Graphics are always downplayed when a companys gaming system is less powerful than the competition. Now Microsoft is making excuses.
“Speaking in an exclusive interview, Microsoft’s J Allard has downplayed the importance of graphics in the next generation of consoles – saying that it’s creativity, not visual quality, which will sell the next 100 million consoles.
“We can’t get all hung up as an industry and say it’s all about graphic fidelity,” Allard commented. “I kind of put the ‘does it look better?’ secondarily. Not because it’s not important, not because I don’t think we’re not going to have a system to do it, but because we’re almost good enough.”
Read the full interview at Gamesindustry.biz
Of course Microsoft’s stance on graphics and power were the complete opposite with the original Xbox system since it is the most powerful of the current consoles available. But now that Sony’s Playstation 3 supposedly has more hardware power, Microsoft is touting that games and creativity win the race for your living room, not graphics power. Nintendo has been arguing this for years but to no avail.
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RSSAnd if the new xbox is going to be flooded with watered down pc FPS ports again... well collecting chessboards is hardly innovative.
And Microsoft tend to overpromise and underdeliver on all fronts. Anyone else remember the 733MHz PIII that turned out to be a variant of mobile Celeron? Or the xbox hdd that hardly any devs actually used to spool textures?? They tend to get the hype rolling with BS, and people keeping going no matter what actually ends up under the hood.
And their "analysis" of the PS3 is both desperate and academically inaccurate. You can't benchmark something you neither have on hand nor have appropriate apps to bench with. Also, different game engines stress different aspects of CPU (and system) architecture. Odds are MS and sony are both fudging. But sony have postured less, and demonstrated more. Sony tend to have the titles worth caring about anyway.
As for nintendo, their demos were expectedly underwhelming, but given the innovation they've demonstrated with the DS (both Sony and MS could learn from that), they might at least challenge the way people play games (if people would turn away from that [insert pre-milleniume FPS of you choice] ripoff halo long enough to notice).
(btw, Sweeney said the unreal demo was realtime. calling Sweeney a liar? next thing you'll be dissing Carmack)
http://www.gamespot.com/news/2005/05/20/news_6126204.html
"So how does Sony respond to the allegations? Far from being evasive, it met them head-on. "Yes, it is real time," a rep told GameSpot."