HANDS ON GUIDE

Graphics

The most telling comparison between the consoles and the PC is, of course, Crysis. Unluckily for Halo 3, it begins in almost exactly the same way, begging a direct comparison. In both games, you're an elite soldier dropped into a conflict set in the jungle. After playing both, Halo 3's environments feel flat, confined and almost interior. It's as though the valleys are simply corridors with leaf textures and green colouring, and the forest clearings just large rooms. The idea that it's a jungle doesn't seem believable - not when you've come over a ridge in Crysis and seen a mile of jungle, beach and ocean unfold in the mellow dawn below you, or when you've seen the sun rise and the tide roll and, from the comfort of your shimmering stealth suit, the ratty huts and bored faces of the North Korean soldiers, and certainly not when you've flattened their security checkpoint and left it in smouldering pieces.

Nintendo has tried hard to take away the focus from graphics for the Wii and, as with the 360 and PS3's best-looking games, if the art style is good, you can forget that what you're playing is powered by a GPU clocked at 243MHz with only 88MB of memory. However, there are occasions when the Wii is just viciously ugly. Need for Speed: Pro Street looks simply horrendous.

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