This is where the Blu-Ray disc really starts to shine, The 360 and PS3 may be on level playing field processor-wise. But because of Blu-Ray and its 25gb per layer disc, PS3 has more potential to make the games bigger, and better looking without compromising the game length/graphics.

I believe that we have been seeing this with recent games, 360 developers often lower the game resolution so they can fit the game onto a 4.5gb per layer disc.

For Example, Alan Wake had the potential to make the resolution 720p, but its assumed either they got lazy (unlikely for a game that has been in development for 4 years) or they couldn't find a way to fit the game onto a single 9gb dual layered disc without shortening the game (thankfully they didn't), so they reduced the game's resolution.

For another example, Final Fantasy XIII, which I think was handled better, Square Enix split the game onto 3 dual-layered discs, although the game's resolution was 576p (instead of the 720p on the PS3 version), the game wasn't drastically different form the PS3 version.

I think in the near future most 360 games will be made on more than one disc.

its not the engine only, the console's Design has to do with alot of the limitations which is obvious . 10 mig ofEDRAM is not enough for a 720p picture with 4X AA and to be honest i dont understand why the hell would M$ promote it's console being able so?!, tons of games dropped the AA for the 720p sake , Alan wake's approach was the exact opposite 4x AA with sub-HD ,it was uneccesery and a big waste of resources and what was the final result? 540p 40% less detail than what was suppose the game look like!

You clearly havent seen how good Alan Wake looks. The atmosphere is mind blowing.

when epic stops improving on the unreal engine?

Lol. That's probably true

From my knowledge the resolution of a game has absolutely nothing to do with disc space, only the resolution(and overall quality) of pre-rendered video is limited by the space on a disc. The resolution in the current HD consoles is mostly memory limited. The advantage that the PS3 has of the X360 is that evey PS3 comes with a hard drive(opposed to 360's arcade version), so developers can use part of that space as additional memory(like the virtual memory used by PC's). Since the memory in the current HD systems is shared by the entire system, making room by moving certain system processes to the hard drive makes more memory available in the graphics department.

Besides this Blu-Ray does allow for more information streaming from the disc, but again this has nothing to do with image resolution.

I have played the game, the lighting and the folige movment and fog are nice i will give you that but the rest is MEH  especially those odd animations.

The X360 is far from maxed. The only thing holding it back is the ease to program for it.. Now that mind sound weird, but, the SDK MS has provided for developers allow for games to look good enough without heavy optimization. No developer is putting a lot of effort of bringing the power of the X360 to the table. There are barely any 1st party developers, and you can't expect that from 3rd parties. Optimization is based on reducing the amount of code as much as possible to perform the same instructions faster. Performing them faster frees up some process time, allowing for more code to be processed. This is rarely done on the X360, and even so, they rarely use (let alone optimize) some parts/features of the hardware, like tessellation unit, VMX unit and MEMEXPORT. Hell even tiling is rarely used.

This guy Night, he knows his stuff.

Most 3rd party devs are making their multi-plat engines and making compromises to port games across 2 (sometimes 3) platforms.

 You get fantastic games like Uncharted 2, Killzone 2, GoW3, because those are first party developers who use all of the available tools at their disposal. MS has like 4-5 1st party devs compared to Sony's 20?

And whoever said Alan Wake had reduced resolution to fit onto a DVD is truely wrong on every level. According to Remedy and Digital Foundary the game EASILY fit onto a dual layer DVD. With 2.3gb of data being the gameplay itself and an additional 3.2gb being the videos. Remedy know how to make a game and compress it well. The resolution was for performance reasons. Having more storage doesnt magically give you better graphics.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-alan-wake-game-data-blog-entry

And yeah Halo: Reach looks wicked (and best gameplay wise since Halo:CE)

2005 - 2010 pick your year and a douchebag will say it.