1 post tagged “gears of war”
For a while now, I have been raving about how I think the PS3 is going to be the king of the hill once developers start getting to grips with it (not to mention showing some tasty snippets from some rather lovely up-coming games), when two things happen that could drastically improve the quality of the games on PS3 - first up, Sony announce RSX Edge, a set of development tools that, in a similar way to the way Renderware allowed PS2 programmers to forget about the nitty-gritty of graphics/physics and concentrate on the gameplay and textures, gives Third Party developers the tools they need to get on with giving us top-notch PS3 games that look astounding.
The second, well, it's a more personal thing - I've just been asked to apply for a Producer/Project Management role running a team of PS3 developers. Keep your fingers crossed that I get it, as I promise that I'll take any developers that fail to deliver top-grade product out to the car park and shoot them - how's about that for a deal?
In all seriousness, I think that life for PS3's early adopters is going to get better and better - XBox 360 is already creaking at the seams to keep up and Microsoft have just basically admitted the first "Core" system is obsolete by announcing the "Ultimate" edition with a bigger hard drive and (it is rumoured) HD-DVD as standard, or at least the ugly £120 external drive bundled in the same box. So that would make the 360 cost £350-ish including a standard "premium" pack and an HD-DVD add-on. Not much less than the PS3 that is all in one box (no external PSU or HD-DVD drive to clutter the place up), has a larger hard drive (60gb, as against 20gb) and has Bluray, which is looking set to trounce HD-DVD as a format. Oh, and you have to pay to get all the "Gold" (i.e useful) features of XBox Live, whereas Playstation Network for PS3 is totally free. That white box doesn't look like such a good investment after all - I am so glad that I cancelled my order for one when Amazon had their pre-order fiasco: a) it means I waited for PS3 and b) I bought a PSP to get me by in the meantime and love it.
It's a shame that 360 seems to be relying solely on Halo 3 and Gears of War to try and beat down the opposition, as none of the other features seem as well implemented after 12 months in the field as either those on the Wii or the PS3. I really loved my original XBox (I sold my PS2 when I got one, it took over so much), but the 360 didn't seem next-gen enough once I got my hands on one and now, by altering the specs and selling bolt-ons to try and match the PS3's specifications, it appears that Microsoft is admitting that is exactly the case. If you bought a "Core" 360 at launch, you'd have paid £299-ish. Say £250 to be fair. Then add £80 for the hard drive and £120 for the HD-DVD drive. That's £450 for a machine that still doesn't match the PS3's standard spec (£425 list price at launch in the UK), not to mention the "Red Ring Of Death" (no free replacement under warranty in the UK, by the way - £80 charge to replace a dead 360, unlike in the USA where it is done for free) problems, or the fact that you end up with an Xbox, an external drive and a brick-sized PSU all making the place look untidy. Oh, and you'd have a non-wireless controller and only basic XBox Live features unless you paid even more. Methinks that Microsoft has dropped the ball...
