Here's my late view of the opening day of TGS. Xbox had a huge setup right on the entrance of the hall.
I'd like to say that the show was a huge success and that the games were stunning, but sadly that wasn't the case. x360 got good coverage with cute babes and the bags they were handing out (and everyone was carrying), but they failed to deliver any show-stopping games for the crowd.
First of all, x360's shown weren't completely free of jaggies, as promised. All the titles had only 2xAA. It's naturally better than nothing, but the pixels are still very much visible even on 26" Samsung screens they had. The trees suffered the most from this, I was expecting leafs and brances that rendered smoothly, but all the trees I saw resembled very much those seen in old Xbox.
Secondly, either the Samsung HDTV sets were poorly adjusted or then the component output sucked badly, cause the output signal was very poor. The sets looked like the sharpness was set to 100, resulting every black pixel to have a whiter contrast pixel next to it, resulting in unnatural look to them. I can't imagine why MS would spend hundreds of millions on developing and marketing x360 and then overlooking to adjust the sets to optimal. I have a HDTV LCD set back home and non-antialiased Dead or Alive looks heaps better on it.
About the games:
Basically ever single game lacked that much-needed wow factor, they were nice, but that's basically it. They're naturally better than current gen games, but most aren't even close to what I'd call next gen. I'd hate to use the expression Xbox 1.5 here, but that's basically the thought I had while playing.
Kameo had some very nice shadings and the game looks nice. Not omg nice, but nice. It has many nice touches such as if you transform into spike ball and run over an orc, the orc will remain attached to the spikes as you roll on. Wasn't really my favourite and I wouldn't pick this game up. Not bad, but just not my cup of tea.
Test Driving had a framerate of about 25, dropping down all the time and making the game impossible to play. Simply a bad move for MS to have it in there and it didn't attract much crowd and was just basically humiliating for the system.
Ridge Racer was the best looking driving game on TGS, it has a very nice arcade feeling and look to it. Fun to play, too.
I'm not even going to start on Final Fantasy. It's a Xbox game rendered in 720p, so there' s not much to say about it.
Call of Duty is 1:1 with it's PC counterpart(s). If you've played if on PC, you've played it on x360.
Dead Rising actually managed to entertain me to a certain point. There are PLENTY of zombies moving on the screen and coming at you and every weapon will result in a different kind of a kill. Not that amazing, but not bad either.
Five x360's ran Chrome hounds in netplay. It was utterly boring and looked very dull.
99 Nights was by far the most amazing looking game. There were hundreds of enemies on the screen at once and the framerate was very fluid. The only disappointment were the few slowdowns when performing a special move with loads and loads of stuff flying around. The only downside was that after killing 2000 enemies, you're pretty much fed up with just slashing the army coming onto you again and again. Hopefully they'll have more content to the actual game than just the nice shell.
The controller is the most amazing part of x360 hardware. I wouldn't never guessed I'd say this, but it's really even better than the s-controller. Really top-notch work.
I know some of you will be angry for me for this report, but I'm trying to be as honest as possible. x360 is a good improvement from Xbox, but after seeing and playing them I just feel that the games are a bit too rushed and far away from polished, wow-factor look. While I'm certain that the games will get better as time goes by, it was obvious that Japanese crowd wasn't sold on the console.
MS missed the boat by failing to get the strongest links available for playing. If they had GOW, PGR and Ghost Recon in the booths, it would've obviously been an advantage for them. We expected the unimaginable and got the imaginable, basically.
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Topic: Dedicated Tgs(tokyo Game Show) Threads Are Up.. (Read 178 times)