I was randomly browsing and drooling over Metal Gear solid 4 the other day at gametrailers, and I stumbled across this video which was posted in 2005 o.O; http://www.gametrailers.com/player/8346.html

The graphics in this video, are beyond insane, and they have this sort of clarity that I've never really seen in a video game. The recent bulids however don't really look anything like that, not worse per say, but they don't have that near-real spark to them. Did they stop using this for some reason I'm un-aware of?  

Snakes face looks plastic on this video :(

I've seen better, but you know that was when the cell had powerz. That was probably when Konami thought more of the ps3 in terms of graphics. They even said that they weren't able to bring out what they hoped for in terms of graphics, but had to downgrade them.

I don't know the main difference seems to be the "blur" when things move quickly and much more sand in the air. Otherwise new trailers look pretty similar IMO.

I could see the blur to become annoying in actual gameplay though and I would like to see one of the walkers in new trailers. They were really awesome.

But yes the old trailer was a masterpiece.

Almost every modern video game with expected high end visuals, starts out with as a pre rendered movie that is the target they think they can achieve. It was probably not made in real time with the engine.

Halo did it, and it never looked as good.

Motor Storm did it, and it never looked as good.

Motor Storm 2 (or whatever it’s called) did it, and we will see how good it looked in the end

I am sure all the FF stuff we have seen have been pre-renders as well.

It’s just part of the marketing engine used today in the video game industry.

It's funny that it says "Forget Pre-rendered Stuff!" when the movie obviously is pre-rendered.

Konami lying punks.

Kojima Productions were probably using their early "theoretical PS3 specs" engine on that early TGS trailer, but had to find out the hard way that they didn't have enough to time code along the lines of the real system specs to reach their goals or get 100% efficiency out of the PS3. Either way, I don't see much difference between that trailer and gameplay videos now except the fact that the 05 TGS trailer had razor sharp character models.

That early trailer was run on dev kits(super computers)before the final specs of the PS3 came in so they had to downgrade the final version.I guess this is what Kojima meant by wanting to achieve more with MGS 4.