DOAU look better than DOA3, which isn' t surprising since DOAU uses the DOAVB engine (which is just an enhanced DOA3 engine). Sounds like a good thing, but DOAVB wasn' t graphically better than DOA3 by that much.

Now we have DOAU and its age is starting to show IMO. Character models aren' t noticeable better and texture quality hasn' t significantly improved either. The only real differences I notice are better lighting and particle effects in the background. The game is artistically better, but on a pure technical level DOAU just looks dated.

These are essentially the same graphics we' ve been viewing for the past three years. Granted they' ve been tweaked, but there is no real graphically leap. From Halo 1 to Halo 2 the graphical difference is obvious. But on any given day you could easily mistake DOAU for DOA3.

Itagaki is supposed to be a " graphics who*re" , but it' s obvious he' s not pushing the X-Box' s graphics to their limit. After 4 games from the same engine (DOA3, DOAVB, NG, DOAU) you' d think Itagaki would have thrown in some bump mapping somewhere. Unfortunately all four games just blend together graphically turning them from beautiful to bland. How many times can I possibly be impressed by the same character model?

To quote any random car commercial -- Had Itagaki truly been trying to push the X-Box, we could be seeing the graphics of tomorrow today!

P.S. I' m basing this off playing the DOAU demo, playing DOA3 afterwards, then playing DOAU again.