Okay, you proved me wrong with rolling smiley faces. I do disagree with just about every one of your points, but how can I argue with that?Uh, I never said there was anything wrong with LO.

Gamefly finally added LO to the queue. Looks like I'll be getting my $5 back from Gamestop :). What? I have a right to rent after Blue Dragon!

I doubt it's really inherent to the UE3 engine itself, but it definitely seems like people who've licensed it go for essentially the same overall look. Very pale, very gritty, lots of concrete and stone structures. I dunno if graphic tricks built into the engine encourage this or what's really going on, but the end result is definitely often kinda samey.

Art direction saves the day in X amounts of cases except when it comes to animation, which the engine is SHIT for, so you'd really think SK could've gone for a better solution already when they decided on a melee combat heavy game. This is particularly unfortunate though seeing as animation is the one truly gobsmackingly amazing part of game graphics this generation in my honest opinion, and no matter how sharp Gears is, the acrobatics of Altaïr pretty much wins every day of the week, despite having a similarly limited art span.

So ultimately I think UE3 is a bad idea but not necessarily because you *can't* do something pretty colourful like Bioshock - in itself being proof of otherwise - but because animations are robotic and awkward and miles behind a lot of PS2 efforts in fact, and outclassed on day 1 with Condemned.

And yeah, the crappy shadow aliasing is annoying beyond belief, but all titles seem to suffer from them in some capacity. Naughty Dog at least has the decency to not use them a lot in closeups, whereas Marcus Fenix looks like he's about to be assaulted with a lego chainsaw all the time.

Inherent to LO however is a different angle when it comes to world design.. and characters too for that matter. Broad chinned muscle men are chucked out in favour of characters with recognizable facial features (Kaim in particular) and you never feel like you're looking at "another sci fi thing" regardless of how gray it is. No matter what engine you throw at them they really can't help but be appealing, and the same is ultimately true all over.

EA are showing that colour and iconic design is coming back though, and while people seem to choose to believe that it's ripoffs of Team Fortress 2, it's really just a return to video games as they used to be. Crash Bandicoot was never a gun tooting marine, and somewhere there seems to be a desire to capitalise on the appeal of likeable design instead of INPENETRABLE GRITTY SERIOUSNESS. The colour will probably follow and we'll suddenly find that UE3 will keep up with that direction too.

Bit of a bummer about animation though.

I know :D! Ships from Tampa, which is a couple hours away, versus waiting days for to get games from Los Angeles. Guess the complaints finally got through ;).