Europeans: your x360 impressions so far please.

[Guden Oden]

A recent interview with the developer for GW says that he's using all three cores.

Very nice! I was actually about to make a suggestion to Dave that he interview the programmer of this amazing little game!

I'm sure we could learn all kinds of little tidbits if B3D was to make a feature on XBL Arcade in general and GW in particular.

Only thing I'd like to see is an on-screen indicator of my current score multiplier, other than that the game is pretty much perfect in its simplicity really.

 

[Dave Glue]

. You don't see Apple doing the cheap-looking silver spray and chrome metal stuff now do you?

Uh...ever turned around an iPod?

 

[dubyateeeff]

Well, you see, I keep tyring to persuade the wife that a nice 37"-42" HDTV Plasma would be a good, sensible, purchase (even actually reclaiming some living room space in relation to the old 32" Widescreen CRT) but she seems to think there are far greater priorities such as a new garage roof and some such. I shall keep trying but she does appear to be digging her heals in a little over this one. <sigh>

You know... if you get a plasma HDTV at the same size as the garage roof she cant complain? You just need to get a comfy bed to lie down and watch it in.

 

[Corwin_B]

I got MS technical support on phone today, they were pretty helpful and didn't treat me as an idiot (which is a nice change of pace from other tech supports). They are organizing the pickup of my 360 through UPS and will repair it or exchange it under 2 weeks. Not as good as launch day, but still better than people who didn't preorder (my local video games shop told me their 4 1st shipments were only for preorders).

 

[therealskywolf]

I got my Xbox 360 yesterday.

Well, i'm very pleased so far, my only grip is that it comes with a Power brick the size of a PsTwo.

And....the controller is heavy? Wtf are you talking about lolol? Really i was with some friends and every reaction in the room was "Wow, so light(?)"

Oh and regarding the rest of the design....well i'm the opposite of you.

 

[Geo]

Very nice! I was actually about to make a suggestion to Dave that he interview the programmer of this amazing little game!

You mean Mordenkainen? Isn't that his gig here?

 

[Kanyamagufa]

Uh...ever turned around an iPod?

Yeah, but it looks damn good on those.

As for the EU impressions, they certainly paint a brighter picture for Microsoft. No one's mentioned a failure in Europe yet, have they?

 

[Guden Oden]

And....the controller is heavy? Wtf are you talking about lolol? Really i was with some friends and every reaction in the room was "Wow, so light(?)"

Hold 360 wireless controller in one hand and a dual shock in the other. 360 is clearly, noticeably heavier even if you take out the batteries.

 

[PiNkY]

On the whole i like it alot. Guden already pointed out the larger gripes (where to me the top half connectors (av & 802.11) really stand out as they just make the unit look unnecesarily cluttered). Another one would be noise, especially when the console is just sitting there charging your wireless controller through the play and charge kit (fans keep spinning here, which feels ridiculous). My last gripe is live download speed... here we are in the futuristic year 2005 with multimegabit internet connections and multiple 3+ghz cpus and wait hours, while a measly 500 megabyte download blocks the whole system...

PGR3: This one rocks. It is PGR2 and then some, especially on the live side of things. Nice graphics, sound, blabla... What stands out is the sense of speed, especially on 720p. All the blurred fast moving details make this the most believable console racing game yet. Talking of speed, loading times are an issue (at least to me) though. Of course there is a lot more data to be read from next-gen discs, the loading times on retries however, make me wonder... Besides i found the game to have issues when inspecting gamer cards on live. This led to three crashes for me so far.

PDZ: Haven't put to much time in it yet. The scale of some of the locales did impress me though.

GWE: Just played the demo but it sure is an addictive sucker. Kind of makes you wonder whether video game evolution has always been for the better...

 

[Bill]

Pretty sure Scooby is Canadian.

Haha, OWNED. LOL, so hilarious!

Dunno why Europeans are always bashing America on the net. Gets a bit annoying.

 

[Guilty Bystander]

Europeans: your x360 impressions so far please.

It rocks nuff said!!

No seriously the graphics are just spectacular.
Kameo, PGR3 and even Condemned do things I haven't seen my PC and I own an Amd 64 with a GeForce 7800 GTX TOP.
Floating point blend HDR lightning, per pixel lightning, per pixel shadowing, light blooming, high res soft shadows, motion blur, field extremely high res textures, extremely high polygoncounts all done in-game.

And this is all running just one core with almost no optimisations.
Also the Xenos is being used as a normal GPU developers aren't using tilling or tesselation.
Just wait for the 2nd gen titles it will be mind blowing.

 

[Guilty Bystander]

I like everything about the 360, except the games just dont graphically wow me.

Play it on a HDTV using 720p and we'll talk again.
Kameo does effects I've never seen on the PC.
Not in any 3Dmark, FEAR, Doom 3, HL2, Quake 4, nothing.

Not impressed pfff... better stuff it if you're gonna be saying **** like that.
Go dream about SLI consoles or some such **** cause you clearly have no clue.

 

[Guden Oden]

And this is all running just one core with almost no optimisations.

You can be sure all launch games use more than one core to some extent.

Also, do you think you can cool your rampant fan-ism a bit, this is a serious discussion thread, not your personal mudhole where you can fling insults at other forum participants. Thank you.

 

[therealskywolf]

Hold 360 wireless controller in one hand and a dual shock in the other. 360 is clearly, noticeably heavier even if you take out the batteries.

........there's a difference between being heavier...and being Heavy.

 

[Magnum PI]

PGR's bad framerate and PD0's also bad framerate.

do you have a better framerate if you play in 480i mode ?

 

[kyleb]

Don't both those games render at the same resolution reguarldeess of the selected output mode?

 

[Dave Glue]

And this is all running just one core with almost no optimisations.

COD2 uses all three cores for one - and how do you possibly know the optimization level?

Just wait for the 2nd gen titles it will be mind blowing.

I think you got lost on your way to the IGN forums kid.

 

[Sis]

COD2 uses all three cores for one - and how do you possibly know the optimization level?

Geometry Wars--an Arcade Live game!--uses all three cores as well.

.Sis

 

[Guilty Bystander]

COD2 uses all three cores for one - and how do you possibly know the optimization level?

Infinity Ward says so that's why it's one of the uckliest launchtitles.
With PGR3 Bizarre just took out the debug and that's about it.

I think you got lost on your way to the IGN forums kid.

I know you got lost on your way to PC fortress Anandtech.
By the way I'm no kid.

 

[Guden Oden]

Please keep your garbage posts out of this thread, Guilty. It's about early Euro impressions, not random fanperson gibbering and goading of other forum users.