XBox360 will always have compressed games because of Standard DVD's lack of capacity.

M$ need to release a whole new system before PS3 dominates the entire earth in 2 years.

Posted by: superdynamite | January 11, 2008 3:39 AM

HD-DVD is dead. Anyone who even thinks of buying a player now is either an idiot or has more money than sense. The fact that Toshiba haven't given in yet makes no difference at all because the format cannot survive with just 30% of movies.

While it will make no difference to the 360 there are loads of 360 owners who seem to despise everything about the PS3 and have spent the last year predicting it and BluRays demise. Strangely, now that the PS3 has surpassed 8m sales faster than the 360 did, the 360 is currently sitting in 6th place in worldwide weekly console sales and BluRay is winning the format war, those loudmouth 360 owners seem to have disappeared.

Posted by: killallmutants | January 11, 2008 3:59 AM

Superdynamite - $ isn't a letter. I really, really could have sworn that even 12 year olds have been taught the alphabet.

Standard DVD's lack of capacity is an irrelevant argument. At your age, obviously you're not a software developer, but if you were you'd know that with the power of modern consoles cut scenes and other bits and pieces are generally rendered using the games rendering engine which means that the need to store vast amounts of pre-rendered data is pretty much gone. Thus, we are left requiring the storage space for textures, geometry, audio and code. Standard DVD's storage space is enough for a truly vast amount of space that would be hard to overflow even for the most complicated product.

The bottom line with your comment and the rubbish spouted by Mr Fanatic Child with nothing better to do than troll an XBOX forum below you is that your lack of understanding about how something works is highlighted by what you say. I observe that NEITHER of you are focusing on the games or the experience. Instead, you talk about hardware without knowing anything about how it works. You then back this up by discussing how that hardware affects software without understanding how that works either.

Debate on the basis of the enjoyment, applications, experience and overall package offered by your personal choice of platform by all means: perhaps you have something interesting to say? Perhaps we might all learn something?

But perhaps not, eh?

Posted by: Coffee Plant | January 11, 2008 12:57 PM

I'd say the only 360 owners who care about this are the ones who wasted their money on the HD DVD drive. I don't think that's very many of them though. So no, overall 360 owners don't care about this.

Posted by: Brian | January 11, 2008 5:55 PM

Coffee Plant: I think you are missing the point...see by putting a '$' in place of the 'S' in the abbreviation for Microsoft (MS), he is commenting on the greedy and dirty business practices that the company has used in the past. That they are just interested in making money by monopolizing the market and putting out a sub-par and untested product. So either you are an idiot and didn't get that...or you are a little whiner and can't take someone making fun of your favorite company? Which is it? Idiot...or whiner? Its one of the two.

Now...the space on a DVD sure does matter when making games. Who wants to switch discs during gameplay on a console? No matter how programmers handle the data on a disc they will always want more space and will be limited by the amount of space on a disc (eventually, they will even need to manage space on BR discs. Game design will eventually suffer.

Also...you debate that hardware doesn't matter when creating a good experience on a console...but won't it matter if the hardware hinders what can be developed for that console?

In reading your post again coffee plant...I've decided that you are an idiot whiner. You complain about others arguments because you don't believe they have a good understanding of what they are talking about and then don't give any better information. Hey...but you make forum posts alot more fun. Enjoy being stupid!

Posted by: RuddigerPez | January 11, 2008 6:17 PM

I brought a HD-DVD, i've now sold it.
I VERY MUCH do care about HD moives. Now that HD-DVD is dead, I REALLY want a Blu-Ray player. I would LOVE a Blu-Ray add-on from M$.

Posted by: Shenmue | January 11, 2008 7:00 PM

It didn't matter to me which format won, I just wanted one to win, so I don't piss away money on one format, and find out they no longer support it. To Superdynamite, your answer about them using the game engine to render the cut scenes rather then record high quality cg scenes is what they have to do just be able to fit everything onto one disc. It doesn't matter what you say, as games get bigger and longer, 8.8g disc is just no gonna hold everything, and if MS doesn't except the fact THEY MUST allow the game dev's to utilize a larger disc format whether it be BR or HDDVD. I didn't pay $400 on an elite 360 to disc swap, that shit was done with the PS1, and for us to do in this day and age is pathetic. Just accept it, and support it, we will need the larger format discs for games...

Posted by: XboxGamer | January 12, 2008 8:18 AM

I will try not to come off as too much of a Microsoft fan boy here, but their business model is quite impressive. Lets take a quick look at what they have done, 1. They got their product out first, that rushed the PS3 out before they were truly ready and their games where not developed well. 2. They used off the shelf type technology witch makes initial prices cheaper. 3. They gave software developers kits on how to build games for the system. So now that we have solved the HD/BR battle, made a more robust x-box live service, they have already started making profit long before Sony will see it. By the time the game developers really need the space, and know how to truly use the BR, guess who will be ready to release their new game system, oh yeah not to mention that they will lessons learned on controller technology. People give MS crap about doing this but business since wise they are brilliant, all the crap they got for not putting HD drives in the Xbox look at how smart of a move that is now, you can site Sony as brilliant for putting BR in their box, but what if things went the other way there would be a ton of angry PS3 owners mad that their game systems format isn’t supported by anyone. To be quite honest too, with the way the Xbox is built we could see the “blue man group” in the future announcing the 360 Blue addition and the all blue Xbox 360 with the built in blue ray player, not to mention doing the add on player at a much cheaper price point then what the PS3 is at just because price of production will be way down on the 360. You may hate MS but in a true business and marketing since they have been brilliant. Oh yeah and if you don’t think at all they media server stuff doesn’t matter, it does to my 64 year old in-laws who loved seeing pictures of my children on the big screen TV, I took the pictures on my digital camera, put the SD card in my laptop, the Xbox saw that I had new pictures and video on my laptop, in seconds I had them on my TV, they were interested in the 360 then. After that we played Scene it with the big button controllers and they were ready to buy on just on those two things alone. If you look at these systems as just gaming systems you are missing a lot, the business, media server, and market place is the biggest thing that has the tide going in MS direction the HD/BR is just a small portion of the marketing battle. If you see the big picture of what MS is doing it is scary and brilliant all at one time.

Posted by: XBox Guy | January 13, 2008 2:08 PM

RuddigerPez - believe me, they are not my favourite company. I do, though, object to ill thought out "arguments" that contain little more content than throwing matches into fields of petrol.

Since you have taken the position of presenting some reasonable points of view (bar the "you're stupid" bits, obviously), I shall return the favour.

Let's use the Wii as an example. Hardware wise it is poor. It is little more than a turbo-charged GameCube, and yet it has been an enormous success. Why? Certainly not because of its HD drive, vast memory or incredible processing and graphics power because it has none of those. It does, though, have some fantastic games and a unique approach to presenting them. Thus, any given hardware's capability is not necessarily measured by speed, output resolution or overall performance: it is measured by what operates ON it.

I believe the same applies to the 360 and PS3. Both are enormously capable pieces of hardware. In fact, both are incredible pieces of hardware. They are also both different in the ways that they achieve that performance. The PS3 is a harder device to program on but I have no doubt that developers will figure out how to produce some extraordinary pieces of software for it as a platform.

It is this generation of hardware (and I exclude the Wii in this bit) that finally means that pre-rendered sequences are not the best or most efficient way of generating cut-scenes and other traditionally data-heavy parts of a game. Textures, audio and geometry are highly compressed and take little space in the great scheme of things. As to whether the limitations of DVD will show on this generation is a matter of continued debate I am sure, but I would be surprised if 360 games are heavily compromised by this "limitation".

For me, it still comes down to the games that operate on the hardware. You and several others seem to think that I am some sort of Microsoft fanatic. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. I purchased my 360 because of the games. When there are games that I want on the PS3, I'm gonna get one of those, too. I loved (and still use) my PS2, I was an early adopter of the PS1, I owned an N64 for Goldeneye and 1080 and my 360 was purchased for several games that I wanted to play.

Your comment assuming that I am stupid because I do not appear to understand others' arguments is odd -- have you not actually *read* the arguments in question? Do you really, really, honestly believe that they are actually arguments? Your message contained debating points. The top two posts in this comments thread contain no debating points. They are fanatical trolling posts and nothing more.

Posted by: Coffee Plant | January 14, 2008 10:11 AM