What exactly does the fact shes a woman or what games shes reviewed before have to do with this review, if you want an xbox fanboy opinion go read kotakus' review, ill take hers over theirs any day.

Which given you do not own the platform to play the game on means very little in fairness.

Well the TV analogy is a tad flawed, because as I said, I'm not saying you need to rid yourself of the 360, or discard any notion of buying one. You can only subscribe to one cable service. You can own both HD consoles. In any case I don't see how what I said would be interpretted to mean PS3 has a greater quantity of 720p+ games. The debates and discussions around graphics have always been about quality not quanitity. Your first reply was the first time I've ever seen a relative quantification of native HD games between PS3 and 360.

Having said that I accept that a better phrasing would have been "HD console graphics whore" to make it more clear that it's the graphics part not the HD part that's the main subject.

Readers please consider my firt post to be amended according to the above sentence.

It's not my opinion that PS3 has better graphics capability than 360 that I'm reflecting upon. My opinion on that subject is completely worthless because I have no technical expertise upon which to make an educated judgement; and almost no presonal experience of the 360 to make an informed judgement. It's my observation that the general industry consensus is beginning to settle on that point of view. If my observation is wildly off base I'm more than happy to be corrected. I am looking for objectivity here, which is hard to get in this industry.

MikeB said: @ Booh! Remedy couldn't overcome the limits of the xbox360 I want to add Remedy is a great developer, IMO Alan Wake's technical flaws and weaknesses are primarily due to XBox 360's technical limitations. As I said before Alan Wake looks like a solid single player experience, if the 360 was the only HD console out there it would sit on the top of my wishlist for this year. If the short campaign and darkness doesn't bother you too much and you like this sort of game, IMO [360 owners] buy the game and support these great developers.

I'm not so sure about that, the second part specificaly. It's important to take in account that Alan Wake had a custom built X360 engine like one of the few games out there and certainly the newest. If Gears 2 still looks better than AW with UE 2.5 which is old and multiplatform, than it seems to me like someone didn't outdone themselves. I still think we'll see more impressive games on the Xbox, than the current library (well it's about time, 2 years and counting) and personally AW seems like an unfinished business.

aragod said: MikeB said: @ Booh! Remedy couldn't overcome the limits of the xbox360 I want to add Remedy is a great developer, IMO Alan Wake's technical flaws and weaknesses are primarily due to XBox 360's technical limitations. As I said before Alan Wake looks like a solid single player experience, if the 360 was the only HD console out there it would sit on the top of my wishlist for this year. If the short campaign and darkness doesn't bother you too much and you like this sort of game, IMO [360 owners] buy the game and support these great developers. I'm not so sure about that, the second part specificaly. It's important to take in account that Alan Wake had a custom built X360 engine like one of the few games out there and certainly the newest. If Gears 2 still looks better than AW with UE 2.5 which is old and multiplatform, than it seems to me like someone didn't outdone themselves. I still think we'll see more impressive games on the Xbox, than the current library (well it's about time, 2 years and counting) and personally AW seems like an unfinished business.

Gears of War 2 does not do 'proper' anti-aliasing (and like Alan Wake does not do 'proper' HDR neither), however Alan Wake features good anti-aliasing, this is the primary reason why they are rendering in sub-HD. Probably they could have gone for 720p with less anti-aliasing but one has to consider the quality of used assets, if this quality is not high enough from an end product perspective it can make more sense to render in Sub-HD and try to smoothen things afterwards.

Gears of War 2 may look more detailed, Alan Wake is however a very different game. I can imagine Gears re-using assets a lot more than Alan Wake. If you need more varierty in your assets and lack enough disc capacity to do this you have to resort to lower quality assets to fit the disc.

I hope this provides some insight on why people may be comparing apples to oranges if they want to compare Gears of War 2 to Alan Wake with regard to graphics.

@MikeB: Why don't you explain to us what makes other games have 'proper' HDR and why AW is lacking?

@ NightAntilli

The only disc based XBox 360 game to feature 'proper' HDR (like Eurogamer / Digital Foundry refers to this) is Halo 3. That game renders in Sub-HD and completely lacks anti-aliasing.

Uncharted: Drake's Fortune achieved proper HDR, 720p and anti-aliasing on the PS3 by off loading some GPU related tasks to the Cell processor. With God of War 3 the developers moved anti-aliasing to the Cell processor for superior results with MLAA (the Cell is far more flexible than a GPU, hence the superior quality).

On the PS3, the Cell processor is the key to achieve still massive gains in the future, but not specifically for just improved rendering (it is an important aspect for enabling future stereoscopic 3D games with good results though).

@MikeB: You're just preaching on how great the PS3 is and "tha powa of tha cellz". You didn't explain anything. And besides, there hasn't been a digital foundry analysis on Alan Wake yet.

@ NightAntilli

Well, just re-read the question. It doesn't get more straightforward:

What makes other games have 'proper' HDR and why AW is lacking?


Notice the words what and why. Is the lighting of UC2 (or any other game PS3 game you wanna put in here) 128-bit while AW is 16-bit? Or is UC2 FP16 while AW is FP10? What?

Note that I made up those numbers, I myself have no idea what they really are.. But, that's the kind of detail I'm looking for. Since I don't know, and you apparently do, I would like some light in this darkness, figuratively speaking...