I don't smoke. Do you?

And hey, instead of childish ranting, why not direct some time at my specific comments -- like the skin shading/normals on the grunts, the shadowing issues I mention, etc...

It is WAY more constructive to respond to my specific comments -- and prove them wrong if you can show I made a mistake -- then to put words in my mouth and not address anything I said.

Still think their skin looks flat? I see what you're getting at, but I can't think of a 360 game that's used geometry over a detailed, low res texture. Gears of War was full of them. It's just really difficult to hide outside of darkly lit areas.

Chest and arms, definately. Ditto with the mask and grunt armor. His cranium has some bump mapping though, although the skin shader is still fairly flat in terms of lighting, translucence, reflectivity, etc. And same issues there on the grunt with light side/dark side illumination. The sun is obviously low based on the lighting on the warthog and brute. In such situations the side facing the sun should be fairly illuminated, and the far facing side should be significantly shadowed. See the ground under the hog? Note the bright/shadowed contrast. That same degree of contrast should be seen on every object between front/back side, with a transitionary zone.

What it looks like to me is the ambient lighting is jacked up which can wash out the contrast a lot. The brute has similar issues, the difference being the HDR highlights on his armor, which is fairly reflective, contrasts more to give it some depth.

The little grunt really lacks anything being highlighted (just a little bit) and looks flat.

And I NEVER said all pictures looked bad. I actually posted some with good lighting!

But you are not going to convince me that the new pic with the grunts and plasma grenade doesn't look flat. Taking off the fan goggles (as a lot of people have in the news thread) it obviously sucks in terms of balance. And my point is a technical one. If people like the art, great. But Halo 3 is showing some NICE lighting in some videos and screen shots -- which makes that one look horrible.

And as someone else said, if that shot was released with any other name people would rip it apart. It looks that bad. Horrible even.

I definitely wouldn't be impressed with the game if I hadn't seen the other media. But I have, so I don't feel the need to gripe about bad shots, or harp and go into detail about good looking ones. The game is out in 20 days.

I think the shots are getting fair comparisons. Some people think they look good, some people think they look bad. Same with every other game on the market. Pretty absurd chopping the opinions down to "OMG FANBOY!" or "OMG HALO H8R!"

What game has been released this generation that doesn't have any bad screenshots related to it?

There's been enough good stuff released that gives a good enough idea of what the game will look like when playing it. Picking over direct feed stills of the game is good only to a certain extent. Certainly viable when having a technical discussion about the games visuals but the vast majority of you will simply play the thing and see a "bad" shot like the above for no longer than 1/30th of a second.

It's very easy to pick out imperfections staring at a single screen for a minute, whilst playing any human is going to notice a hell of a lot less. If you stop Gears and look around you can see the rough edges.

It's fine to discuss the media at hand, it's all we have after all, but there's a lot of people taking a single screen and running a mile with it extrapolating with no consideration to the context in which we're looking at it. Acert's technical discussion is always qualified as such so while everyone has to have their opinion polarised as Phaethon described I have no idea!

For all those asking me what I am smoking and how wrong I am without actually discussing my points

1. You guys keep talking about all the great media, but we are still waiting for 720p Direct feed. Off screen can obsure quality, especially contrast, in favor of a game and cover up issues. The game looks good (I even said the first picture looked good), but with all the PR out there I like to see stuff myself before I jump on the hype bandwagon. And NO! I don't believe reports. Seeing the professionals call Motorstorm "like the CGI" in quality is just one reason why.

2. As for bad screenshots... You can disagree, but I find it horrible quality control to release *really bad shots* especially of high budget games. There should be someone who knows what is good and bad, watching over the media released. The fact someone thought that shot was good and is worth "showcasing" Halo 3... scares me. This is a problem MS/Sony really need to address.

And, frankly, I get tired of being attacked. You say something good, people get upset. You say something bad, people get upset. Comments asking what I am smoking should be perma ban.

I don't mind if people disagree. I try to distinguish between art/austhetics and what I am seeing technically.

And for the record, the SP footage Blim has captured looks great. So I don't see why people get so bent out of shape when Bungie releases something that looks bad and people go, "Hey, that is a crappy screenshot". We know the game looks good, that doesn't stop the screenshot from looking bad!

Nor does a bad screenshot make the game look bad.

Which is exactly what I was alluding to and what people don't get. Context is everything. The shot with the grunt really close up 99% of us will NEVER see in-game whilst playing. It's fine to have a qualified technical discussion about it but there's enough people who run off down the lines of "the graphics are now disappointing" which only causes reactionary retorts from those who disagree, some of whom are unable to disagree objectively

I think you have too many fans and everyone wants to be able to de-construct screen shots like you :P

Acert posted a technical critique of the Halo 3 screen shot which was clearly qualified as such. I don't see anybody here with anything like the same level of knowledge in that area. If you don't enjoy or understand that particular discussion, don't read the post!

The problem is, despite it only being a post discussing the technical aspects of the shot/media some of you take it as "OMG he criticized Halo 3, I must defend it!"

Then a whole other bunch of you pile in with comments like "Yeah, you see! Graphics under-whelmaton" and everything just goes rapidly downhill.

Asking what someone is smoking not only has got nothing to do with what we're talking about, it's also pretty rude and you're piling into the guy as he dared to make a critical comment of a piece of Halo 3 media like that's not allowed or something. If someone goes to the trouble of posting a detailed opinion, comments like "What are you smoking, you need glasses etc" just aren't on and aren't the sort of discussion we want to encourage on this forum. If that's your bag there's plenty of others places for it. Keep doing it and you won't be having a choice in the matter.

If that's a problem for anyone please feel free to PM me or if you want a big discussion on it start a thread in the relevant forum but for now it'd be nice if we can keep this thread to talking about the game, in this case, Halo 3 rather than having a pop at other users. That is after all why we're all here

Wow. I knew there was a reason we recruited you deft. A+

Now lets all discuss Halo in a civil manner.