Colin Ballast

w00t! GoW FTW! Yet another game on my list of games to buy for my brand new PC!

Wow, what a load of cynical misguided crap. Metroid Prime is a METROID game, so it was never intended to be a multiplayer game in the first place. You guys just saying "It's a dealbreaker for me." are jsut idiots who think that it's designed to be a shooter, when it's designed to be an adventure game. Honestly, people would be saying the same thing about Zelda Link had a gun and was blasting up enemies, "WTF! NO online multiplayer?!? Teh suckx0rs! I'm not buying it!", but they don't because it's not shooter like. If you people had brains in your heads, you would know that Metroid Prime is about single playe, and Multiplayer is just a side thing. Metroid isn't Halo, it has a lot of similarities, but those are only ont he surface, and you should know that.

I can definately see the difference, and I consider it significant, and I don't see what people think is so "meh" about it. Gears of War definatetly has higher graphical qaulity and fiddelity, but that is of no real relevence here other than telling what Halo 3 is capable of.

You can tell the difference of Halo 3 and Halo 2. Halo 2 has very low resolution textures that are pretty muddy, and it is very good for it's time. In the rocket launcher screenshot, you can tell the difference easily. Halo 3s rocket launcher was very detailed and had actual polygons that were showing protrusions, rather than the pixil replacements that were supposed to similate it, albeit a rather crappy way. Also, said protrusion has a reflective quality rather than the simple shadowed texels that were supposed to be a crappy excuse for detail.

The game is overall brighter and more vibrant, while Halo 2 is very dark, spare for places where you are not outdoors. You can see more bloom and detail in the grenade explosions, and the ground lights up in reaction to gunfire.

Halo 3 can really be compared to Halo 2 Vista, which also looks marginally better than Halo 2, so I concider this a significant improvement. Maybe people are just not as observant as I am in pointing out all of the graphical differences I see, because people here seem to be saying "the bump maps are just deeper and the pixle resolution is higher", but I have pointed out several things that are a big difference.

One more thing to concider that helps to take Gears of War out of the picture, is that one reason why it looks so much better than Halo 3 is because it's characters and environments were designed with the intention of taking advantage of the 360. When an artist comes up with a "look" or "feel" of a game for a certain piece of hardware, they have to concider upon designing environments and characters what the hardware is capable of.

You might thing the Master Chief's Mark IV MJOLNIR battle armor was just designed the way it is because it looked cool, but there is a certain thing to game design that needs to strike the right balance of how to make a game look good, and operate well at the same time. That armor was designed to look cool, while staying in the limits of the hardware's poly, vertext, shader, and rendering capability, which at the time was for the Xbox. The reason the original Halo didn't take advantage of Xbox, was because it was originally intended for the PS2, which wasn't capable of what Xbox could do. But once Microsoft purchased Bungie, and the game sold significantly, they decided to make a sequel which looked a ton better for the Xbox which would take advantage of all of the hardware bells and whistles it had to offer.

Gears was originally intended for the 360, so the head room for art and environment design was dramatically increased, with at least (I think at least) 500 million poly's per frame, with a 512MB RAM graphics card to make it faster and more efficient. Epic designed the character and teh environment to take advantage of it, so why didn't Bungie for Halo 3?

That would be because of two things: The first is that it would need to change the art and direction dramatically. The second is that doing something that looks as good as Gears while sticking strictly to the original art style is difficult to do.

Never the less, Bungie has pointed out time and time again taht it has not recieved the final coat of graphical effects (and it already looks good to me personally). And the second is that EGM said that the brief screening of the single player looks spectacular (and if you've watched the "Et Tu Brute?" Vidoc, you've seen jsut how good it looks.

It is not a big deal, and people have to keep in mind, which the big wigs have said again and again, is that this is not the final version. Being a big fiddler with Engines and Renderers and whatnot, graphics are not a very big issue to deal with, it's the physics and processing, and the programming that makes the game run that are the biggest headache that they spend the most time on, hence why they are doing the damn beta in the first place, which you guys that are critisizing should realize. It's not to show off, it's to fix bugs.

I feel I've ranted long enough, but I am pretty sure I've made a point.

Weird, but a cool idea.

I always thought there was something wrong with that man. Call me crazy, but I admire what he's trying to do, just not in the fashion he is doing it. You can't sue a company for creative decisions, and it seems he's become fundamentalist in almost every way. He, it seems, hates any platform with violent games, and concidering every platform has violence in general, games in general.

I think he has a serious fault of logic and should read up on the constituition and civil right laws, which ironically for a lawyer he does not fully understand, before he goes and sues anybody.

If he does sue Wendy's, I will fall flat on my ass and laugh until my lungs start dying. Whatever, he is not a major threat to anybody because laws prevent that.

That poor Link is going to grow old and wrinkled on Mike's arm as he grows old and wrinkled. My personal opinion is that tatoos are not a good idea, unless you intend to keep your skin in tatoo canvus condition as you age (with working out and applying lotion and whatnot). It's cool, but I hope it doesn't get ruined as he ages.

How I show my devotion...I can't really think of anything that really says to the world whe I'm walking down the street "I'm a hardcore Nintendo fan, and you can kiss my ass if you think I'm kiddy for doing it!", because truly in real life no one would ever guess that I really love the company, not because I'm hiding it, but because I don't feel a need to let everyone know.

That was basically a mindless rant, but whatever, I think it's a cool tatoo, and I might end up drawing my own Nintendo illustration (I'm an artist) and giving it to a tatoo artist to ink on my back.

I played both and actually enjoyed them a ton, even though they were simplistic and designed for kids. There is just a ton of stuff to bust up, a lot of collectables, and I like legos, and Star wars so I'm definately going to buy this. If this is the only lightsaber game out there, then I'm buying it.

I'm noticing a lot of comments around here that happen to be centered on the reason that games look, not to say bad, but not exploiting the Wii's potential, is that they are merely previous generation ports that are just revamped with controls. I'd like to add on to this.

The sad thing about this whole thing is, most of the games on store shelves are either last gen ports, or games that are just crappy from the start, which tells me a couple of things. One, if ports are there to be exploited, developers will ablige; it's cash in their pocket for less effort. If they aren't there to exploit, most, keyword most developers will still find a way to make games that people will buy with little effort put into them.

The only real message that consumers can use to get the message across that we don't want rehashes or crap is not to buy the games. I think everyone is doing a good job with that already, as most games that consist of these are still on store selves, and stores are still waiting to sell stuff and get more shipped to them.

In time, developers will realize that we don't want old stuff, or just new stuff that is plain bad and not worth experiencing. Eventually they will realize that we want stuff that's new, fresh, and has time and effort poured into it rather than ancient code that has merely been plugged with new input instructions.

@#64

You have to admit, that trying to stop a bunch of guys from harping on someone for acting childish is better than just sitting back and watching him get beat to death by the words of arrogent gamers. If they are going to piss on someone for doing nothing wrong, then I will empty my big fat bladder to at least shut them up. I'd rather improve ideals by means that are contradictory and forceful, because no other way would work in my opinion. Am I pissing on these people? Yeah okay I am. But do they most definatly deserve it? Certainly in my eyes. Are they pissing on someone who doesn't deserve it? He may have been asking for it, but that doesn't mean it was called for. I think that bashing someone for something that isn't wrong, or whatever is wrong. It's very twisted and screwed up logic, but it makes sense.

@ #62

Not pissing on anyone, not being a hypocrite. I'm just saying it like it is, that people should act a little more mature and respect people instead. "Pissing" is merely a metaphore for treating other people like crap, which I plainly think is wrong.