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Coming into the home stretch, MS is pushing the envelope hard on this launch. They're cutting things close. It's October and we've finally seen near-final builds. But developers got their final dev kits in August, and less than two months is hardly enough to learn a new system, finish a game, and deliver it to the high expectations we have. Part of our expectations have to do with MS's lofty goals, and its insistence that everything will look amazing in HD, and part of it has to with Sony's CG E3 videos, which were sneaky and cynical, but represented a deft strategic move. Will any of the 360 games look like Sony's CG stuff? No. Will they look better than the quality of games MS and partners showed at E3? Oh hell yes. So now that you've seen the games in motion, what's your perception?
While MS's X05 event demonstrated it's ready to launch in November, not everything is in order. THQ's The Outfit and Saint's Row look shaky at best, EA's games aren't fully realized, and several titles look just like high-res versions of their current generation partners (Tony Hawk's American Wasteland, GUN, King Kong, Need for Speed Most Wanted, to name a few). But when you take a step back, compared to other launches, the overall quality of the lineup -- not necessarily the individual titles on their own -- but the overall quality of the games is high. Even if every one of these games is rated in the mid to high 8s, for a launch -- that's an achievement.
Looking back on Nintendo's Luigi's Mansion, Pikmin, and WaveRace Blue at launch, and Sony's two standouts from 29 games (SSX and Madden), this set of 26 or so games looks very good. Project Gotham Racing 3, Kameo, Perfect Dark Zero, Call of Duty 2, Dead Or Alive 4, Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, NBA 2K6, Condemned, King Kong -- all of these can more easily contend with those others in their day.
The weakest aspect of this launch from a cynic's point of view is that there aren't any knock-out, drag-down kill apps. You could call Perfect Dark Zero that if you'd like, but I'd say that's erroneous. It's good, but it's no Halo. You can point out Project Gotham Racing 3, which is beautiful, fast, and fun, but it doesn't push the envelope too far. You can focus in on Call of Duty 2, but that's on the PC, and it's not a giant step over its predecessor. It's a good, solid, refinement and improvement. The fact is, none of the Xbox 360 games really blast out of the door with 100% knock-you off your feet next-generation games. They're all just good. Some are even very good.
Put things in perspective: Launches aren't traditionally the place where publishers or developers are able to knock you out in the first round. If that were the case, a lot of consoles -- the PS2, GameCube, perhaps even the Xbox -- wouldn't exist today. The fact is, there are several rounds to win -- and if these consoles last five years, that's at least five rounds -- this is just round one. Come next fall? Round 2 is where developers will really have had time to learn, understand, and exploit the complex architecture of the Xbox and make it work to do things you've never seen before.
http://xbox360.ign.c...8/658313p1.htmli think that all puts the 360's launch line up in a good perspective to past system launches. and i agree with the bit shots at MS, other then the DC and xbox launch i havent been this excited for a system's launch games for any other system.
