J4CKO

iTrader: (1)

Sony just need to release some killer games, everyone is wary about buying a console with a selection of mainly poor games, you know the ones that anybody who buys the console buys, they arent very good so end up going for two quid on Ebay inside a year, GTA and GT need to be released and Sony will clean up.

I will eventually get a PS3, no doubt but at the moment, there isn't a game that hasn't been done as well or better on the 360, not that bothered about Blu Ray just yet and it needs to drop in price a bit as getting on for five hundred quid once you have bought some games and an extra controller is just too much.

£350 quid bundle with GT5 would be pretty hard to ignore.

bob269

or from Amazon.com £90 with 8 free HD titles

Buy an Xbox 360 HD DVD Player and Get Two HD DVDs from the List Below Free

Assuming they'll let you import from Amazon

messiah

Seen the add-on drives on ebay for £75, people cant seem to give them away...

Just like games choice is dictating the 360/PS3 debate - movie choice will dictate the HD war, and it seems that BR has all the guns in its arsenal. Fox have the ability to really put a nail in HD DVD's coffin - all it'll take is a release date for the Star Wars & Aliens boxsets.

messiah

Woolies - PS3+2 games+2 BR's+ 2nd Sixaxis = £375

As popular as the GTA series is, its nowhere near as important as GT5 is to Sony - GT4 caused the hardware to sell out again.

bob269

How many times will people keep buying the same stuff over and over tho? I guess the hardcore fans will, but not the average joe.

HD got Paramount and Dreamworks exclusively, It would be better if all studios produced for both formats

Blu-ray blow: Paramount, Dreamworks to go exclusively to HD-DVD

STi wanna Subaru

iTrader: (1)

I think GT5 is massive for Sony and will be very important for the PS3 but I don't think it will have the same impact because the 360 has Forza 2 and is a viable alternative which was not the case previously.

Edcase

Yes but again, 360 has been around 15 months longer, don't you understand the economics of price degradation over a products' lifespan?

Edcase

If you aren't going to play new stuff on it....why buy the new console? Stick to your ps2?! Why do you need to spend hundreds on a new console with all the new visual, aural and online advances if you don't want to play the latest games that make the most of those features?!

Oh, and on your last point, its simply because they couldn't get people enough dev kits early enough as well as finalising the dev software etc.

PeteBrant

Not including Speilberg films though. Any the HD Consortium paid them between $150 and 250 million dollar to jump for a 3 year period.


Star Wars & Spiderman are going to be BluRay Exclusive - Job done


Of course like you say, both formats please.

PeteBrant

What, you mean other than Forza

STi wanna Subaru

iTrader: (1)

it was late to the table on the Xbox though and GT series was firmly established as the console racer. The original forza turned a few heads and made them think that the Xbox may have a challenger but it's Forza2 that has established itself as a real rival to GT in the eyes of many. If you get what I mean

messiah

I found Forza 2 a letdown, was hoping for it to be a GT clone but was just nowhere near as polished or as "hardcore" - the pitstop ability was pretty pointless as barely any races required it and all the race series seemed to have no variety in what tracks were used.

Someon'e going to come along and start moaning about the lack of damage in GT - but I think it's more trouble than its worth, its fine in solo games but online it just caused a lot a bad feeling among some of my clan-mates.

Getting smacked up the backside by a "noob" is going to happen no matter what the game is, but being able to carry on is more fun than limping into the pits for only a half repair job.

STi wanna Subaru

iTrader: (1)

polished? hardcore? expand please

I'd prefer the option to turn damage off or to restrict it depending on who's racing than not have it bt hopefully GT will relent and introduce it.

Well noobs are always a pain like that I agree but if you get a good room then it's not such an issue.

Iain Young

Not sure what you mean by polish, but I'd call Forza a lot more hardcore than the GT games. The sheer amount of tweaks you can make to the cars, plus tire wear, (which is affected by on your tire choices and suspension tweaks etc). All that stuff makes GT4 look like a simple arcade racer. There's nothing wrong with that of course, but personally I prefer the attention to detail and more accurate modelling in Forza over GT4 (which I got bored with within a week). I actually bought a ps2 (with a dfp wheel) solely for GT4, and was very disappointed with the whole experience.

True, but I guess you need to find some new mates who can actually drive. I've had more online races than I can count on Forza2, and being taken out by a noob doesn't happen much if you know who you are playing with, and besides, you can turn the damage off...

messiah

We have had to resort to turning damage off, the crashes are ususally caused at the first corner as no-one wants to give an inch but then the accusations start flying about who caused it - "what you braking there for?" etc...

Regarding the "polish" I just feel that the GT series interface seems very slick and the menu's always seemed well laid out - car selection in Forza 2 got on my t!ts, waiting for the car to appear on screen got frustrating especially when you were just scrolling through looking for one further down the list - granted its nowhere as annoying as car selection in Motorstorm though.

Will have to disagree on the attention to detail between the 2, I think they've taken more care with GT4 with regard to the car models, and thats on a last-gen console. Naturally I've spent a bit of time with Scoobs in both games and in Forza 2 the rear brake light in the wing is just a red rectangle, in GT4 it actually looks like a lens with a lamp behind it

At the end of the day, I don't own Forza 2 anymore, but I still have GT4...no doubt others are the reverse, but its just my personal preference.

bob269

I guess its what you like, both PGR3(4) and Forza 2 are good in their own right, forza wasnt for me, a little boring with the lack of tracks and having to avoid penalties crashing etc took the fun out of it, but then again i prefer the more arcadey feel of pgr, same with fps's stuff like Graw where you die from getting shot once isnt for me, i prefer the run in guns blazing style of darkness, gow etc.

messiah

Prefer PGR for online racing - the frantic nature of it tends to get the blood racing a bit more - but then again I prefer GRAW style shooters, run & gun isnt for me, always prefer something with a big scope as I like the tactical side of it.

Swen6

Yes i do and they've dropped it to kick Sony in the nads, both MS and SONY are loosing on every console, it's just who will take the risk on how much they want to loose per console to increase stake in the market, SONY could drop the price and it would increase there sales but not profit, but ultimatly if they want console in homes thats what they'll have to do and do it now, like you keep piping on the 360 is 15mths ahead, they'll never catch up unless they take that gamble, GT5 will not save the console single handedly by the time it's released they'll be futhr behind. And as many 360 owners have said if the prices drop they'd buy one.

Edcase

The above goes to show how little you do understand. They can drop the price as time goes by because they build market share, sell more games to more consumers and they recieve a royalty from the publishers on every single game that gets built, so more hardware = more software = more royalty = lower hardware pricing. Sony invented the model with PS1, but it's no different than the razors / razor blade model. Give the handles away at a loss and make money on the blades.

spectrum48k

some food for thought:

" The benefits of the higher storage capacity of Sony's Blu-Ray discs have once again been pulled into the spotlight as Heavenly Sword chief development 'Ninja', Nina Kristensen, tells CVG that the game would simply not be possible on DVD.

"We have jam-packed the Blu-Ray disc absolutely full," declared Kristensen, as she confirmed rumours that the audio alone was allocated 10GB of space on the 25GB Blu-Ray discs.

That's more than an entire dual-layer DVD game, which holds a total of 8.5GB.

We wondered if this meant compression methods usually used to squeeze content onto normal DVDs had not been used, but Kristensen insisted otherwise: "We used compression all over the place. We had to be really judicious at the end with what was going on the disc and what wasn't.

"I think it's one of those things - if you give us the space we're going to fill it with stuff. It means the audio can be of a higher quality and stuff like that. It all adds to the quality of the package," she told CVG. "

Iain Young

However it has been widely reported that you can finish the whole game in 5-6 hours. They've filled the whole disc with fancy graphics / cut scenes and forgotten about the gameplay. If that's what blu-ray games are all going to be like, then they can keep it. Even the audio quote is a bit misleading, as the audio data contains every language version on the same disc rather than having localised versions of the game. The audio track is actually 10gb divided by the number of languages it has been translated into...

More food for thought...

Call or Duty 3 was 22GB on the PS3, but yet on the 360 it was 7.2GB and overall was supposed to be the slightly better version of the game. At worst they were identical...

Edcase

FYI GT5 prologue has just been confirmed for this year as I mentioned yesterday. 40 cars, 3 tracks including a London city track, plus reversible modes, and 16 player online. Available on disc and download.

rik1471

Good luck waiting for the proper version.

I'm still waiting for GT Mobile.........

*yawn*

PeteBrant

I thinks fairly obvious that eventually DVD is going to run out of space. I mean historically you are looking at a 5 fold increase in space requied every what, 5 years or so?

Of course you combat this with multidisc - But then certain games are never going to suit it - Look at why Brunout 2 was canned on the cube.

DVD space it going to hit its limits sooner or later - Rather sooner than MS were gambling on I would imagine. I think MS were hoping that digital distribution was going to hit before BluRay or HD DVD could get a foothold - i don't think that's going to be the case.

Eventually they are going to have to take the hit and stick certain games on HD-DVD.

It could be worse though, they could have no contigency whatsoever - At least they have somewhere to go if that absolutely positively need it.

Iain Young

I have no doubt that dvd will run out of space sooner rather than later. My worry is what they are going to fill it with...

PeteBrant

Surfaces 60% more shiny of course!


To be fair, there has been a backlash against pre-rendered footage. Most games these days use in engine cutscenes.


It's not all bad - sometimes game slike Bioshock come along and restore your faith in where the industry is headed.

In fact I'm going to end up buying that game twice - my PC copes with it - Just, so I want to get it on 360 once my machine comes back to play it as nature intended.

And of course PGR4 and Halo3 are just round the corner....


I want my 360 back

JackClark

That's not bad for a free demo, good on them.

rik1471

It isn't free.

Awesomepossum

I was breaking down what you get for 400 odd quid as std on a PS3 against what you would need to spend on a 360 Premium to bring it up to the same spec.

If you break down the components built in to the PS3 against the 360 then it works out the 360 is the one with the shocking pricetag. I forgot the £60 for the Wireless adaptor and this takes the price above the PS3. So in essence the PS3 with its shockingly high price tag turns out to be better value than the 360

If you buy a 360 and you want to watch HD quality movies then you need to fork out 100 notes for the add on device that will allow you to watch said HD content. The PS3 has a BR player built in so no need to purchase an add on to watch HD content

You may prefer a load of different boxes to do different things but i prefer 1 box to do all of it and it does a damn good job of replacing 5 different boxes

Iain Young

It is cheaper if you want everything in one box. I don't, so it's an expensive option for me. It all depends on what you want I guess

Don't want to play movies in a console, (I'll have a higher quality standalone player for that). Don't want wireless networking for it (wired is much quicker, especially when streaming video / pictures from a media center). The PS3 forces you to have both whether you want it or not