Sony says PS3 only console powerful enough for Killzone 2 as OPM UK announces first official review

Blah blah blah blah, etc.

I really wish OPM would do a version for about 3 or 4 quid without the disc. It’s a very good mag – arguably the pick of the official ones – but that disc is just useless to me, and (I’d imagine) a substantial portion of its readership.

Wait – official mag ‘good’? Does not compute! Bzzzt! BOOM!

OOOH SHINY!

Blah blah blah

Thanks Hero of Canton. The wallet really is shiny though. Like crushed butterfly wings being sprinkled into a rainbow. Have a look in Smith’s – I semi-guarantee you’ll at least give a slight ‘oooh’. And congrats on the new releases Pat. Can’t remember if I said that before.

Fancy sending a copy to Denmark, Tim?

Seriously, how long have you been at that mag….

I bought the Issue 026: Christmas Edition.

Glad I did, cus you had some Demon’s Souls info in there. And I won’t have to download a good 50% of the demos from the PSN store.

Yeah, I might pick this one up.

I still have one of them from the PSone Days, I really need to find it. The cover was Simpsons wrestling I think. It had Driver 2 tips in it.

Aaaah, those were the days.

I just want to know how you fill a whole mag full of positive information on the PS3. Maybe I should pick it up and find out, I’m aching for mine to seem more of a worthwhile purchase.

How long? Oh Christ. I’ve always been here. Like the caretaker at the Overlook Hotel. I’ve even used that joke before.

Every now and then I talk about leaving. My publisher just laughs.

Maybe I’m more like John C Reilly in Platoon – a lifer.

Are you actually Denmark based then, Mike?

Yeah, I am. Sexual refugee about 10 years ago.

He’s a reformed male escort.

@Morrius

Well we try not to make it too much like a glee club. Generally though, we’re not short on content. Without wanting to get into any hot console-on-console action, I’d rather be writing about our lineup than anyone else’s – but I play all three systems, lest that sound too partisan. That said, I’m a ridiculous HD whore so the Wii barely gets a look in.

OPSM UK costs about £15 where I live.

That’s a mental amount of money.

Most powerful console blah blah. Shame how one of the engineers at IBM who worked on both disagreed last week

Game looks great and I’m there day one but throw four years and enough cash at a team to work exclusively on the 360 they’d be able to get something looking just as good.

Have to hand it to Guerilla for getting pretty close to “that” trailer though

Only console powerful enough to do this particular game in the very specific ways it does things?

Cheers, Tim.

*broken*

Wait a minute, i subscribe to the mag, i didn’t get one of those shiny things, Tim if you’re still around, sort it out, do subscribers not get the shiny thing, is it just to attract shelf shoppers, i’ve subscribed to all three “Official” mags and i want free stuff… it’s bad enough that now if you subscribe you get a free BluRay, i got nowt.

Pat, I got tired looking after my niece for an hour. She said she wanted the same story reading twice in a row. “That’s ridiculous,” I explained,”you know the ending now.” It was the croc comes to tea or something. Spoiler: he eats all the food.

Fail at parenting.

Sennasit, the packaging doesn’t go to subs – primarily to avoid waste I think. Sorry. But we’re saving the planet one hologrammatic piece of card at a time I guess.

I’m a reformed Ford Escort.

@Tim:

I read my son the same story about 5 times a night!!

*checks email*

*still nothing*

@ deftangel
It’s common knowledge that it looks considerably better than “that” trailer, not “pretty close”.

My arse it does!

That just, like, your opinion, man.

Er no bollocks to opinion. There’s no way it looks better than the original trailer. You’ve only got to look at the faces for that.

It looked very good when I saw it running at EG Expo, not as good as the completely pre-rendered movie from ages ago, but as close as any current generation console hardware is likely to pull off.

As for looking better than it, that’s bullshit.

In some elements it’s much better looking:

Fire, Art direction, Motion Blur

In others it’s not as good:

Smoke, poly-count.

it still stands that there are people who think that it looks better than the CG, and that is an achievement in itself, so go ahead and have your opinion.

And Deftangel, you can’t disregard it like that. They are totally different consoles. They work radically different. All I can say is that Killzone, didn’t have a budget that high above you’re average HD game (shockingly). $21 mil according to an article I found in the NeoGAF thread.

4 years? Well 2/3 years really, since Liberation was done inbetween the E305 trailer and the E307 one.

@TimClark

It’s ‘the tiger who came to tea’.

Still a classic…

There was a Killzone 2 trailer at E3 2005. It releases at the end of Feb 2009. Assuming they didn’t dream up the trailer the night before E3 like I used to with my Art Homework then that’s four years on my calendar.

The format wars bullshit is very 2006. Everybody and their dog has had their say on it and the general consensus has been their designs are radically different but they are roughly equivalent in terms of overall performance. The PS3 just has a steeper learning curve as it’s a more radical architecture.

That’s more or less what a chap from IBM said last week. Given they designed large parts of both boxes I’m inclined to think he’d know what he’s talking about.

As for budget, it was rumoured to have risen to EU42m on this very site last year. EU21m was the original estimate. That’s a pretty expensive game!

Like I say, if you gave a competent developer that amount time & money to develop their own propriety engine on the 360 and give them the same art direction, you’d get a very similar output. Both systems have their limitations. The 360′s is not being able to rely on the hard drive, the PS3′s is memory but anyone saying Game X would not be possible on Platform Y is largely talking out of their ass.

To quote gamesradar:
“E3 2005 gave us the infamous MotorStorm and Killzone 2 trailers. They looked amazing – too good to be true. And of course, they were too good to be true, generated as ‘target footage’ by Sony. MotorStorm came close (sort of) but failed. And now we’ve got playable preview version of Killzone 2 sitting in our PS3, we can tell you that it doesn’t look as good as that early footage.

It looks better.”

See: http://www.gamesradar.com/f/killzone-2-2005-07-and-08-graphics-compared-in-video/a-20081217113324546074

It’s only their opinion, but it also happens to be fact.

@deftangel

Do you have a link to the IBM guy quote?

I’ve always read that Cell is significantly more powerful than MS’s CPU solution, and given that KZ2 makes full use of the SPE’s to get the graphics it does, it’s one time where I’m inclined to agree that this game is only possible in its current form on PS3.

No problem being proven wrong here BTW, but I’ve had a keen interest in the tech behind KZ2, and as everything is so heavily based around the unique functionality of the SPE’s, I don’t see where the 360 could substitute that amount of grunt from.

now why did he have to go and say that lol.

Was gonna go off an talk tons, but it’s not worth it.

Let me revert to this fallacy.

Let me see somethign to challenge it on the 360.

Let me see the next Halo (not ODST), whatever that Asian woman is working on. Because thats where we will see the fruits of labour.

Anyway as I said… it was NOT 4 years. Liberation was developed between the E305 trailer, and the E307 reveal, by Guerilla Games.

And $42mil is still less than half of GTAIV’s cost. And therefore, I expect less than many AAA games.

So there was neitehr excessive time, nor too far above the average investment. All it was was exploring alternative techniques, to suit the alternative hardware.

Oh not looking to stir trouble, I’d just genuinely be interested to talk about the tech of each console. I know 360 is ahead of PS3 in memory and gpu, but from what I’ve read, that’s not going to bridge the gap between Cells 6 spu’s targeted at rendering the game.

Honestly, I’ve no problem being proven wrong, I’m just keen to discuss the tech side of things, as I’ve taken quite an interest in the tech behind this engine.

Psychotext is your man.

Shocked me actually quite how intelligeable he is on that subject.

Heh!

Yeah, that sounded like an apologetic compliment.

The guy knows his stuff.

The thread I lurked in, there was still the battle of which is stronger, and both sides were putting up a great points, from documented evidence.

You leave me out of this… I’m sure TEA is lurking around here somewhere just waiting to scream xbot at me the second I post anything even vaguely Sony related.

“And of course, they were too good to be true, generated as ‘target footage’ by Sony. MotorStorm came close (sort of) but failed.”

Only if you watched the original target trailer on a 14″ rubbish portable. Motorstorm didn’t look anything like the quality of the pre-render, that’s bollocks.

Yeah Motorstorm didn’t, thats true.

But then, some thigns, (as with the KZ2 CG) don’t fit with gameplay as well either.

I’ll believe that the graphics are better when I see it for myself. I remember all the hype over GTA4, and while it’s a pretty game, the graphics engine didnt look as good as some of the pictures that I saw before the games release. It was so overhyped.
Im sure KZ2 will look incredible, but to say it can be better than tht pre-rendered movie is just stupid. That initial opening scene where it showed the city underneath.
No way it can look exactly like that, im sure it will be a nice enough aproximation however.

They did it in 2007. And there’s other sections in the final game, I am sure we haven’t seen, where the city is shown from above.

N’Gai Croal played it in 2007 though.

So the City view isn’t impossible by any means.

I just read somewhere that OPM UK gave KZ2 9/10. Is this true?

Yeah OPMUK 9/10, OPMUS 10/10, some dodgey website review which got pulled 99%.

Oh dear, OPM UK usually scores Sony exclusives one point higher than the industry average. It’s a good score, but this will be siezed upon by the doubters.

8 would also be a good score.

On the other hand OPMUS, has scored other PS3 exclusives pretty scathingly.

Motorstorm PR was a 6, was it not?

And Warhawk a 7 (it’s defintely DEFINTELY not)