Maybe it' s just the fault of his XBox ;)

My friends launch xbox had some really werid errors. Somehow everything was flickering and textures as well as some graphic effects did really look fucked up.

So I suppose your friend' s 360 is suffering from the same problems, he should get replacement ;)

He' s on his second.. :P
I' ll visit him some day, and ask him to see if the game has grown better graphics on his newer console. :)

The lighting is badbadbad. It' s like there is no advanced lighting at all. Just... light.

The photos they placed on the buildings look nice. But if you look at the edges of the houses and all the other things it looks like it' s completely flat.

The whole picture looks like someone took a couple of photos of houses, chairs and a car and glued them standing on a photo of a brick road. You know, like you did at school when you were small.
So it looks like there' s nothing at all behind those walls. A house normaly have four walls, but these look like they only the front wall.

The overall impression gets pretty impressive at first glance though. But when you start looking you' ll notice the flaws.

Blu-Ray will come in handy when a racing game developer decides to use HD video backdrops instead of static panoramic photographs like those used in GT4/Concept.

Look at Railfan for instance; there' s no need for animated backgrounds because the environment is just HD video of a realworld location. As you drive around a track in Gran Turismo, the mountains don' t move or anything but it' d be far more immersive if the clouds and trees etc weren' t rendered by the graphics card. It wouldn' t just be realistic, it' d be real. As long as you could match the lighting and the vehicle models were detailed enough the results would be impressive.

I guess you could do something similar with the track or even cars if you had lots of HD cameras and Matrix-like multi-angle rigs. It wouldn' t be that hard to do with the technology, it' s just that it would require a developer to take a huge risk.