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Unless you owned a wide screen, that would suck. My PS2 is plugged into a 32", and I have to get as close as 1 foot away from it in order to see clearly in NFSU. Besides, there's no fun if you could see what they could see, and vice versa.

nope XBox runs on Windows NT 5.0 Kernel, XP technically is just a modded version of Windows 2000; just like Windows 95,98,ME were all modded from the same core. But no worries, it's all the same really; they literally cut out the operating system part that everyone knows and purely used the kernel + skeletal OS


well we'll see. from what i've seen and heard HL2 performs poorly with full options, you turn on AF and FSAA and not only do they not affect the scene properly but also they kill the speed quite dramatically.

Without the Shaders though, i don't doubt that HL2 beats Doom3; after all Doom3 is based on an entirely new BSP engine, rather than just an upped polygon version of a stable formula.

HL2's open areas are pretty debateable, you ask at HalfLife2.net forum you'll learn from there why; also checkout the screenshots/movies shown, how the levels are designed. In the real areas where it appears open you'll notice that actually the interactable sections of that part of the world are very very constricting. (the docks is a very good example)

as for SoftShadowing, i've said it before and i'll say it again; what valve believe Soft Shadows are, is not what any other artists seems to believe they are.
Doom3 has the exact same style shadows (albiet alot sharper and blended edges) and they call them Volumetric Shadow, as this is what they are.

A Soft Shadow reacts to the light, and softly blends with the scene; what Valve are using are just Stencil based shadows which are not 100% black. When they add a distance and depth falloff to thier shadows, THEN i will call them Soft. But if they did that they'd loose one hell of alot of speed.

There are alot of other Shader features what Valve claim are something, and yes in a way you can say technically they're right. But in another way you can also stand up and say they're just hyping up a feature which quite frankly was obviously taken from Cg programmers and tweaked for thier use. I mean hell they didn't even bother to enhance any from the bog standard shaders... look at the lighting, shadow and atmospheric effects in Doom3.

You know HL2 can't actually do that without applying a normalising shader to every single model and material. Doom3's engine has this feature builtin and optimised to reach with the light, any additional material/shader in HL2 would result in a very large speed loss with such a feature. (they rely on other things namely bump mapping and higher polycounts)

Personally i think more oftenly Doom3's graphics look more real than HL2's do because it does have that element of fantasy; they're not trying to make it hyper-realistic.