Thanks

Thanks, stopped me having to come up with other excuses not to buy a Microsoft console:

1) Unfulfillable sales-spin of the highest order.

Seriously, stop talking shite. Do you mean it can render in HD? Do you mean it can render X million polygons a second with full shaders etc.? Or do you mean I can put up a pre-rendered image and say "It's as good as Avatar" (not that I've even seen the movie, nor care)? Because what you WANT people to think you mean is vastly different to what you ACTUALLY mean. What you WANT people to think is that this is equivalent to a modern supercomputer churning for months on end - in reality, it'll be underpowered compared to a recent gaming laptop.

2) The games I get most enjoyment out of are almost inversely proportional to the time / effort / processing spent detailing the characters.

Games development is already far too long and far too expensive and I wouldn't touch a game that advertised itself on the basis that it "looked more realistic". It just means they spent more time on the artwork and less on the gameplay. Any idiot can rent Avatar if that's the sort of thing they want to look at - personally, for me, a games console plays games.

3) The AI claims are utter tosh.

What you mean is that the individual pedestrians have a handful of attributes and select one of many pre-selected options as to what to do (run, shoot back, hide, etc.). That's *NOT* AI. It's simple heuristics. And it doesn't matter if you do it with one or a million on-screen characters, it doesn't mean they are doing anything other than the same pre-scripted actions that every game of that sort has. Show me a problem where you can just throw more power at something and get "better" AI and I'll demonstrate that it's not AI at all.

And in terms of gaming - I've yet to see any significant advance in "AI" players in decades. Hell, most AAA titles still have things getting stuck in walls, being lured to certain death one at a time without the rest noticing, walking into quite obvious traps and literally being manipulated by the player into dying in the way the player wants. "True" AI doesn't make for fun games at all, anyway.

the fuck?

"would pave the way for every pedestrian in games such as Grand Theft Auto to have an individual mentality." o_O

Spoken like a true guy-who-doesn't-know-a-fucking-thing-about-game-design.

How do you quantify "as good as Avatar" anyway? Does this mean playing on The 720 will require being a dribbling, mindless, hot-topic clad drone?

Movies looked better when they used latex and macaroni anyway. I'm not even being nostalgic or Ludditean.