If people just wanted to " play the games" then we wouldn' t have any newer consoles than the NES. Why upgrade graphic and sound power when only the games matter? That is your reason for the " microscope" , especially for a system like the Xbox360. There isn' t much out for it that is decent as far as gameplay is concerned right now, and people want to make sure they got what they paid for.

I' m not saying that improvements aren' t great. Hell, I' m a graphics whore, myself, but I don' t need to know how many times anti-aliasing something uses, or how many frames per second it runs at to know if it looks good or not. I use my eyes.

As far as good games, gameplay wise, you know that is very subjective. I love first person shooters, so I think the 360 is a little slice of heaven. You, being a FPS hater, would most likely NOT enjoy the pickings from the 360 thus far.

Actually, I kind of understand why YOU' re all into the tech and stuff, seeing as how you' re an A/V man (although I think it' s more A than V if I' m correct). I' m just glad that I can enjoy the next-gen right NOW, as opposed to wondering whether the PS3 or Wii is gonna come in and pwn the industry, or something.

But, cmon Joe. Even you have to admit that the Live Arcade games are pretty fun!

I don' t yet own an Xbox360. I was going to get one for MotoGP but decided not to once I heard about the framerate issues. I use my eyes for framerate purposes as well. I can easily tell the difference between 60fps and 30. I am a big racing game fan and yes, I would buy Project Gotham 3. I am glad the games look amazing to you as that gives me more hope for when I buy my system. I just have one request: Fewer war simulators, please!

Xbox360 isn' t quite powerful enough to run games in full 1080i resolution. All games run at 720p or lower and are upscaled due to the wimpy graphics card inside the machine.

It' s not the hardware. It' s the game engine that' s the problem. The hardware is new. The more developers learn, the better they can create game engines.

You' ll probably find that the first year of PS3 games will also suffer the same issues that plague the first year X360 games. Especially launch games.

Devs will be put through massive time crunches and immense amounts of pressure just to get the games done for launch. That means not much time can be devoted to optimization or bugfixes. So they not only have to learn how to program for the hardware but they also have to figure out how to get the best performance out of it.

I still think anyone hoping for 1080p 60fps for all PS3 games with antialiasing/filtering is going to be sorely disappointed. It' s just not going to be possible this time around unless you severely degrade the visual quality of the game.