Gears of War (update)

Answering those critics, just before this year\'s Tokyo Game Show, Microsoft and Epic invited us to check out the game -- running on the newly unleashed final Xbox 360 development kits. And it looks better than it did at E3. Not drastically better (or even drastically different, given that the level they showed was one of the levels that was shown at E3), but for those worried about the company not being able to produce the same level of quality in the visuals, this undeniably shows that the game will look that good (or better, if Epic is to be believed).

In the demo we checked out, the characters and environments looked just like they did at E3, but other minor details were improved, such as the nice dramatic motion blur effect when you turn quickly and the polished look of the line that shows up when you aim to throw a grenade (which now looks futuristic). The framerate appears to be improved on the E3 version as well, and though it\'s still not 100% perfect in all areas -- the game doesn\'t come out until 2006, after all -- it\'s clearly well within reach and we don\'t see the occasional hiccups showing up in the final version at all.

According to Epic\'s Cliff Bleszinski, the game as it is running right now is only using one of the Xbox 360\'s three cores, and has been up and running on the final development kits for only about two weeks. The game had been running on Beta development kits for only a few weeks before that, so it\'s clear that the team at Epic is only getting started in terms of finding out how much power they can get out of the system.

Epic Vice President Mark Rein states he believes Gears of War has the potential to become a bigger franchise than Unreal for Epic, given its focus on storytelling and a strong single-player experience, and based on what we\'ve seen of the game so far, we\'re inclined to believe him. Microsoft will be releasing new screenshots of the game when the Tokyo Game Show opens on Friday in Japan (U.S. time: 6:00 Thursday night), so check back soon for those and look out for more news on the game from Microsoft\'s X05 event early next month.

http://www.1up.com/do/previewPage?cId=3143680

Running on only one core?!  That\'s awesome.  No reason they shouldn\'t get 60 fps then.