It doesnt matter what happens with Bungie now. Microsoft owns the rights to the Halo brand, hence why Halo wars is coming out. Ensemble is a 1st party brand, something which Bungie is no longer and took a back seat. Now Bungie is magically inspired to make another Halo game after watching ensemble studios do so well with their title. Halo is still a FIRST PARTY game. Microsoft by now most likely owns the rights to Gears as well. A second party developer isnt always tied to a company by ownership...they can also be tied to them contractually for said title IE:Gears. I could never imply complete ownership, because they are still selling Unreal multiplat.

I am still highly confident that Sony is convinced that the best way to make people like KZ2 is by giving them a pleasent surprise.
We know there will be 11 levels in the final game, but we have only seen 1 level so far, so I think Sony are holding back on the other ones just so people can be wow'ed by this game again, once it releases.

Killzone 2 is a more technically sound game.

Gears 2 looks good ,but pretty similar to Gears 1.

I think gears 2 looks better, who knows how "touched up" the stuff we have seen of kz2 is? Untill I see kz2 running on ps3 hardware, I wont believe how good it looks or doesn't.

I think Gears2 (or at least Gears1) uses many tricks to look as good as it does. If you look closely other games and Killzone2 have far more details and many of the great Gears2 effects are for example background images.

I mean it still looks amazing, good tricks are also important

But if you look at the screenshots:

http://uk.xbox360.ign.com/dor/objects/14232680/gears-of-war-2/images/gears-of-war-2-20080714001316563.html?page=mediaFull

It looks amazing but not much of that is actually 3D graphic

http://uk.xbox360.ign.com/dor/objects/14232680/gears-of-war-2/images/gears-of-war-2-20080714001320188.html?page=mediaFull

Characters look pretty cool but its hard to make out little details, everything looks so flowing together. Perhaps some higher textures instead of more shader effects would make that easier.

http://uk.xbox360.ign.com/dor/objects/14232680/gears-of-war-2/images/gears-of-war-2-20080707034713224.html?page=mediaFull

And if you look at the actual 3D structures it looks very nice but not that outstanding.
I am a friend of clear, sharp images so I would give the nod to Killzone2 but Gears2 really looks like a render movies at times so its also a worthy contender.

ummm Killzone 2 easily looks better because of the PS3 tech but to show i'm not fanboyish it's probably gonna suck as a game if it's anything like the first one....

R2 and GeOW 2 graphics are great but.....

KZ2 have CGI like graphics. This screen shot is from multi-player . GeOW 2 with just 10 players and still look way worse in terms of graphics details.

Lol, you do realize that the game has been tried by several gamesites, running on actual PS3 hardware, right?

So I'll just point you to the video Griffin already posted:

http://www.gamersyde.com/stream_8142_en.html

Yea, but then we will have a whole new debate.

What looks better Gears 3 on the 360, or Gears 3 on the PS3?

Gears 3 on the xbox1080 will look awesome