Ok so after being disappointed that Gears of War 2 didn't explain much of the story I had an epiphany at work this morning. While bouncing ideas off one of my co-workers I came up with an idea as to what is going on in the Gears of War universe.

First the grand theory. Man is all powerful he builds cities controls the world and imulsion. Man fights himself primarily over imulsion. Man however gets sick if he gets too close to imulsion (Or irradiated whatever you want to call it). Man creates race of super imulsion miners that are more resistant, AKA the locust. Locust build cities underground and happily mine imulsion. Locust keep digging further down. Locust that have gone the furthest down become warped (AKA Lambent) maybe they discover some other power deep in the center of the earth. Lambent locust turn on the normal locust and say "screw you guys we are taking over". Normal locust say "Screw you humanity we aint dieing down here for you, we're coming up to the surface to take over and drown the lambent". Lucust come up during E-Day kick humanities ass. Gears of war 1 starts.

Now to support my theory. First things first the games have made many hints that it's all about imulsion, this was hinted in gears 1 then it took a huge step forward in gears 2 when the collectable messages emphasized how important imulsion was, how the prices were raised during the war and one even hinted of a conspiracy theory for it (Kind of like our own world and oil). Also it was also pretty clear that the locust were man made, again this was reinforced with the lab level that was mysteriously "Declassified" and it's also pretty clear that Marcus's father was probably on the project as quoted by the locust queen saying "It's a shame you didn't follow in your fathers footsteps" and at the end of the credits he's alive and says "What have you done!" after you destroy the normal locust cities.

The last bit comes from a leaked script for the gears of war movie. It existed on the internet for a brief time about a year and a half ago and really explained a lot about what happened just before and during E-Day (It was a really good script and some scenes will be incredibly powerful if done right). Marcus's father was in the movie script and just before E-Day he was getting strange activities from the underground areas. One of the scenes had him trying to go underground to get some more data and talk to key people but the security guard was giving him a tough time saying "No one is allowed underground! Ever" which seemed kind of odd but why wouldn't you want people to see what was going on underground? If you created a race of supper miner slaves! That's why! Eventually the military called for Marcus's fathers help and started showing him videos of strange things that were happening underground because he was an expert in that area. Most likely because he was on the project and it would also make sense as to why he had all the locust tunnels mapped out in his home computers as per gears of war 1.

So that's my theory. Anyone have ideas to support it? Ideas against it? Take the bit from the movie script with a grain of salt, the leaked script I read seemed pretty legit and it had a lot of details that weren't in gears of war 1 but when I played gears 2 I thought "Ah I remember they said this happened in the movie script". Anyways I believed it as legit but not everyone may.

The 360 is more familiar to developers, it follows the same architecture as PCs and previos generations consoles (Stress the GPU, unified memory architecture, CPU is good enough to get the Job done).

Sony moved away from what developers were used to with their dedicated memory format. They have 256MB of memory for the Cell CPU and 256MB for the GPU forcing developers to try and stress the CPU as much as possible. Microsoft has 512MB of shared memory so developers can dedicate more resources to the GPU if needed. That's probably the biggest difference. If developers can find new ways of maximizing the PS3's dedicated memory and move towards stressing the CPU over the GPU like they are used to then the PS3 can be very nice, but personally I'm thinking that's asking alot for developers to do, kind of like Sony is forcing developers to do what they say not asking them what will make things better for them. Just as a note the 360 was only going to have 256MB of memory until epic came in and showed them what Gears of War will look like if they doubled the memory to 512, Microsoft then dropped 1 billion dollars to make it happen. I really don't see Sony asking ever asking developers what they want.

The nice thing about Microsoft is that while Sony is still hyping games it anounced before the PS3 was even released (FF13, Killzone 2 I'm looking at you!), Microsoft made clear at E3 2007 that it would refrain from talking about games that were more than a year away. So really we have no idea what mind blowing games we will be graced with next fall.

I remember last year talking with my buddy about whoat will come out this year. Microsoft released all the big games it anounced but my friend assured me that there was more up the big M's sleeve. Gears of War 2 was anounced only 7 months before it's release and that is the biggest game for the 360 this fall. Next year we have Halo Recon in the fall, I can almost guarantee the Mass Effect 2 will be out as well and we'll see that anouncement late next spring. Resident Evel 5 will probably be out next fall. Other than that who knows what wonderful suprises we will be given. I can't wait!.

Last remnant might be good. Bit of a toss up on the one. Hopfully it will be better then infinite undiscovery (/Shudders), but I don't link it will be better then lost odyssey. And dead space is supposed to be really good, that was released the week before Fable.

Absolutely. I love my 360. I had a few buddies that owned PS3s (Got them as gifts, they admited they would have never bought them themselves). Convinced them to get 360s and they can't stop playing them. Especially now with 3 years of great games. My one co-worker was playing Dead Rising non stop, then I told him he had to pick up gears of war to be ready for the second one. He finished GoW, then Fable 2 came out and he's been playing that non stop since. He's even taking time off to get cought up on all the great game experiences he's missed and he can't believe he didn't pick one up sooner and with Fallout 3 and Gears of War 2 he's got soo much to do for months.

Viva Pinata is awesome. I first got my 360 to play that and Gears of War. Those 2 lasted a while. Never played Halo before but my buddy gave me a copy of Halo 3 because he had 2. It was AMAZING, so far that has been the best 360 game I played. There is so much great stuff for the 360, and multi platform releases are almost always better on the 360. Head over to the PS3 thread to see how much everyone is blowing up over Falout 3.

[QUOTE="TheRaven17"]

I never said the cell architecture was bad. I think it's an amazing piece of technology. What I said was the "Memory" arcitecture was inferrior. The cell is still a CPU, nothing more. GPU's are the most important thing in a gaming system and restricitng how you can use your memory to feed the CPU and GPU has been a detriment.

It's like someone braging about their new computer, if you say you have an amazing CPU and you can run games with the greatest of ease anyone who knows anything about computers will say "ok so how's your graphics card?" build a computer sytem with a mid range CPU and a high end graphics card compared to a high end CPU and a mid range graphics card and guess which one will perform better.

PhysicsLCP

Thank you. I think we're starting to see eye to eye now. I love the cell, I think it's great and I was really routing for the PS3 when I heard about it. (I'm a hardware junky). Some developers can burn the midnight oil and find a way to deal with the 2 different ways of coding (1 being stressing the GPU as hard as possible and the other being stressing the CPU as hard as possible), EA sports was able to do it for Madden 09 after the significantly worse Madden 08 showing on the PS3. But I think we should be commending companies that are able to work but no tearing other companies a new A-hole just because they couldn't. Developers are people too, changing the way things are done is tough.