Alot of people are somewhat unimpressed with what the 360 is showing in it's early launch games. Well, chances are, these people aren't playing them on a large, high quality HDTV display.
I can tell you right now, that a 360 hooked up to a proper HDTV display, looks freaking drop dead gorgeous. I mean, you will see shit that you never imagined was possible. The HD Era is for real as far as I'm concerned. Anybody that doesn't believe me, take a flight to Sacramento, California and come to my Garage. I got a 8 1/2 foot screen that will say otherwise. I run my 360 in 720p, and the Infocus X1 downscales it to 800 x 600 and still looks freaking amazing.
I'm talking totally amazing.
You see NBA 2K6 running in 720p on a that size of a HDTV screen, and you will literally wonder if what you are experiencing is real. No joke.
I'm dead serious.
Now... Here is the bad part. The bad part is that the 360 doesn't look that great on my 51 inch Sony in my living room. It looks impressive, but it doesn't look light years beyond Xbox 1 games. So, you are probably thinking, "Ok, so the 360 looks great on gigantic screens and looks mediocre on normal screens, who gives a rats ass, none of us have a 8 foot screen in our damn garages".
Well, the 360 looks absolutely astonishing on my little 30 inch 16:9 princeton graphics AF 3.0 HD precision HDTV reference display. Of course, it's no coincidence that a AF 3.0 can display the full native 720p signal in it's natural form.
For example.... Playing Madden '06 on the 8 foot screen is amazing, just for the sheer scope of it all, but playing it on my little Princeton Graphics 30 incher is an even better experience. Sure you sacrifice an incredible reduction in size, but you gain significantly greater detail. The detail gets so damn ridiculous at times that it actually distacts from the gameplay!!! I mean, it's like you have to stop sometimes and just admire what you are witnessing on screen. Of course, in alot of games, doing that will get you killed. Or sacked. Or posterized.
Right now, I have NBA 2K6, Madden 06, Perfect Dark Zero, Kameo, Condemned and Project Gotham Racing in my possesion. I'm renting Condemned and NBA 2K6. I ended up buying Kameo, Prefect Dark, Madden and PGR. All 6 of these games look absolutely amazing. Project Gotham Racing is probably the biggest Tour De Force. NBA 2K6 is a close second. Condemned, PDO and Madden are all very impressive as well. I'm happy as hell with these games.
But I can definitely say that all of these games look dramatically different on the various TV's that I play them on. It's amazing to me, how playing the 360 on different kinds of TV's, gives such dramatically different results.
The 360 on my 51 inch Sony HDTV looks quite mediocre. I mean, it definitely looks better than Xbox 1, but not by a drastic margin. And this is an ok HDTV. So I can imagine how dissapointing the 360 could seem on non High Def TV's.
However, seeing Madden on my Princeton Graphics or NBA 2K6 on my 8 foot dream is like a religious experience.