That link showed... not even a scene, just a zoomed out view from a point in development... hardly a finished game. By that logic, Sony finished KZ2 in 2005.

You do realise Alan Wake isn't released yet? And that when it is released U2 will have been out for 1 year. It's the natural progression of the console generation.

To bolded: Not that amazing really. Compression is pretty advanced these days, but what really takes up space is the number and variety of textures used. For instance, Crysis is still the most graphically advanced game out, yet only takes up 6Gb HDD which could easily fit onto one of the 360 DVDs. The fact is most of the environments are very similar so they could repeat a lot fo the textures. On the other hand, a game like MGS4 which is less advanced graphically, has far more variety in environments and as such requires far more storage space.

to say the truth about Crisis
It may be the technical king and I m not challenging your point (I just agree)

but, OMG, this game is so blank, it is really just an update version of Farcry with insanely average settings (a blank island)

yes, you can "kill trees" ... wow, amazing ...

Lol. Yeah, it kinda was a very "samey" game although I preffered it to Far Cry.

I am looking forward to Crysis 2 though as I think they had some nice ideas in 1 that were hindered by the repeating enivronment and can be massively improved upon.

FAIL Microsoft. To design a console that is capable of 4xAA and not being able to show it in games.

I hope that Alan and Reach won't be the last games that will use 4xAA on X360.

That is pre-rendered. Also they do use the fog to cover details in that. Look at the trees in back. Basically just an outline of trees. Cant see any details. 

I'm just saying that instead of going for PR pieces you should delve a bit more deeply in the technical side of things before starting a technical argumentation. The embedded eDRAM is a great addition, but it doesn't offer "everything for free" in many real use cases. Once again, Google for it and you'll find the exact references.

And you're wrong about KZ2. Google for it and you'll find that they're actually doing a supersampling Quincunx. Which also falls in the category of MSAA techniques. It's not like there's a switch between just two ways to perform AA. On PC games you'll often find a plug-in system for antaliasing resorting to very standard techniques because it has to run on a variety of hardware, where on consoles you code "close to the metal" and tend to employ less standard techniques, more tweaked to your precise goal. As such your repeated appeals to PC game settings make little sense: there's not such thing as "the" MSAA technique but a whole molteplicity of them and they won't always give better results than Quincunx or edge detection/blur, depending on things such as other post effects.

In your third paragraph you once again state something (the bolded) that is untrue in general, true in cases that don't put together resolutions of 720p / 10 bit hdr / 32bit z-buffer. It was a godsend for many multiplatform games and engines, allowing indeed a "free"  and quick MSAA on the 360.

Such is not the case when you want more complex setups. Which is why Halo 3 is sub-hd (they wanted their HDR over the resolution) or why quoting Remedy:

I'm pretty sure you'll be very happy with our shipping solution. We hate dithering and aliasing just as much as you I think. Hardware 4xAA on the Xbox360 is nice for a lot of things - it did take us a while to get the most out of it (E.g, refactoring the renderer quite a few times).

Shadow aliasing doesn't really have anything to do with the generic framebuffer resolution or aliasing quality, but having the game run with 4xAA in the framebuffer is kind of rubbing in any other visual quality problems there might be.

Please note that there's no mention of getting anything "for free" in this case. Actuallywe hear about them having to redesign their renderer around it. As always when someone wants to get the most out of a console there was a lot of work in overcoming the limitations of the hardware. That's the case with the PS3, using SPEs for pixel-processing when it makes sense. That's the case with the 360, designing your engine to use the limited 10MB of eDRAM to its best. A totally different scenario from the "free" AA that many quick and dirty engine jobs indeed got, but with much less interesting final overall results.

And btw, the second part of the Remedy guy's answer should be a hint of what others already told you: shadow aliasing has nothing to do with the framebuffer AA. It's about how shadows are calculated on the surfaces they hit, not about how they are translated to the pixel grid. And it's a whole different issue from what you employ full sceen AA for.

Finally, can you please links to factual evidence that:

1) Alan Wake will employ full-screen 4xMSAA ( the quotes I myself reported don't say that, as they may be talking about 4xAA on specific tiles)

2) it's the first ever console game to do so, ie all other games people mentioned such as Heavenly Sword are not doing 4xMSAA (I got the notion that HS does 1280x720 4xMSAA from the pixel-counters threads at Beyond3D)

@SHarky 54: How do you know it's pre-rendered? Doesn't seem pre-rendered to me. Too many graphical glitches, and at the end, the player seems to be controlling the camera. But, yeah, trees that are basically a mile away are never very detailed, since those are basically the most resource intensive objects you can render. A lot of games simply don't include vegetation/foliage at all, stream them in later, or use simplified models, even up close.

Fog does help vegetation look better, however, the fog in AW is not hiding so many details that you can't see what's far away, unlike a lot of other games. Not at daytime anyway. At night time, to some degree, yeah, but, it's night time.. You're not supposed to see details of everything far away lol. Guess that's a bit convenient for them xD Though you can always still see the light from the lighthouse for example, and still you can see a lot of vegetation.. Even far away trees. I'm not saying the fog doesn't hide anything, but why would it make sense for them to use volumetric fog instead of distance fog if volumetric fog uses way more resources, if their goal was to hide imperfections? They could've used the resources for volumetric fog to increase far away detail.. I personally think it was a choice to have a great atmosphere.. Not necessarily that the fog's main purpose is to hide details.

@Selnor: "Then theres the 2nd to utilize EDRam this year. Reach boasts 720p, 30 FPS and 4xMSAA on entire image. But more impressively is what that free chip allows the devs to add to the rest of the game, 60+AI + Vehicles + flying = most impressive fights in an FPS on consoles."

Where did you get that info from? Halo Reach runs at 1152x720 instead of 1152x640, which is the case for Halo 3. It's better but not 1280x720 which everyone will think when you say 720p.
Reach doesn't even have Anti-aliasing at all. They have improved post-processing so the jaggies are less noticeable, but still no "4xMSAA on entire image".

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-halo-reach-alpha-analysis-blog-entry

If 4xMSAA was as free as selnor believe, every 360 games would have been sampled like that since the first year of the console. It's not even free in 720p with 2x...That's why a lot of games have been sub hd this generation (95% of multiplat are lead on 360 since the beginning). U can get a 2xaa ALMOST free in sub hd resolution with the Xenos. Not much more without heavy penalties.

4xMSAA is a different scenario and not free at all, u try that kind of tiling on very light/or predictable engine rendering (sports games, remake,..) that's why i highly doubt Alan wake will perform that kind of sampling, and it wouldn't be a bad thing to me. Remedy has talented graphic artists. I would prefer see them fixing the low res buffer for all atmospherics (looks very odd to me on pics and vids so far)

Heavenly sword was kind of an achievement, but they also had to use a special HDR space (nao32) to limit the framebuffer size, even on PS3, who doesn't really have a physical limitations on framebuffer size (u just crunch on your available memory pool for general rendering, other engine loops, etc..)

Anyway, sampling is not the only important thing, it's part of whole. The way graphist works with their color space, the visual homogeneity, contrast balancing, color correction, can be way more important than sampling a lot to get something really clean. Shaders are also very important, AF and many other things (even LOD). Getting a good IQ is a very complex thing and not limited to one feature like AA.