So I went yesterday to a local shop to check on the ps3 machine on display. They are on sale here on the 23rd and every single shop has one demo you can play. A girl was playing Motorstorm and i found the image very crisp and detailed (it was right next to a 360, so you could compare them one on one). The gameplay seems very nice also. Now what dazzles me is that in this quest for more realism, you end up with curious choices. You have detailed motos and players that react independently, and than you have turfs of grass that don't give a s**t to what's going on track. The tires walk right through them as if they were on a fifth dimension. Why? Isn't interaction with the environment one of the most important things? It seemed to me so «in your face» that unnatural behaviour.

motorstorm is probably one the best games ive ever played graphic wise... when you play the game all the boards are visual eye candy.. online is fun too

I guess so. That's why that grass behaviour seemed so unnatural to me. The better the graphics, the more noticeable are this kinds of minor flaws. It's like you're watching some movie with real people walking and suddenly bugs bunny appears and walks by them like no one was there.

Anyone played this on a standard def television set? It looks okay... but nothing special. HD = WOW Pretty much cuts down a huge amount of the market by doing that unfortunately.

Inspite of what some people believe, the PS3 and XBox 360 have some (serious) limitations which prevent them from being much more than an XBox or PS2 with flashy graphics ... It is not that their technology is bad, but the ammount of processing power and memory required to create dramatically more realistic environments and smarter AI (than were availiable on the Dreamcast) is amazing ... If you took the state of the art Blade Server (with each blade having 4 quad core processors and tons of memory) which had dozens of blades you'd have a great deal of difficulty with realistically processing the physics of a grass field with wind ...

That's a thing people from Pixar always talk about, it's why they avoid trying to have more realistic computer rendered images, they say the closer to realism you get, the further away you are. You know we look at real life all day, we don't study it, so we really don't comprehend all the nuance of motion, but subconsciously there is so much going on that we pick up, and hence notice when it's not right. So I think for many years we'll still be able to tell the difference between real life and graphics. But for now it sure looks sweet. On a side note as pretty as Motorstorm is I think it fails on so many levels to capitalize on it's potential. The first crash I saw in the game was amazing, all the little pieces flying off, it really separated itself from Burnout Revenge's crashes. Then after three more crashes, they felt the same, so many pieces blow off and the steel carcass goes flying, they could have made this game the off-road version of Burnout(I'm not suggesting to copy, but it would have added depth to make accidents a part of the game play) Plus the games sense of speed is terrible compared to Excite Truck. Despite Excite Truck's bad graphics, after playing insanely fast and flying some 200-300 feet in the air, Motorstorm starts to feel boring. Especially when your car falls into a gap and you watch it crash and fall for what feels like an eternity. It's unfortunate when a games only standout point is being pretty. If I owned it I'd honestly only play it when people were over to show off the ps3's graphics, then I'd put it away and play something else.

Yea.. I doubt we will see grass physics until the Xbox 1080 and PS5.

exite truck is crazy fast!! That game is so much fun Does the speed of the game have anything to do with how many fps it is pushing out?? Exite truck = 60 fps Motorstorm = 30 fps

Thats one of the things I find disconcerting about GTHD. Sure it looks amazing, but the people in the crowds are either motionless or walk about in a very jerky, robotic manner. It's one of these things thats always annoyed me about games is animations, especially when they're poorly stitched together. This takes me out of the experience when I see a character turn on a dime or when a persons feet clip the ground.

you're obviously not a real racer! any real racer would keep his eyes on the road! jk