This resolution crap is such manufactured outrage.
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Okay, so this may come as a surprise to you, but there are, in fact, some people who care about the hardware they're using. As a PC gamer, I don't settle for some godawful on-board video capabilities of my motherboard, I do a bit of research over various video cards within my price range and pick something based on its bang-for-the-buck. It's just common damn sense - you shell out hundreds of bucks for something, you damn well better get the best you can.
So for the upcoming consoles, we have two systems that play the same software at different performance levels. The system with the lower asking price plays them better. That's a pretty damn sticking point in my book, but hey, maybe some folks really just prefer the Xbox platform for whatever reason, fine. If that's all it was, that'd be it.
But that
wasn't all it was. What we got from the so-called games
journalists was bullshit left and right - from Leadbetter playing MS mouthpiece to several journalists downplaying the blatantly fucking obvious difference in visual quality of resolution difference (for fuck's sake, when I was a kid playing around in the options in Mechwarrior 2 it was pretty obvious to me that
the bigger numbers made it look better!), to several outlets concocting the most nonsensical "hardware comparisons" to further personally muddy the waters. The whole IGN fiasco where GAF posters could tell the resolution error of footage that IGN, an outlet with individuals who do this shit for a paycheck, completely missed and insisted until now was what they thought it was, has all just been a delicious icing on a shit-cake.
And it never really needed to come to this. Months ago, it was glaringly obvious that the hardware disparity would come to this. That games would have a difference in performance if devs really pushed the systems. MS reps themselves had publicly stated "we didn't target the highest level" (or however they worded it, I'm sure you can dig up the quote), and that much was obvious. It could have been left at that. Yet Penello stuck his head out and insisted "we'd never give 30% to the competition." Instead of some proper investigative journalism, we get the circus I outlined before. And here we are, in the aftermath, where reality goes its course and common sense prevails, where the more powerful system indeed has better looking games after all. If all that dirt had never been kicked up in the first place, this whole ordeal would've never been. Yet here we are.
In a way, it's not so much about the power/resolution disparity in itself anymore as it is the irritation from all the bullshit. Don't try to fool me into believing there's no hardware disparity. Don't try to tell me the difference between 720p, 900p, 1080p, whatever is barely noticeable. Don't demand that I submit to the idea that "no one cares about this stuff" and neither should I. (Evidently, the hardcore gamers do - the segment that, ya know, buys new consoles at launch, wouldn't ya know it) Report the fucking facts, and let me, the consumer, make my own judgements. And most of all, stop taking me for a damn fool.
[/shitty rant]