@gohangeorge I actually think that Juliet Starling was a very well-designed female character. She has all the best qualities that you would expect from a female protagonist: she's strong, independent, compassionate, loyal, and by no means a damsel in distress. She has a loving, supportive family life, and she actually spends the whole game carrying her useless, dead-weight boyfriend around! The over-sexualization of her character is also done ironically in order to poke fun at the stereotype. The way she answers her chainsaw-phone, drops everything to shop for upgrades and costumes, and performs her cheer moves are all tongue-in-cheek jabs at American pop culture. On top of that, she frequently complains about how lollipops are going to make her fat.
In SH1, Harry Mason i far from the stereotypical tough-guy. He's not a cop or a special agent or a badass. He's just a guy. But more than that, he's a sensitive and loving FATHER. Men in strong, supportive parental roles is the other area that gaming has yet to mature in.
When SH3 rolled around, the designers of that game treated Heather like a real person. She was cute, but she wasn't treated as a sex object. She was properly humanized and developed over the course of the game. She had real feelings, hope, dreams, and fears. She was strong and independent and perfectly capable of coping with the surreal nonsense that the horrific game world threw at her. Sure she broke down a cried a few times, but who wouldn't in that situation? James had a few psychological break-downs in Silent Hill 2 as well.
I'm sure this has been brought up a hundred times, but the fact that most multi-platform games are designed primarily for Xbox360 means that comparing screenshots for those games is a little unfair. Of course, the Xbox360 games are going to look better. Of course, its hard to compare exclusives since different games use different engines altogether. So comparing Resistance 2 or Metal Gear Solid 4 with Gears of War 2 or Left 4 Dead would be difficult, but comparing games in which ALL of the developer's attention went to optimizing for a single console would probably give us a better idea of the differences between the consoles.
I do have to wonder if both systems are tested using the same television. The consistently blurrier PS3 screens could have been the result of a lower-quality display hardware. It is also significant to note that for almost all games that are multi-platform, the games are typically developed with a focus on the xbox360 and the PS3 versions are practically just ports of the 360 games with the occasional addition of clumsy-feeling sixaxis functionality. It would be interesting to compare screenshots of similar games that are exclusive to each console. Like Metal Gear Solid 4 vs Call of Duty 4, Gran Turismo 5 vs next Project Gotham or Forza, Gears of War 2 vs Resistance 2, etc. You know, look at games in which you KNOW that the developers put maximum effort into each console,
Urlacher54's comments