Late Night Consoling

what does 360 mean ?

sorry microsoft, nintendo wrote the book on false demands. and that was when nobody cared enough about videogames to um care. they still do it all the time (kirby gba?) but i don't think they pulled it much with consoles. (a stupid idea anyways)

Kojima needs to be working on another Zone of the Enders game.

The second one was so fucking awesome, with the exception of one fight.

I tried out a 360 today at EB Games, and I can see where both sides of the whole it sucks/it rocks argument are coming from.

The first thing I noticed was that the display they were using (a Samsung unit) had the contrast set far too high and the brightness was toned down some - as a result, things that were dark were REALLY dark and it threw off the whole asthetic experience. That being said, it definately was running at 720p, which certainly gave it a very clean image.

The textures thrown around in Kameo and King Kong are definately leagues ahead of what you're seeing from an Xbox, however they're nothing new for anyone running a half-way decent PC. Kong looked especially good up close, and his 'fur' splines et. al. were well done (however I had to try a few times to get a good look - see above). The T-Rex I was fighting was another story. He looked rather unimpressive, sporting a far lower polygon count than I had hoped. As for Kameo, I was less than impressed with Kameo's (the character) polygon count (far too many hard edges and sharp point for a main character in a next-gen game), yet pretty much every other model shown looked great. I do have an issue with the specular highlighting used in the fortress demo level - it made the ground seem as if it was covered with slime or made from plastic - pretty much the DooM 3 treatment.

The controller fit well into my hands, and as I have had experience with the original Xbox controller-S I knew exactly what I was doing with this guy.

After trying each game out for a while, I watched a couple of the videos they preloaded for the system showcasing their upcoming games. PGR3, as expected, looks great - HOWEVER I was quite dissapointed that the shadows shown had z-buffer issues (where you get intervals cut out of the shadow where the z-buffer didn't have any information). Amped3 looks like an Xbox 1 game with slightly better character models and snow effects, but a greatly improved view distance and LOD along with a far crisper image.

The video for Ghost Recon looked amazing. I do hope that the level of quality shown is achievable ingame.

In all it looks like the system has a lot of potential but nothing that really showcases it for the moment.

Anyone else think in car racing as presented in pgr3 is a gimmick. I prefer the bumper can cuz you can see how your exactly turning on the road.

This Wall Street Journal article also mentions some of the issues MS have been encountering getting the 360 out:
http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB113227316117900733-Ii1Btd6V5mUVW_WMjTwpajE2_G4_20061117.html?mod=tff_main_tff_top

Last month, on a 5 p.m. conference call with their China-based colleagues, Mr. Holmdahl's team discovered one factory wasn't producing at the level Microsoft needed to hit its holiday season forecast. Alarmed, Mr. Holmdahl soon led a team of engineers to China, where he found that certain test equipment was bogging down as production speeded up. Ten hard days of troubleshooting and writing new software ultimately fixed the problem, Mr. Holmdahl says. "We were really able to crank up the volume," he says.

The gamestop near me took 250 pre-orders and will only get 30 units.. yea MS did that on purpose.. right.

Some interesting Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence] info summarized below from where I had found it. The actual site where the info is from, including info on the multiplayer types and stages, is here:

http://www.konami.jp/gs/game/mgs3_sub/english/index.html

3 DVD set

1st DVD will be the main game with some tweaks such as the 3rd person camera mode along with new difficulty sets: Super Duper Easy and European Extreme; a third person camera view is added, offering a camera that is 'lower to the ground' than the high flying version usually found in the games

2nd DVD will have the multiplayer goodness along with Duel Mode for bosses, a Secret Theater mode featuring the funny cinematics that were created in-game by the MGS team for the official site, and it includes the original Metal Gear and Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake (!)

3rd one will be the cinematics of the game provided for people that are just interested in the story and are finding the game difficult to get through.

It looks like it's slated to come out in Japan on the 22nd of December and from Gamestop's release schedule, looks slated for the States...next year in March. Man, that's a long wait.

Is it just me or does the guy in the lower Screen shot of Mage Knight look like a ninja turtle... More specifically Raphael)

So who else has seen Kong running on a 360 demo kit or some of the newer screenshots? for the longest time the only shots were from the standard platforms with the lower res art content, but now with the new screenshots here: http://www.gamespot.com/xbox360/action/kingkong/screenindex.html and what I saw at Best Buy the other day, I'm absolutely floored. I loved the demo, I love the 360 controller, and now with the art I've seen for this version it's definitely my platform of choice.

Then I get sad thinking this is what BG&E2 could look like :(

So let me get this straight... Hirofumi Matsuoka makes games. And he's making games for Nintendo. But we don;t know what. How is this news? You lost me Chris.

:P

Anyone picked up Infected for the PSP. Your thoughts?

Just got my %10 discount card from Target, and I now know my first purchase I'll make with it.

Question about resident evil 4.... how can the gamecube be much better....

It seems like it dont have progressive scan, while the ps2 version has progressive and widescreen.

Remo, how do you contradict the tinfoil hat set?

im going to post this everynight in LNC until my thirst is satisfied (which will be never!):

more ace combat zero news pls :(

I'm surprised this hasn't been mentioned already, but Hideo Kojima and Frank Miller are collaborating to make a PSP game (maybe it's the same one?) called Metal Gear Solid: BD. It's apparently more of an slideshow comic made for the PSP. There's some more info at http://www.metalgearsolid.org

Link: http://www.computerandvideogames.com/quicksearch/index.php?id=7980

Ok honestly.

Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan! is the best game I have played in years.

The japanes win at video games. Period.

Cool! I enjoyed the Wario minigame series on the GB/DS! Can't wait to see what the developer does for the Revolution.

Whoa.. when is this mage knight coming out?

DAMN YOU DS AND YOUR GAMES!