Thursday, November 24, 2005
Xbox 360 Hands On Review - Call Of Duty 2
In common with every teenage boy in the UK, I spent part of yesterday trying out the Xbox 360 demo machines that have landed in the nation's gaming emporia. I'm really impressed by Call Of Duty. The game is a sort of "Saving Private Ryan" simulator. It authentically captures the look and feel of the film, and the gameplay is great. The backgrounds and the "SFX" are amazing. The 360 does a fantastic job of rendering beautiful detailed textures, with no redraw problems. The smoke grenades produce a startlingly real cloud of smoke over the battlefield, much more sophisticated than anything the Xbox or PS2 could do. The major flaw though lies in the "uncanny valley". The graphics for the soldiers are great, but no matter how lifelike, they're still not emotive. They run around and bark commands, their heads explode when they take sniper fire; but they feel like toy soldiers. I feel just the same apathy for Mario on the 1" GB Micro, as I do for my high-definiton WWII squadron in CoD. Until the faces of the soldiers are actually indistinguishable from faces in TV footage, I think we'll all continue to suffer a sort of videogame prosopagnosia.
In common with every teenage boy in the UK, I spent part of yesterday trying out the Xbox 360 demo machines that have landed in the nation's gaming emporia. I'm really impressed by Call Of Duty. The game is a sort of "Saving Private Ryan" simulator. It authentically captures the look and feel of the film, and the gameplay is great. The backgrounds and the "SFX" are amazing. The 360 does a fantastic job of rendering beautiful detailed textures, with no redraw problems. The smoke grenades produce a startlingly real cloud of smoke over the battlefield, much more sophisticated than anything the Xbox or PS2 could do. The major flaw though lies in the "uncanny valley". The graphics for the soldiers are great, but no matter how lifelike, they're still not emotive. They run around and bark commands, their heads explode when they take sniper fire; but they feel like toy soldiers. I feel just the same apathy for Mario on the 1" GB Micro, as I do for my high-definiton WWII squadron in CoD. Until the faces of the soldiers are actually indistinguishable from faces in TV footage, I think we'll all continue to suffer a sort of videogame prosopagnosia.
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