Ozymandias has found out that the PS3 will use a 2x BD drive, which is 72Mbits/second or 9MB/second. The Xbox360 uses a 12x DVD, which should give it about 16MB/second. “That is significantly faster for games and will result in shorter load times.”

Lets start with the bad news - the launch lineup is shrinking. Originally, the list was 30 titles (1st and 3rd party). Currently, the list is about 15 titles (can’t get more specific because at this stage it literally changes by the hour). There is an up-side, however. The extra development time is making a world of difference. Some of you saw Heavenly Sword at E3 and it looked pretty good... that is, it looked like your typical 360 game. The team has been hard at work piling on layers and layers of detail and as of right now, it looks like ****ing Advent Children (you thought Metal Gear looked good? You gotta see this). It's also being given a God of War type violence upgrade, since they found out the graphical realism and brutality of the combat (bloodless though it was) was getting it a Mature anyway. Seriously, it will blow your mother****ing mind (although it’s sad that having really awesome graphics influences the ESRB ratings these days). The current release target is March.

Killzone 2 - This one has been MIA since last years E3. It is still in development and it is, unequivocally, the PS3s big "secret weapon." Announcements are being held back until closer to the PS3 launch as it's going to generate a monumental amount of buzz. It's one of those things that I can't get into too much detail about. However, it looks exactly like the video. Yeah. That video.

As a quick side note, Bethesda is working on a special edition of Oblivion just for PS3. We were shown some screenshots (sadly, not the actual game) and it looks like an entirely different game. Every texture is being replaced with new extremely-high resolution ones. It’s basically what Bethesda wanted to do the first time until they ran into the DVDs capacity limit. BluRay fixes that little bottleneck.

Those DVDs you love so much, they’re the reason PS3 games are going to ****ing destroy anything available on the 360. 85% of the games currently in development for PS3 will not fit on a single DVD9. To give you an idea of the implications, Resistance: Fall of Man is currently 20GB, and could be around 35GB once cinematics and things are added. Publishers are not being forced to use BDs, but it’s expected that 95% of all PS3 games will use BD discs. The big exception is EA, who uniformly develops for the lowest common denominator. Sony is dedicated to helping companies develop for the superior PS3 then downgrade for the weaker systems. The fruits of this labor will probably not be seen for another year at least.

There was a demo, side by side, of an upcoming sports game (can't tell you which one). One was playing on 360 (DVD9) connected to an HDTV running at 720P. The same game was running on a PS3 (BD50) on an identical HDTV at 720P. The differences were unbelievable, simply because the BD has the space to hold all those extremely high resolution textures. The 360 could probably handle them, but they just plain won't fit on the disc. This is just one example of how storage capacity is hurting the 360. Of the parade of developers that spoke to us, the BDs capacity was the number one item of praise. No more having to cut corners or find creative ways to make your game fit on the disc. DVDs are just plain obsolete when you're talking about High-Definition hyper-detailed 3D environments.