alexatkinuk

Oh crap, but the Sam & Max controls are BETTER than Wallace & Gromit.

Unless they do MAJOR improvements it will be very annoying. I mean Sam & Max controls were dodgy, you would click somewhere they decide to go somewhere totally different, but Wallace & Gromit was worse as you would be walking and end up going somewhere you did not intend and could not correct it as quickly as a quick click with the cursor can.

Actually when developers moan that the PS3 is hard to develop for it IS Sonys fault.

If you are releasing a console today, its your job to have a good development kit that makes your job, as a developer, as easy as possible.

Long gone are the days when you had to code for the specific chips in the console writing in assembler. Its called progress, standards and APIs. Microsoft from day one tied the Xbox into the same development environment that the PC used, its APIs are based on DirectX and the original Xbox was even a standard PC design based on the nForce 2 chipset, a Intel Celeron and GeForce 3. (granted, they were tweaked OEM versions, but as far as a developer cared its a tweaked PC)

When they switched to a slightly less PC like hardware for Xbox 360, they still allowed fairly easy programming. Just like how I can write the same app on Windows and port it to my Windows Mobile phone with very little work.

So then Sony come along and made the PS3 a PITA to code for. Why? Well so that they could pull a PS2 and have games gradually tap the power over many years, so they did not have to release a new console as soon. But they did not count on the Xbox 360 which could tap the power more easily and is still improving to some extent.

You can blame the developer all you want, but why would any developer bother to spend MORE money writing for one console than it costs on another? Only if they are going to make more money back on that console, which sadly is not the case. So there are very good reasons why some PS3 ports are poor and its all down to money. Sony caused this situation due to being so sure that PS3 would be more popular than Xbox 360 that they took a risk and made the PS3 a steep learning curve. It was all so that the games would gradually be better and better as developers learnt the hardware, a pretty poor excuse IMO.

@jasonerin1981

People are still claiming the 360 games are dumbed down? The only game I know of that was dumbed down was UT3, and it was dumbed down on BOTH consoles because it was designed for PCs with up to 8 times the memory of the 360/PS3. (1GB graphics 3GB system vs 256MB graphics 256MB system for PS3, 512MB split however you want on 360)

Theres so little difference in reality between PS3 and 360, except 360 is more flexible RAM wise. (if you need less than 256MB system RAM you can use the rest for graphics, on PS3 you can't)

Guess what, games written first on PC look better on PC, games written first on 360 are better on 360, games written first on PS3 look better on PS3. That is purely down to the time spent optimising for a given system, nothing to do with that systems real capabilities. The only exception is if they then spend a year porting it over instead of a few months, because again it means they spent more time tweaking the game for that system so naturally its more optimised.

All games can be improved over the state they are in when released. If they couldn't, all games would still look like the early 360/PS3 games with last-gen graphics in HD. Its all about development time and little about hardware, except the known fact the 360 devkit is easier so it takes less time to develop on 360 than PS3 to the same standards. Why do you think GT5 is taking so long? We will have had 2 Forza games in the time it takes to release GT5, Prologue does not count as its more or less GT5 beta with hardly any cars/tracks.

Microsoft always saw the use of the extra space, but they also saw that it was a LOT cheaper to use a DVD drive and just use multiple disks.

As I have said before, launching the 360 with Blu-ray instead of DVD would have been impossible. The tech was not ready for when they wanted to launch, its got close ties to Sony too so HD-DVD would have been the best they could hope for and that too was not ready either.

Microsoft would not have had the lead they have today if they had delayed the 360 to include a high-def disk format. They would also not have made a profit due to the extra costs manufacturing the console and the disks themselves. So quite frankly, they made the right choice.

However if the NEXT Xbox was still DVD I would think they were insane. But I would be pretty surprised if it was not Blu-ray or some other kind of high capacity disk.