Xbox vs. 360: To HD or not to HD

The 360 looks better, no surprise there. I can't, however, say that the 360 blows the xbox completely out of the water.

sigh. obviously the xbox360 has better graphics than the original box - we all know that. what would have been more useful is a comparison of 360@480i vs 360@720p/1080i, for it is one thing to shell out $400 for a new system: another thing to tack on two grand for a new television.

See the problem is the developers had to push out these games for the 360 because what’s a console with out games to play.

So you take a beastly system, and give crappy games and this is what you get. On paper the 360 is awesome, powered up and running it’s got loads of potential as an on-demand online video device, and a bridge between your pc and your living room. BUT I really think the developers (the big ones at least) decided to push these out just to make $$ on the launch and to create a presents for themselves on the next gen consoles to say we been there since launch.

I own four of the launch games, Perfect Dark/Call of Duty/Need For Speed and Kameo (I wont even get into how disappointing that Zelda wannabe game is it can have its own blog!) , the same day I got the Xbox 360 I got battlefield 2 Special Forces. After playing the 360 for the last few days on both a pc LCD and a sick HDTV (call of duty2 and perfect dark zero/ nfs most wanted) I can see that Battlefield 2 SF is a better game then all of them. Although comparing bf2 to need for speed isn’t fair. When u compare it to the other fps it has way better game play, better online (bf2’s 64 players vs 8on8 (how next gen is that?) PDZ/Call of Duty2 (which is SLOWWY for some reason on top of the fact that I cant play them co-op on live or play split screen on live I mean what gives how come Halo 2’s xbox live setup is superior to this why don’t they just standardize it and make it exactly like halo2 you can’t even join parties in call of duty2 its so annoying to play with other people online I find myself playing the single player campaign with a voice chat on with one of my friends playing something else) note battlefield 2 is also a single threaded game, just developed much better. So why should I want to play any 360 lanuch game when pc games are still superior in terms of game play. I mean I find myself now having to pick between play bf2 online and play perfect dark zero(but after dropping a total of around $1400 for this new 360 console+hdtv) I shouldn’t have to choose because the 360 is supposed to be the next big thing I mean isn’t that all I should be wanting to play, instead I find myself playing a $29 expansion to a game I bought a year ago.

Granted playing 360 on a HDTV is nice but what if you don’t have one, the last time I check most people don’t. When I first got the console I decided to load it up using my 17 inch PC LCD monitor as sort of a bastard HDTV, but I was playing call of duty 2 on the same screen as I was for the PC and the 360 version look the same enough for me to not really notice any difference really, I mean yes the textures/fps are higher and maybe some of the volumetric stuff looks nicer on the 360 but the core elements are the same. This is what I call a poor attempt to capitalize on existing games.
I mean come on the all of the launch games aren’t even multi-threaded, this is like watching the last generation of single threaded games for the ps2/xbox/cube crowd getting ported to 360. Once developers start coding for multi-threads the games you will see a jump in the quality, look and play of the games. All these launch games were nothing more then scaled up Xbox 1 games put out to satisfied the launch demand.

A perfect example is gear of war this game looks so good the epic was smart enough to delayed it so that they could go in and rework the SDK with real Xbox 360s to test on so they could enable multi-threading and speed up everything to make the GAMEPLAY of the console one of a kind. Which is what will make this game a “killer app” for the 360 and what perfect dark wishes it could be. They were smart enough to realize that if they put out a crappy port like ID/Actvision did with Quake 4/Call of duty 2 the gamers would be disappointed about the 360.
And the HDTV does make a difference but if you look around you can find excellent tv’s out there that do the job and are under $1000 dollars.

I bought a nice Samsung 30 in HDTV for really good price its the last of the CRT slimTV designs its got 1080i/720p built in HD tuner and 4 channel BBE sound chip, it has contrast ratio of 5000:1 (way better then the 550:1 lcd monitor I was playing originally) and I got it for less then $800 from PC Richards. The only downside is that it weights 120 lbs but its is only 16 inches depth (“hence the slim TV”) So if you look you can find them. But again I think we are only at the foothills of the mountain that is the Xbox 360 in terms of the games that are going to come out for this thing. Just imagine what this consoles 4th or 5th generation game will look like running on all six threads considering that the 4th gen version of Xbox games look about as good as the 1st gen 360 games..

Just wait 6 months and let the developers catch up to the hardware.

Woh dude. Try using a little more punctuation. That was too long, and got very confusing at times. I skipped the second half, as it started giving me a headache.

Joe I appreciate your well-balanced comments. My take is I'm quite happy and content just playing my 360. It just gets me more excited about the next round of games and what developers can really do once they get the hang of the hardware and not have to rush things for a launch. That being said, I'm having a great time playing NFS: Most Wanted and Condemned on my 50" HD setup. To me, the graphics looks alot better, crisper and more vibrant than my old Xbox hooked up to the same TV with component cables. While this article was good I feel you don't need a 360 right away until you have a proper HD tv to go with it. It makes a BIG DIFFERENCE.

thats what happens where your writing ASP code while posting. Punctuation was never my strong point.

To #2, there was another Gamespot article that I believe contains the information you're looking for:

http://www.gamespot.com/features/6139690/index.html

#7 that is definitely a more useful article, thanks :) it's a little moot (for me) though, because I *do* have an HDTV, and *don't* have a 360 :)

I totally agree with joe about the xbox live on call of duty 2 and pdz absolutely SUCKING ASS compared to the xbox live of halo2. They should standardize it so that all games play like halo2, and I keep finding myself putting in the halo2 disk in my 360, even if its just for the wireless controlers. I don't have an hdtv, just an old 27 inch my old boss gave me that makes weird buzzing noises, but the games still pwn the graphics of the regular xbox.

Most of those games are EA and as some have mentioned, they rushed the games out. Wait for the next rush of games from developers. I'm happy that some developers changed their release dates to the holiday and early next year. Hopefully they read comments like these and get their act together. Especially EA.

what i don't get is that MS knows that halo 2 is the flag ship tile for xbox right?
then why didnt they adapt there flag ship titles awesome matching system to all the games that could use it like any First person shooters ( like CoD2 and PDZ). When i got online I was under the impression that xbox live for the 360 would be identical to Halo 2. I read that the 360 had some 300-700 mb of extra "live connectivity" software removed from the dvd in order to unify the developers requirements for live connectivity so every developer wouldn't have to write basicly there own verison of the same code to talk to live and the developers didnt need to code in for(which i thought was the Halo 2'ish matching system) then i loaded up call of duty and was severly disappointed by its nearly total lack of xbox live support, i mean i felt like i was playing a 1st gen xbox live game. its obivous that activision spend all most no time on the live end of there game.

yea i can play deathmatch or ctf with other people but come on! i can can even create parties and have my friends follow me from game to game, I have to send them each time a game invite(very annoying)
make my $7 a month work a little.

1. there no co-op online in either single player(come on) or split screen live play(the second player would be signed in as a guest al mechassualt or ANY other xbox live game) this really pissed me off becasue even 1st gen xbox games have this i sat down with my friend to play together online and we spend 30 mins trying to figure out if we can even do it.
How can you have two player split screen for system link and local but not xbox live?

2.4 vs 4? what fun is that i mean how can u put in a game that plays 4 on 4 and call it next gen. I can't even play 8 vs AI or co-op. BF2 plays 64 people online and it came out a year ago that is totally unacceptable. ALL 360 fps should be at a min 64 players online HELLO its supposed to be next gen.

3. no PARTIES how am i supposed to make friends when i have no way of keeping with me the ones i make while im playing, after the match ends i have to jump back into it and play with a new set, granted the four channel direct chat is awesome but what about the people i dont already know. I dont like having to go into the messanging system of live just to keep two guys i JUST played a match with.

I my opinion xbox live needs a major update and they need to standized the xbox live method for joining and playing with other people. I thought that it was all worked out but i guess there going to need a patch or something.

I could go on.

They need a blog for just this, what you do and dont like about the new xbox live experience compared to the other one.