This looks good... but the color palette is not gritty/real enough for my tastes (the previous CGI shots/video really are a contrast). The big thing will be how the lighting looks in the game when in motion. So I will reserve judgement until then (mainly because the pictures, less scaling the wall, make the game look flatter than it is). I have never been to interested in SC, although the games have been excellent and this should play great.

Fakes! The inks still wet.

Yep. I think this should be said on thread about such games. Wake me when a Next-Gen exclusive game designed from the ground up with hardware in hand from day 1 appears.

I have taken the time to translate.Translation: We did not have time to build a new engine, seeing as MS gave us beta kits in Augest and we want to release in 2006. Also, seeing as 98% of console gamers are on older consoles it makes absolutely no fiscal sense to create an engine/gameplay that cannot be ported/codeveloped.Very lean, as in optimized for the Xbox... but we plan to splash a ton of graphic goodies on top of the DX8 XBox design ala HL2.So mean it will make you cry!Yes, having 8x the system memory tends to do that--especially if the GPU *really* can do 125M polys a second! (tongue in cheek snear at NV2A)Yes, you heard that right! Since it is an old engine on new hardware we decided to actually turn on some lights!You know, because, like, no game before the 360 had snow or dustYep, totally designed (like how Doom 3's missions were totally re-designed for the Xbox1) -- on the old Chaos Engine!Yes, because when we use game design philosphies and engines engineered to run smoothly on a P3 733MHz with 64MB of memory and a GF3 level GPU -- and then slap it on a system about on par with a high end PC -- well, you can really crank up the view distance!Yes, so when we took this older engine, we maxed out all the settings and then designed the game around the maxed out settings on the old engine.

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Ok, maybe I am being a little too hard. The game looks good and clean -- HD, high res textures, some nice lighting in areas. And they probably are not using the Xbox1 engine, but the SM3.0 engine that appeared last year. That said it is still a multi-platform release using an old engine.

Think HL2. HL2 is a DX7 game. Crank it down to DX7 and check it out--looks good, just missing all the bells and whistles. Slap on these nice effects--that really look nice but don't impact gameplay nor are they really "base" technologies in whcih the art is built/designed around--and walla!

Basically it looks like a high end PC game. Not bad mind you, but this is the 360--it is closed box and not constrained by the laggers with GF4 Ti4200 GPUs!

As MS said last year: It is up to MS to lead developers. They did a good job with PGR3 of raising the bar. GRAW, from UBI, looks to be another title that aims for a high standard. FRN3, graphically, from EA likewise attacked it.

So it will happen, but I think what most are seeing is that we wont be seeing "next gen" until late 2006, and no console dedicated games until 2007. I have heard this from developers themselves, I have been saying it for a while. Fiscally, if you read the Publishers reports, they don't expect to fully transition to Next Gen until 2007.

Basically we get NICE upgraded titles plus a few real gems in there that impress. Better something than nothing, but I will be glad when we read,

"We did our first title for the 360 launch window and really got to see what the hardware did. After we got the title out we spent a couple months really pushing the dev kit seeing where the bottlenecks were. Our lead programmers got up a basic rendering and animation system, made target specs, we then produced some art boards for art direction for the engine we were to build and THEN we began developing the game... it took us 24+ months to get it done, but we really hit the 360 hard".

That sounds much better than "Remember guys, this is a multi generational, multi console port. They are doing a lot of custom work to it but underneath the frame is the same as all the others. "

That said graphics are only 1 equation in a game. I am not sure many of us will complain with a high end PC looking game that ROCKS in gameplay. :D