Every so often, Eurogamer run a series of technical comparison reviews for games released on both Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.
This is the latest update to the full list.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 Every so often, Eurogamer run a series of technical comparison reviews for games released on both Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.
This is the latest update to the full list.
Every so often, Eurogamer run a series of technical comparison reviews for games released on both Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.
This is the latest update while the full list is here.
Every so often, Eurogamer run a series of technical comparison reviews for games released on both Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.
This is the latest update while the full list is here.
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Prey (2006) Cherokee Tommy wants to take his girlfriend and leave the reservation to make a new life for himself but a giant alien spaceship lands and starts devouring his hometown and ‘leaving the reservation’ takes on a whole new meaning. 7/10 Good first-person-shooter which introduced some interesting mechanics manipulating gravity and space (before Portal made it fashionable) and has some spectacular effects and vistas. Tellingly, one of the climactic boss battles is notably traumatic (a good thing, by the way) and demonstrates that the game has successfully involved the player emotionally even if they thought they weren’t. Probably in a concession to playability, this is a surprisingly linear game with only a single puzzle (a cube you rotate) that you aren’t hand-held through and, after a short while, you can’t die (after level 4, you just get mildly inconvenienced). However, making a game more playable certainly isn’t a criticism and Prey feels just right to control, understand and play. No, Prey’s more notable flaws come with tone, particularly in the first level (oops), as this begins by needlessly forcing you to brutally beat two dudes with a wrench for almost no reason and having you swear strongly throughout the game. I don’t mind saving the world or shooting monsters but I didn’t like having that behaviour imposed on me. This game contains frequent sexual swear words (especially in the last couple of levels) and extreme and graphic violence, extremely gory and extremely unpleasant scenes and nudity.
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Every so often, Eurogamer run a series of technical comparison reviews for games released on both Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. This is the latest update while the full list is here.
F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin
I’ve moved this Head-to-Head list to a more permanent location. Sorry for the inconvenience.
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King Kong, Peter Jackson’s: Official Game of the Movie, The (2005) Travelling to Skull Island, filmmaker Carl Denham is hoping to use the location and super-sized wildlife to make a film like no-one has ever seen before. And make lots of money, naturally. A storm sees the cast and crew shipwrecked onto the island, however, and you, the writer, Jack, and the star, Anne, will soon have entirely new roles in an unimaginable story. 8/10 Not just a great game-of-a-movie but a great game. The odd camera, graphical and control niggle (the 360 version sometimes renders at a lower quality than usual and Kong’s horizontal camera controls are reversed in the New York level for no obvious reason) is absolutely nothing compared to the brilliance, atmosphere and freshness of the gameplay, amazing considering this is essentially a first-person shooter with the odd bit of third-person button mashing. Of special mention are the absolutely thunderous sound effects which, on 5.1 surround systems, will seriously upset the neighbours. Cool. This videogame contains violence, unpleasant scenes. Classified 12 by BBFC. Suitable only for persons of 12 years and over. |
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Test Drive: Unlimited (2006) The Hawaiian island of Oahu is your playground for expensive houses, clothes, bikes and, of course, cars from hatchbacks and nice family saloons all the way up to eyes-on-stalks supercars. Race against the clock, against the islands drivers and online against drivers from all over the world or just put on your favourite radio station and take a relaxing drive and soak in the scenery. 8/10 Extremely well thought out and extremely large open world driving game with lots of cars to drive and lots and lots of roads to drive them on. Bikes, hundreds of costumes and full avatar creation are the icing on the cake but the thing that really sticks in the mind is the exemplary interface that puts everything you need at your fingertips in a very clear and highly usable manner. Online integration is also outstanding. |
Free stuff is great. Great free stuff is even better.
A couple of years ago Nadeo released an Nvidia / Electronic Sports World Cup-sponsored version of it’s TrackMania series called TrackMania Nations EWSC Edition. What was surprising was that it featured an entirely new and brilliant environment and a super new car and was also completely fully featured with all the gameplay of its retail daddy Trackmania Sunrise. I spent an awful lot of time on Nations and really enjoyed designing tracks for it and playing online.
My best track is SuperModel which is just one block wide, awesome in multiplayer, requires a little thought to conquer and master, but because I neglected to take a screenshot, it didn’t get downloaded too much. Stupid lazy me.
So it is with genuine delight that I greet Nadeo’s Trackmania Nations Forever. This is a fully featured game again, this time spawned from TrackMania United (which also receives a free 900Mb update!). It features an upgraded version of the Nations environment (a really smart stadium), lots of new tracks and brings along the online enhancements delivered in United. Yay!
You can get TrackMania Nations Forever direct from Nadeo or, better, from Steam. Why better from Steam? The TrackMania Nations Forever page on Nadeo sucks up 100% CPU on my Opera browser and batters a huge chunk of CPU on Internet Explorer. It’s really really bad. So use Steam.
It should also be noted that game.co.uk are currently selling TrackMania United itself for a measly £4.99.
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Gran Turismo (1998)
10/10 Genre-defining racing game classic. I’ve taken another look at it almost ten years on now and the driving is as good as ever. Using a PC emulator, I had it set up with a high resolution display and analogue steering and analogue brake and accelerate on the Xbox 360 Controller shoulder triggers. Worked like a charm (aside from an humungous ePSXe-introduced dead-zone in the steering which has be got used to). Ridiculously, a lot of sim-slanted driving games since do not match this great game for that feel of being in control of a vehicle and knowing what it is doing from the vibration and screen feedback. |
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Simulador Turismo Carretera (2007) The 2006 ACTC (Asociación Corredores Turismo Carretera) season has 60 cars, with real drivers, 12 circuits not seen in any other licensed game modelled using GPS technology, hyper realistic physics, championship rules, and full race weekends. 7/10 Based on the ISI rFactor engine this has all the strengths and weaknesses inherited from that but adds the wonderful bonus of racing on national Argentinian tracks you’ve never raced in any other game. The weaknesses of rFactor are horrendous inaccessibility, awful environmental graphics and, unless you’re very awake with your gamepad, an almost cruel insistence on steering wheels. The strengths are beautiful, detailed car models, natural, aware AI and, most importantly, incredibly convincing and responsive physics accurately and consistently conveyed to the player. The strengths certainly outweigh the weaknesses if you are willing to put the practice in and, with that caveat, this is highly worthwhile. Links |
The Conflict series hits the five game milestone by following up Desert Storm, Desert Storm II, Vietnam and Global Storm with Conflict: Denied Ops.
A demo has been released for the three target platforms: PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. How do they compare and which will be the one to buy?
Things start badly for the PC. It took a ridiculously long time to install, nearly ten minutes. Then, for some reason, they have managed to use a video format that probably won’t work on your XP PC. Helpfully they supply a Windows Media 11 patch to fix this. It doesn’t. Thanks.
Anyway, an iffy video codec won’t affect the gameplay, will it? Well, it might stop you even bothering to get to the gameplay. You have to skip the treacle-slow movie by hammering the Escape key until the planets align and the key-press is recognised. If you can’t be bothered, you’ll never even see the game. Brilliantly, the outro video doesn’t allow you to skip but the demo is fully Windows-friendly and behaves itself if you press Ctrl-Alt-Del for bring up Task Manager and that handy End Process option.
Once I got into the game itself I was a little perturbed to see that my system simply couldn’t handle it. My PC can play Bioshock smoothly with just a single option turned off. Disappointed, I went into the graphics options are starting turning things off to get a usable frame rate. After a couple of different items made little discernible difference in frame rate, I decided to turn everything off. While marginally better, it was still virtually unplayable. The engine used here clearly has no innate performance (that fact will be borne out by the badly compromised PS3 version). On top of that, it looked horrible even with everything turned on.
Perhaps the consoles will be better.
The PS3 at least runs at a consistent frame rate. Nice, smooth and eminently playable. I had an enjoyable time playing the mission supplied in split-screen Co-op. However, it looks horrid and doesn’t feel like it is running in a true HD resolution (it’s feels almost as ugly as the PS3 version of Fear). Perhaps the low resolution, jaggies and blurry textures would be eliminated in single player. Nope, the PS3 version of this demo is staggeringly ugly.
Now on 360 we get something unique. Uniquely rubbish, unfortunately. The developers are so inept and / or careless that the demo isn’t actually called “Conflict: Denied Ops Demo”, oh no. It’s called “Single Player and 2 player Co-op Demo.”
However, once you’ve found the demo, this is easily the best looking of the bunch as it runs smoothly and looks okay. The explosion where the wall gets dropped on the tank at the beginning is smaller than on the PC but the remainder of the combustible landscape looks cool. The textures are sharp though aliased and the games runs very smoothly.
Slimm Says
Xbox 360, no question. What’s more disappointing about the technical and design shortcomings and overall carelessness is that there is definitely reasonably entertaining gameplay. The gameplay does shine through on the ugly PS3 version if you can keep your eyes open long enough while the PC version is virtually unplayable. The 360 version looks and plays fine.
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Colin McRae: Dirt (2007) 9/10 Colin McRae Dirt is the best in the series since the brilliant Colin McRae Rally 2.0 and, surprisingly, establishes itself as the best next-gen racing game by some way. Outstanding graphics (especially on the smooth-running PlayStation 3 version), excellent sound, reference-quality presentation, lovely and accessible replays and lots to see and do are all the icing on the cake of the fun and excitement of the core driving sensation. Classified 12+ by PEGI. The game is only suitable for persons who have reached the age of 12 or over. |
Codemasters have released a PlayStation 3 demo for their off-road racing game DiRT.
The first thing that hits you is the size:
Either Codies techies have recently learned how to zip files or the PS3 has significantly lower quality something somewhere. The question is: does it make any serious difference?
For me, the PS3 didn’t feel quite as sharp visually as either Xbox 360 or PC but it does feel much smoother and more consistent.
Where this really factors in is in control. For me, the PC demo simply could not be setup satisfactorily with a gamepad. No matter what setup options I used, the gamepad was always far too sensitive.
Both the 360 and PS3 demos instantly feel fine. The 360 gets plus marks for rumble and terrific triggers but the PS3’s much lighter controller and no rumble makes for a far less fatiguing experience (this applies to all 360 / PS3 control comparisons). The general smoothness of the PS3 demo also means that you feel more in control and that minute adjustments can be consistently applied with effects that can be consistently anticipated.
The accuracy of the PS3 controls does highlight what is probably the biggest problem with DiRT as a game: the apparent simplicity of the driving model. DiRT is not as satisfying to drive around in as Forza Motorsport 2 on the 360 or Motorstorm or Gran Turismo HD Concept 2.0 on the PS3. Those games feel like you’re driving the vehicle depicted while DiRT feels a little more like you’re moving the camera. Well, that’s being a bit harsher than I meant. While it’s certainly not as satisfying a driving experience, it is consistent and eminently playable.
Slimm Says
For me, the PS3 demo just comes out on top thanks to its smoother feel and accurate and consistent controls.
On all the demos, I really miss Nicky Grist.
Classified 18 by BBFC. Suitable only for persons of 18 years and over. 
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