-> Crunshii: Seeing as disc swaps are usually one time affairs, the combined load times of bluray discs would be far slower, seeing as it has to be done every time the game/a level is loaded. You also make the erroneous assumption that blackdove's reasoning is based on fact, which it isn't really.

-> BlackDove: This is an uncompressed image:


This is a compressed jpeg(via discrete cosine transform, huffman encoding, differential encoding and quantisation, both perceptual and lossless redundancy elimination):


The compressed jpeg is almost a tenth of the size, but if you were to say you could see any difference at all, you would be a liar. I could actually compress it further without any perceptual loss, but I think this makes my point. Using uncompressed textures or sounds is extremely wasteful of every resource on a computer. Compression technology is very advanced, and not wanting to use it is like making 5 plates of food for dinner, and throwing 4 away.

Why should developers have unique assets for each building? That too is wasteful of resources. Will it really destroy your immersion that much by having the same rug and chairs in a skyscraper as in an adjacent office building? Also, the size of an object doesn't have any noticeable baring of the amount of space it takes on disc, it's all about the complexity. Seeing how easy it is to model a skyscraper, most likely by duping most of the floors, the size would not actually be that large. Continuing your example of GTAIV, bluray would actually be a detriment to the seamless nature, due to lower read speed, meaning more data would have to be stored in memory at a time.

The main reason rockstar were pissed about the 360's architecture was that the presence of a HDD could not be ensured, meaning they'd have to code the game without any virtual memory. This is actually a huge failing of the 360 in my opinion, but it's got nothing at all to do with bluray. The fact of the matter is DVDs can hold more than enough models, textures and sounds for almost any game. The only game for the 360 I've heard of needing 2 DVDs was blue dragon, but that is entirely because of all the FMV in it, which are not going to be in GTA4 at all. Flight sim is so large because of the enormous amounts of ground textures required, an amount utterly incomparable in scale to GTA, no matter how big it is.

Finally, the 360's processor is bloody fine. This is an alienware ALX aurora. It is an absolutely top of the line gaming PC. There is nothing the ps3 can do that it can't replicate or improve upon. The 360's xenon cpu smokes the ALX's athlon 64. Like I said, the graphics card is far more important for the amount of shit going on on screen than the CPU. Like I also said, the 360's GPU is actually marginally better than the ps3. They are equivalent systems. The end.

I haven't played crackdown, so I can't comment on it specifically, but you can not declare any faults of a system based on a single game. If it suffers from slowdown, then it's because it wasn't adequately optimised. Does the fact that the ps3 version of fear has an inconsistent framerate mean the cell is inadequate? Of course not. Calling crackdown the limit of the 360 is just moronic.

The jpeg example was just that, an example. There are equivalent techniques for pretty much all types of media. Mp3s at 192kbps are almost perceptually identical to equivalent wavs. With video, not only can jpeg compression be applied to every frame, even more redundancy can be eliminated based the fact that for 99% of frames, the preceding and following frames are largely identical, which means most of that information can be discarded. Sure, you can always have better quality, but if it's beyond the range of human perception, it's purely masturbatory.

As for most of the dvd being taken up by "the game", what are you basing that on? I'm assuming by the game, you mean the code to make everything do stuff, in which case it most certainly does not take up most of the disc. Code is small, very small. It's just compiled binary machine code, the most compact data type available. If you replace all the models and textures with monochromatic cubes and the sounds with procedural midi bleeps, most "next-gen" games would probably fit on to a couple of floppy discs. With clever recycling of assets and primitives(even though an abundance of each is quite possible on a DVD), disc space should not be a problem. The only reason there would be less game on a dvd than a bluray generally speaking is developer laziness.

The reason rockstar were pissed about lack of HDD on the 360 was because they were developing it originally for a system that was guaranteed to have one. Changing something like that is a pain in the ass.

Blue dragon is the only game because of the HD FMVs. FMVs are becoming redundant now that in game graphics are so phenomenal. I don't anticipate that being too much of a problem for the 360, considering the japanese use them more often than western developers, and I don't think the 360's ever going to have a huge contingent of eastern content. Mass effect is actually a good example of my point about clever use of the space available. If the hype blurb is to be believed, the game is enormous, scanning numerous explorable planets, with fully voiced, dynamic conversations, as well as being pretty damn nice to look at. See also, elder scrolls oblivion.

What exactly is the 360's cpu not good enough for? Give me an example of something the 360 can't do because of only having a measly 3*3.2ghz CPU. The reason I said GPUs are more important for graphics than CPUs is nothing to do with the cell at all, it's because it's bloody true.

If you think I'm saying the ps3's specs are in some way crappy or something, you're completely misinterpreting what I'm saying. My point is that the 360 is a lot more powerful than gamers give it credit for. The ps2 was the least powerful of the big 3 last generation, but still produced some amazing looking games, like shadow of the colossus or GoW2. If the bluray drive didn't drive the price of the console sky high, I wouldn't be complaining about it. Before you call me cheap or poor, it goes beyond my own wallet. If the price is too high, people won't buy it(see NPD figures). If people don't buy it, publishers don't support it. If publishers don't support it, it doesn't get games, and that's the only way it can actually fail as a system.

If you want an interesting unbiased take on the present state of the console wars, n'gai croal has a damn good discussion on it all. It's a good read.

The 360 does not have enough space for high quality games nor the processing ability

...Mark my words: all games of splendid quality for the 360 will be short, then levels will be shamelessly tacked on through XBL, all the while lying to everyone about disk size. Gears of War should've been the first signs of the High Quality/Low levels quandry. Lost planet was also short, but the quality was also really fine. Halo 3 (or should I say Halo 2.5) is proving my point: the beta's quality falls way short of Gears and barely above Halo 2 but yet the boards are larger and the action moves faster. Compare that to Lair's ability to have a board the size of 32x32 relative miles, boards that are 20,000 feet high, draw distance that spans miles, progressive mesh, smoke and particle effects, 1080p, realtime lighting effects, water moving in the background with a solid framerate and the size of one level probably would strain on both the Xenon and the DVD-9. Resistance: Fall of Man has already been proven to be about 22 gigs with more and bigger levels than Gears