Xbox 360 - It has Begins!!!

[Davey]

My point (and raiden's as well, I presume) is that violence is all about context. If it is used to illustrate a point or create a certain ambience, that's fine. But if the sole source of entertainment in a game (or movie, for that matter) is to watch people squirm and squirt out 34 gallons of blood after getting disemboweled, there's obviously not a lot of substance there. I mentioned Postal 2 because nobody praises its gameplay content.

If it keeps other people entertained, more power to them. I just that kind of stuff incredibly boring. That isn't to say you can't have a good game with buckets of blood... but gore in of itself offers no entertainment value to me. Then again, I'm not 13 anymore.

[SheSaidDutch]

My point (and raiden's as well, I presume) is that violence is all about context. If it is used to illustrate a point or create a certain ambience, that's fine. But if the sole source of entertainment in a game (or movie, for that matter) is to watch people squirm and squirt out 34 gallons of blood after getting disemboweled, there's obviously not a lot of substance there. I mentioned Postal 2 because nobody praises its gameplay content.

If it keeps other people entertained, more power to them. I just that kind of stuff incredibly boring. That isn't to say you can't have a good game with buckets of blood... but gore in of itself offers no entertainment value to me. Then again, I'm not 13 anymore.

Applauds

[sethsez]

I can't remember a game in which gore was the sole selling point since Postal 2, and like I said, that didn't exactly fly off the shelves. Manhunt was close, too, but that (to me, anyway) felt like it was making a comment on the violence, even if that's not how it was sold.

I guess the point would have more merit to me if there were games that actually offered nothing but gore, but there aren't. People aren't blown limb from limb in Halo and nobody complained. A few of the WWII FPS don't even have blood (which is rather ridiculous when you consider the context) yet nobody complained.

Do you have any examples for what you're talking about beyond Postal 2?

[Specineff]

I can't remember a game in which gore was the sole selling point since Postal 2, and like I said, that didn't exactly fly off the shelves. Manhunt was close, too, but that (to me, anyway) felt like it was making a comment on the violence, even if that's not how it was sold.

Mortal Kombat, Time Killers, BloodStorm, Survival Arts, and the awful War Gods.

[The n00b]

I can't remember a game in which gore was the sole selling point since Postal 2, and like I said, that didn't exactly fly off the shelves. Manhunt was close, too, but that (to me, anyway) felt like it was making a comment on the violence, even if that's not how it was sold.

Mortal Kombat, Time Killers, BloodStorm, Survival Arts, and the awful War Gods.

Mortal Kombat 1 and 2 were good though.

[sethsez]

I can't remember a game in which gore was the sole selling point since Postal 2, and like I said, that didn't exactly fly off the shelves. Manhunt was close, too, but that (to me, anyway) felt like it was making a comment on the violence, even if that's not how it was sold.

Mortal Kombat, Time Killers, BloodStorm, Survival Arts, and the awful War Gods.

You'll notice I said "since Postal 2" for a reason.

And aside from Mortal Kombat, those games all got absolutely panned (rightfully, I should say). Gaming really started its whole "OMG BLOOD AND GORE IS SOOOO COOL" phase around 1990 or so, and it ended about a decade ago.

[raiden]

Do you have any examples for what you're talking about beyond Postal 2?

well, here in Germany many games get a violence reduced version, because otherwise they face the risk of being banned from stores altogether. This law was designed to keep young people from playing extremely violent games, which of course doesn´t work because they just download the uncut version from the internet. Several people, however, invest the extra effort to import an uncut version just to have the full death animation/gore factor. This hasn´t stopped at all, the last famous example being Resident Evil 4, and with movies, it has been around since the 70´s.
Bloodflower said people wanting to kill other people is in our nature, I just wonder why I don´t feel the impulse, why these games aren´t attractive to me, if it´s supposed to be in my nature.
Concerning Mortal Kombat, I never played it back when it was new because it didn´t appeal to me then, either. Recently, I was at a friend´s house, with two people who claimed to have played all Mortal Kombat parts to death, and who clearly love the series. So I didn´t want to spoil their fun and agreed to play it for once. Guess what? I won each and every round, no matter which character they chose, no matter which one I chose. Without any practice or knowledge about the game, I won consistently against two people who played it for years. Don´t you think that says a bit about the supposed gameplay depth of the series?

[sethsez]

I don't think anyone has ever argued for the gameplay depth of the Mortal Kombat series. It's fun because it's big and dumb. Mortal Kombat is the Saint Bernard puppy of fighting games, running around, knocking over the endtable, skidding on the tiles in the kitchen and smacking into the wall headfirst. People don't love it for the intellectual stimuli and never claimed to. Besides, Mortal Kombat is very much a relic of the period I talked about between 1990 and 1995 where games were just discovering violence. And since you played it, I think it's pretty clear that MK makes absolutely no attempt to be realistic. It's over the top and amazingly campy, with (in the recent games) purposefully awful voice acting to complete the budget martial arts movie feel that it's always been going for.

In addition, I think there's a difference between a game with a lot of gore, and a game in which gore is the point. A war game that focuses on individual units has gore because that fits the theme, not because people want to see heads blow up. People play FPS because they enjoy the mechanics of the genre, not because they like the violence (although most of them don't care about it). However, given the nature of the genre violence is usually a side-effect. Someone who plays a FPS isn't any more likely to enjoy shooting someone than a person who plays Virtua Fighter is going to enjoy beating someone up, which is why I think the term "murder simulator" is just shit-stirring.

[ST Dragon]

So is this X-Box 360 the new X-Box 2?
Or is X-Box 2 going to be released soon after?

[ST Dragon]

Forgive my ignorance, but I remember reading some time ago that the PS-3 was suppose to be miles ahead of the X-Box as far as hardware specs go. But judging by the specs posted, the X-Box has three 3.2GHZ CPU cores, where as the PS-3 only has one(Not clear). PS-3 has 512KB L2 cache where as XBOX 360 has 1MB. PS-3 has 256MB XDR Main RAM @3.2GHz & 256MB GDDR3 VRAM @700MHz, where as the XBOX has 512 MB of 700 MHz GDDR3 RAM Unified memory architecture. The PS-3 has slightly faster nvidia GPU RSX @550MHz comapred to the xbox -ATI 500 MHZ GPU.(by the way whats that 10 MB embedded DRAM)?

So judging by the specs, they're very close, but the PS-3 has System Floating Point Performance of 2 TFLOPS where as the XBOX only 1 TFLOP. So the PS-3 is supposed to be more power.

PS-3 Specs:

CPU: Cell Processor
* PowerPC-base Core @3.2GHz
* 1 VMX vector unit per core
* 512KB L2 cache
* 7 x SPE @3.2GHz
* 7 x 128b 128 SIMD GPRs
* 7 x 256KB SRAM for SPE
* 1 of 8 SPEs reserved for redundancy
* total floating point performance: 218 GFLOPS (2 TFLOPS)


GPU
* RSX @550MHz
* 1.8 TFLOPS floating point performance
* Full HD (up to 1080p) x 2 channels
* Multi-way programmable parallel pipelines

Sound
* Dolby 5.1ch, DTS, LPCM, etc. (Cell- base processing)
Memory
* 256MB XDR Main RAM @3.2GHz
* 256MB GDDR3 VRAM @700MHz

System Bandwidth
* Main RAM: 25.6GB/s
* VRAM: 22.4GB/s
* RSX: 20GB/s (write) + 15GB/s(read)
* SB: 2.5GB/s (write) + 2.5GB/s (read)

System Floating Point Performance
* 2 TFLOPS


X-Box 360 Specs:

Custom IBM PowerPC-based CPU
-3 symmetrical cores at 3.2 GHz each
-2 hardware threads per core
-1 VMX-128 vector unit per core
-1 MB L2 cache

CPU Game Math Performance
-9 billion dots per second

Custom ATI Graphics Processor
-500 MHz
-10 MB embedded DRAM
-48-way parallel floating-point shader pipelines
-unified shader architecture

Memory
-512 MB GDDR3 RAM
-700 MHz DDR

Memory Bandwidth
-22.4 GB/s memory interface bus bandwidth
-256 GB/s memory bandwidth to EDRAM
-21.6 GB/s frontside bus

Audio
-Multi channel surround sound output
-Supports 48kHz 16-bit audio
-320 independent decompression channels
-32-bit processing
-256 audio channels

Overall System Floating-Point Performance 1 teraflop

[dave4shmups]

Right now, both XBOX and Nintendo executives both need to go study Darwin and Cockroaches to figure out why the PS3 is going to own them both if they don't change tactics VERY soon.

[ST Dragon]

What's the name of Nintendo's Next-Gen console?
Specs, Pics, Links?

Thanks in advance.

[jp]

Right now, both XBOX and Nintendo executives both need to go study Darwin and Cockroaches to figure out why the PS3 is going to own them both if they don't change tactics VERY soon.

I doubt it, but we'll see.

[Nei First]

Someone who plays a FPS isn't any more likely to enjoy shooting someone than a person who plays Virtua Fighter is going to enjoy beating someone up, which is why I think the term "murder simulator" is just shit-stirring.

One thing I will say in it's defence is that Fighting games are not nearly as "realistic" as the FPS we have now. Realism is a strong point in this argument. With some FPS you feel like you're really in a battle killing your enemy, with some games you can focus on blowing off certain parts of the body, and it can look real. God knows what they'll be able to pull off with these next-gen consoles, it's different with these kind of games.

I still enjoy FPS though.

[sethsez]

Eh, fighting games can be pretty brutal. FPS have more gore, but fighting games (at least the 3D ones) have impacts that you can feel. Not literally, of course, but someone getting smacked into a wall in VF4 looks damn painful to me.

[Nei First]

Painful? Yes. Realistic? Hardly.

[sethsez]

But FPS aren't realistic either for the most part except for the military games, and in that case there's a contextual purpose for the violence. Halo 2 is no more realistic than VF4, at any rate, and that's all I'm saying.