that games don't. Why? Motion blur.
Playing a game a 24fps is a terrible experience but movies seem mostly ok at that. As far as I know the reason for this is not motion blur, but evenly distributed frames. In a movie you get 24 solid evenly spaced frames a second, whereas in a game the rate is constantly changing. Even if nothing much was happening and the counter stayed at 24fps it would probably be unevenly distributed....hmmm how to say this....the eye percieves changes in frame rate as well as the frame rate itself. Also some of the (time) gaps between two frames could be quite large (and quite small other times relative to the average) in the game so this will be noticeable.
This guy are sick.
I expected the XBox 260 to be a really smooth console.
Nah - you're thinking of the Xbox 360. The 260 was a piece of shit.
XBox 360? What is that?
It could be bad timing (who has time to play other stuff with Soul Calibur 3 and a stack of other games?) or a lack of really interesting release titles (ie. the killer app like Ridge Racer was) but something is amiss. I feel that MS, in their zeal to get the thing out before "anyone" else could get theirs out they are missing some magic in their games. Maybe if they had held off for 6 more months and really got some special stuff that shows the features of the XBox 360 over just the XBox there might be something interesting going on.
An interesting thing to note is that the XBox came in just as MMOGs are starting hit their stride. The XBox 360 will be the first system introduced with this effect stronly in play. This should be a good litmus on how MMOGs effect "buy once, play once" games and their systems. I'm not suggesting doom or gloom for either but it will be something to note.
ps. I have a sneaking suspicion that XBox 360 is heading for the same road of ruin in East Asia. Has anyone out there heard anything about how they are handling release events?? Or is MS going to again ignore the second largest market and arguably source of stellar console talent?
Hi guys, I've just posted my vlog of the glasgow visit of the UK xbox360 tour: http://www.davesapien.com/vlog/xbox360hour.html Its abit tenghty but its my first vlog. If your in the UK the tour is still running; here are the dates; 18th-20th November The Light Leeds 25th-28th November Mercer Street Studios WC2 London Thanks. Dave.
Even if the new XBOX ends up as the clunky door stop, at least it will be a good looking door stop.
You can fix the speed of a game's framerate, just lock it to the refresh of the monitor. On consoles, this is done by necessity, all NTSC TVs work at 30fps. Also, given the low resolution and since the refresh rate is known, it's pretty easy to maintain that all the time.
Seriously, grab a movie DVD (one that has 24fps progressive data on it) and freeze frame it on a good monitor during fast action scenes. Witness the blur.
"Kameo is a game that will last players weeks but not months," as mentioned in the Closing Comments section.
And if you've got the time to play games for more than two hours a day, more power to you. I know that my lifestyle is different - I'm a college student with very little free time - but even then, I'd be perfectly content with a shorter game if the experience is a good one. Beyond Good and Evil and Max Payne come to mind...
Goo goo g'joob.
I played the first two project gothams, and I find it's nuanced arcade style a nice inbetween to fantasy and ralley games. Then with my HD Tv, spectacular probably won't be saying enough.
Oh. And madden. How do I love thee..... Seriously, the newer generation of maddens have 100s of hours of playing time in them for the NFL fans. I'm not talking meer mastery, but a perpetual domination of your team over their hated NFL foes. Sure, the AI eventually breaks down, but that only opens up the ability to truly punish ones rivals and the boquet of the game. Not to mention old favorites with a new polish, such as Halo and Halo 2.
To say nothing of the other new treats that I might get to after killing a few hundred hours of ever more precious and rare free time. I probably would be buying one right now. But Seahawks Playoff tickets are going to run in the neighborhood of $400. Ain't no fucking way I'm missing that. Not after 24 years of fandom. Xbox can wait.
GO SEAHAWKS.
the good old days when you would be playing a racing/space/flight game and u would shift your whole body and weave in and out as u were really in the game... they dont make those types of good games nemore... :( makes me sad.... oh well... i still will stick to my computer games and skip the Xbox release yet again... i dont like M$... and killzone looks WAY better then perfect dark
(yes i know i suck at spelling fell free to correct my grammar and/or spellin i dont care, im still not going to change
"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."
I have a great idea. Since IGN and 1Up will put out their reviews of sports titles first, let's wait until those are up (but not wait until the reviews of COD2 and PDZ for 360 out), and proclaim that *all* launch titles are weak, even though the biggest launch titles, COD2 and PDZ, haven't been reviewed yet.
That way people will think the 360 launch does not include COD2 and PDZ, and we fool people into thinking the 360 launch is much worse than it actually is.
BRILLIANT!
God damn, am I the only one getting sick of all forms of M$ bashing on slashdot????
Where are these reveiws coming from, and were are people getting the hardware already and selling it on eBay?
I LABLE-NOW_W0QQitemZ8234160841QQcategoryZ62054QQssP ageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem
http://cgi.ebay.com/Xbox-360-Kameo-New-in-Box-AVA
Are they legal? That guy says he won it in a contest, and he's going to ship it today.
How much is this sucker going to sell for? Is it really worth paying a premium to get it a week or two earlier?
I'm waiting for that awesome looking Jumprope controller. I mean shit you don't even see the TeeVee or the XBOX or anything. That wireless jumprope must be like WiMAX or some shit. JumpJack Revolution Extreme!!!
I'm asking because I simply do not know.
Is the "motion blur" of 24fps movies added in post processing, inherent to the camera in original filming, or a combination of the two.
I'm also not a gamer, but being a geek I like the technology that goes into the newer games. I may very well buy a PS3 if I get unpissed at Sony. 2 HDTV outs, digital sound, absolutely sick looking screenshots, cell processors, looks neat. I'm curious about the blur in games. Why does that not exist? Would it take more processing to produce the blur than to just throw out more frames?
F-Zero. Mario 64. Pikmin. Luigi's Mansion.
All of these games were like nothing created before.
Somehow I suspect that the Elder Scrolls title won't play on Transgaming's Winex, either, so I'm probably going to have to buy some new gear for that anyway. Though if they do a Mac port, I'd be happy buying Apple hardware. They're only slightly evil, much less than either Microsoft or Sony...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I must say, even I'm impressed.
I barely have time to game anymore, games that take months would take me years. A few weeks of gameplay will work out to a few months for me in the long run, which suits me fine. I'd rather take my time, play when I can, and enjoy the experience.
rm -rf
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
Man is the lowest-cost, 150-pound, nonlinear, all-purpose computer system which can be mass-produced by unskilled labor.
It's inherent to the film and camera itself.
At 24 fps, the camera shutter will be open for (don't know the exact number) 1/30 of a second each frame, and any motion that occurs during the time the shutter is open will appear on the film as a blur. It's the same blur effect as when you use a slow shutter speed to take a picture of fast action. When viewed as part of a sequence of moving pictures, your mind interprets the blur as a moving object.
Games try to emulate this effect with motion blur, since the alternative of using instantaneous pictures can be visually jarring. I suspect (don't know) that motion blur does take more processing power than just throwing out more frames, but the end result looks much better to a human observer.
And just how do we know that the 360 won't be plagued with the "dirty disk" issues of the Xbox Beta(tm)? I've sent mine back to the factory for refurbishing, and just recently had it "cleaned" by a game store down the street, but even so it has always complained about perfectly clean game disks and DVDs...
(And I haven't been able to find out.. will the 360 support VCD?)
I'll get one if I can play play my old Xbox games and DVDs without the continuous "dirty disk" problems though.
Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind. - Dr. Seuss
Actually, motion bluring in games is nothing new. I can think of one game that was very convincing because of it, Need for Speed Underground 2 (for X-box). I don't remember if the first one had it, but basically as your driving along, everything is pretty darn clear, until you start going fast. lines, lights, buildings, everything started to blur a bit and it really started to feel like you were moving fast! While I don't think the effect was quite perfect, it was definately a good start and one of the first racing games I saw exploit this effect. There's a big difference between knowing your going at 150mph because that's what the speedo says when you enter a turn, and feeling like you're going too fast for the turn without having to even look at the speedo.
-=JML=-
Asses are for crapping, not screwing.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"Live Arcade downloadable games are the biggest thing that will make this system a hit.
"...all add up to a system that is light years ahead of current systems."
You mean SEGA Channel?
Doesn't sound like that new of an idea.
Last night at Best Buy there were several people crowded around the 360. I was really excited to finally see one in person being an avid gamer, but frankly the graphics aren't any better than current PCs. The game didn't even look appealing except it was the new 360. The general consensus was "this is it?" Yawn.
To me, the PS3 is the console of choice. I admit I'm no fan of Microsoft, but if they had the better product I would buy it. They simply don't. I have a PS2, a PC, a Mac, and a PSP. The PSP has better games on it then many people give it credit for, the Mac has all the essential A-list games (albeit late), the PC is the pinnacle of computer gaming, and the PS2 has one hell of a long list of A-list games. Where are the Ratchet & Clank, Jack and Daxter, Sly Cooper, and God of War games on an XBOX? NOWHERE.
... but I do know it will be all wireless. It will also have HD. It will also have the most horsepower of all 3 consoles and a better SDK than the PS2. I also bet that the SINGLE VERSION (instead of XBOX's crippled one and regular one) will be around $400 at launch. Maybe $300.
The XBOX only has Halo. That's it, folks! You know what? I have Halo on my Mac. It's great. But for the life of me I can't get into it on XBOX. The only game the XBOX does well is an FPS which is always superior with a mouse and keyboard.
XBOX 360? It uses an old DVD format and no games. The games it does have are copy-cat "me, too" games for the PS2 and PS3. The only real advantage XBOX has is XBOX live. I give it credit where it's due for that.
I will be buying a PS3 based on the games that will be coming out for it. I also have a 50" HDTV that I plan on using with it, which is 3/4 of the attraction of these new consoles. Blu-Ray HD Movies are going to be sweet. Plus, I don't believe the PS3 will ship with the bannana
The Revolution has a possibility of a good controller and some nice franchise games. It'll probably be cheap.... launch will prob. be $100 less than the other consoles. Might pick one up.
"Politicians find new names for institutions which under old names have become odious to the people."
Reviewing the review...
The first Project Gotham 3 review begins with a diatribe all about the reviewer and not at all about the game. Why must writers make all their work about themselves? It's like the writer thinks we want to hear about him, and he must segue into a discussion of the game itself only by explaining how the game is directly relative to the main topic: himself.
Does this help us? Can we relate to the author in a way that tells us we'll have a similar game experience? Or are these boring "making the game personal" descriptions just an indication of how much the review, when he gets to it, will be biased?
I lost interest after reading too much about the author. I preferred to complain about it rather than continue bothering to read. I suppose this is because I have some sort of attention deficit. Ever since I was in fourth grade, when... (me me me, etc)
funny i did a review weeks ago, about several games & the system itself.... http://www.clubvibes.com/magazine/article.asp?id=2 516
Don't ya hate it when the correct spelling of your favorite screen name is taken?
The Christmas season is NOW you goof.
I was excited to read the review. I couldn't wait to hear what EA added. What extra features did they give to add value to the inevitible $60 price tag?
WTF! They left out instant replay?!?! They cut out the mini-camp?!?! They trimmed down the defensive audibles?!?!
I have to say I'm quite disappointed. Realistically, though, EA had to fit all those fancy shmancy graphics on a regular "old" sized DVD, and I think the game suffered because of it. Hopefully MS can switch to a "next gen" DVD format soon, or we might be seeing scaled back games in the future. In my opinion this game should have a lower price tag at launch. For one, it's less "game" than the other versions, and two it's halfway through the NFL season.
Reviewers who give 10/10 are idiots, fanboys or bribed. Anyhow, they lose all respect what i've had to them (I know that no one cares about my respect;). But how come some game could be perfect? IIRC Best scores i've seen was for Tie Fighter (99) and some Final Fantasy. Yes, those were good games, but had some problems. Even a diehard fanboy should know that nothing is perfect. It's just embarrassing if PGR3 reviewer thinks that it's the perfect game *even* if he's big motor sports fan.
http://archonon.sytes.net/
Even if the monitor refreshes evenly, exactly 30 frames per second, if the console can't keep up, you're going to get the same exact frame refreshed several times while the console chugs away trying to catch up.
As others noted, motion blur on film is a part of the way the camera works. The longer you expose the film, the more it happens.
Now as to blur in games: Yes it requires more processing power. One way to do it, that 3dfx tried and that some pro companies do is called an accumulation buffer. Basically, you render multiple frames and them composite them into a final frame. So you'd render, say, 4 intermediary frames and composite those in to one display frame. These days that's not so popular, mostly because of the way graphics cards are designed. Instead, motion blur is usually done using the shaders on the card.
So why not just do more frames? Well for consoles, the big reason is the limits of TVs. NTSC TVs are 30fps, PAL TVs are 25fps. There is no increasing that rate. So blur becomes more important. Also you discover that when you are doing blur using shaders, you often get away with less processing power than you would to increase the frame rate. So you have a scene that you can render at X framse per second. To look real smooth, you need it rendered at 3*X FPS, but your hardware can't handle that, you'd need it 3 times as fast. However when you do a pretty good looking blur with the shaders the scene renders at 0.9*X, it's slower than the orignal, but looks so much better that it's worth it.
Now those are made up ratios, but that's the idea. For the forseeable future, motio blur will be more and more popular to smooth out fast motion in games.
I agree, I quite enjoy the odd 10-20 hour game, however, I rent them, never purchase.
... hundreds of hours later.
... bought it.
I rented Resident Evil 4 (PS2) last weekend and put about 5-10 hours into it and made it to the end of chapter 2. That cost me $5. I'll probably drop another $5 renting it for a weekend a couple more times and have spent $15/20 playing a $60 game.
Morrowind? I bought it. I bought every expansion. I'm still playing it
FFX? Not a perfect game, but lots of hours of entertainment and replayability
Short games are fine, but they're not going to sell as well when the rental market is as good as it is.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
What I did was I went next door to the grocery store and found what I wanted there.
I realize everyone has different expectations, but put it in prospective. Going to a movie costs anywhere from $8-$10 last I checked, for somewhere between 1.5-2.5 hours of entertainment.
That's close to the cost of a game that entertains you for 10 hours, and costs $50. Plus, the game has the benefit of being interactive, rather than something you just watch.
Or, you could buy the movie on DVD, for around $20. It's even more dollar per hour now. You do have the benefit of owning it, so you can rewatch it when you want, but that same arguement applies to games as well. You can replay it. And even the most linear games have the benefit of being somewhat different the second play through (IE, in Galaga, you'll probably not get blown up by the exact same insectoid ship at the exact point in time you did last time).
Come to think of it, they also kinda zoom in on your character so that he/she is bigger on your screen while the surroundings are blurring by... I like it, but perhaps it only works for snowboarding games...
Come and see the violence inherent in the system!
If I see a rocket move past me in three frames, I'm calling LAG!
"For a successful technology, honesty must take precedence over public relations for nature cannot be fooled." -Feynman
if you haven't gotten your xbox360 yet, here's a list of where you can buy them around the nation. Lots of Walmart locations. http://www.frappr.com/xbox360kiosks
I've got an even better, faster, and cheaper way to get XBox games to run - buy an XBox, which you can now purchase for less than half the price of the core system of the 360! This miraculous solution will even let you play *hundreds* of games that you won't get to on the 360!
Yeah, yeah, emulate an XBox on the PC you've already got, right...
I am soo sick of it. Please dont pretend it is not happening here. Same "talking points" same bullshit. After all they even said it in the newspaper about virulent (was it balmer in the interview which was posted on slash). I am not reading Xbox news anymore...cause it is nothing more then infomercial. And I also noticed some Xbox critics which are modded down for no good reason...
pleaaaaaase...you dont fool anyone here.
feel free to mod me down Xbox PR whores.
I really don't care about the next gen systems. I won't be purchasing any of them until they hit $200 USD. I simply can't justify spending that amount of money on what is essentially a toy.
Actually, it's a myth that films appear smooth. I can assure you that when you have even a moderately fast panning of the camera, the things appear rather jerky. If you compare a film shown in a regular theatre with the same film (digitally remastered or rendered again, if it's 3D animation) shown in IMAX (60Hz framerate), there is a large difference.
Next time you go to see a movie, pay attention to the pans.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
and now we are finding out the PS3's NVidia subsystem is in the 6800 Class of PC Cards, not even the current 7800s.
I loathe Sony, don't take this a fanboy comment, but where exactly is your source for this information? It sounds like one of those lovely unsubstantiated rumours, such as the former one about it being the 7800-range.
True dat. It's why filmmakers always do slow pans and zooms.
all i really care about until the ps3 comes out or some other good game is ridge racer
http://www.npcgaming.com Dedicated Gaming Servers
Slashdot has become nothing but a zest pool of MS haters period! You folks are unbelievable. You have no clue what is happening in the world around you whether its new technology or games. You live in the pre 1990 word where your perception of anything MS is windows 95 or windows 3.1. You haven't a clue how far MS is advancing unlike some of your so called hero's
No one is denying MS isn't an Angel, but tneither is any other large corporate entity including Google, SUN, Redhat etc. The fact is that Microsoft is making some incredible technology. The XBOX 360 is no exception, but hey, its amazing how much total hate can blind folks from the truth.
"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."
Now I am not an expert at photography but it is quite easy to either intentionally set a camera to capture a fast moving object as a frozen frame with no blur, or make the picture have said object be nothing but a blur of movement.
Something sounds wrong about your last sentence, but maybe I am just misunderstanding it. Are you saying that there is no way to photograph a moving object with out it blurring?
Well I've wrestled with reality for thirty five years doctor, and I'm happy to say I finally won out over it.
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
It is in general very hard to impossible to take a picture of an arbitrary moving object because the speed of the object may be faster than your fastest setting. For a normal scene where you want just a single shot, it would be possible to set it up, but sometimes the object may move faster than fastest settings. For example, the beating of the wings for insects or very small birds (hummingbirds) requires very fast cameras.
I was talking specifically about the movies, where the exposure is preset based upon the required framerate. 1/24second is not fast enough for lots of motion, which means that film has to have blur.
Sorry, I was thinking of the "film" as in taking a photograph.
Well I've wrestled with reality for thirty five years doctor, and I'm happy to say I finally won out over it.
All I see is a gaming system with better graphics. WOW.. Lets see something original.