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Heavy Rain Previews Show Promise
As the February release date for Quantic Dream's Heavy Rain nears, several publications have gotten a chance for some hands-on time with the game and seem to be intrigued by what they saw. Quoting the Opposable Thumbs blog: "The game grabs you during the quiet moments where nothing 'happens.' When you look at a picture your child drew. When you're questioning someone about a crime. When you're trying to figure out how to react to a violent situation. The preview we were sent put me in different situations as I played a small handful of characters, and each one provided a few tiny moments that were surprising in terms of storytelling or subtlety." Eurogamer's previewer had a similar reaction: "To my great delight as well — Heavy Rain isn't a mature game because it has unhappy families and moody lighting, it's a mature game because it anticipates an adult response from the player and is prepared to receive it."
The PS3's complete graphical dominance over the Xbox 360 comes from:
1. Blu-Ray's 25/50 gig storage format versus the Xbox 360's 3.5/7 gig DVD format
2. The insane power of the Broadband Engine(Cell)'s SPUs for cranking through obscene amounts of lighting, animation, physics, transform, or even image buffer calculations
3. The split memory architecture. The RSX side of the PS3 can be cranking away at pixel pushing and (relatively)static vertex transforms while the Cell side of the PS3 can be cranking away at game logic, physics, and pre-rasterize graphics calculations. So you have both sides PS3 running at maximum efficiency without fighting over the same bus. And then within the Broadband Engine the absurdly fast ring bus piping data between the SPUs allow them to crank away in parallel through massive amounts of data
The 360 is just a desktop PC in a console case. It is gimped with the smaller than last gen DVD format, only 10 megs of edram that is too small for a 720p 4xAA frame buffer, and a poorly designed memory architecture. Not really surprising given that Microsoft has no internal competence in console hardware design and they 360 was rushed out the door after Microsoft was forced to pull the plug early on the first Xbox.