Jesus! :O

Where's that guy who questioned my pre-sex feelings I'm gonna beat him to death with my face!

Nice. Now I want to see it in motion with no photomode chicanery.

Best looking racer part 2.

Too bad MS could not use some of that 1.15B to invest heavily in a permenant partnership with BC.

The difference is leveraging BC internal assets, specifically where they do well, across a number of studios as well as using such technology to give some much needed love to unused IPs like MS's rally series. BC is already branching out multiplatform (see: The Club) and considering MS's internal studios are by far the weakest of the big three it would solidify them much more so than... FASA. One [among many] reasons the 360's sales ark isn't substantially more significant than the original Xbox is their internal studio quality. Exclusives are important to differentiate, but as dev costs skyrocket sharing resources and technology is as well. There is no point for MS to have 3 car series with 3 dev teams all doing independant research and development on renderers, physics, deformation, procedural landscape generation, etc

That is the old way of thinking... and it needs to change if the expected quality of titles is to remain high and the learning curve on consoles is to follow the traditional path. As it is MS's internal team at Turn10 totally failed, by their own benchmarks and expectations, in an area BC excells. It is a waste not to be able to leverage those assets and skills and allow the Turn10 team to focus more squarely on the areas they actually do well.

Think of it as internal middleware.

And as for a more permenant relationship with BC, one need look no further than the list of former PlayStation exclusives now jumping ship. I dare say the hype for MS's platform would have been significantly dented if PGR3 and (and Oblivion and GRAW) had jumped ship at launch.

PDZ and Kameo to carry the day? Uh, yeah. BC has been a driving force in quality titles as well as demonstrating the potential of MS's platform. Losing that would be a killer blow... especially considering their own internal studios pale significantly in the car eye candy arena. If PGR4 was a PS3 title competing against FM2 on the 360 market perception would be different.

Software, not necessarily hardware nuances, distinguished platforms. Technologically BC is at the head of the class and makes a case for MS's platform that very few others (Epic with Gears of War is an example) have been able to match or exceed. Nice to know 3rd parties are the ones pushing the platform's graphics and perception :|

Well, MS really flushed tons of promising internal dev teams when EA hopped onboard with the last Xbox.

Things like Brute Force, Crimson Skies, Amped, Mechassault, Links, Top Spin weren't all exceptional granted, but they were dawning franchises that could've been must haves by now with a Brute Force 3 being where Gears ended up. Instead MS seemed content with third parties taking those spots, and now that multiplatform games aren't *obviously* gonna be more attractive on MS platform (even though they have been so far as people will be quick to note) it's even more important - like Acert says - that each platform have a strong internal dev team climate.

Brute Force got input from Bungie according to its credits for instance. That's the kind of cross-team collaboration I reckon could be worth a lot right now.

They all want to be number one though Simon, that's the trouble.
They will only ever give so much away to each other.

If someone is stupid enough to get in front of me, on a bike, whilst i'm behind the wheel of a TVR? They deserve everything they are gonna get :p

Goddamn! Unbelievable. Now this looks awesome.

Well, they're going to tear it up off the line.. so it's only fair.