Bizarre Creations\' Studio Updates are always a source of interesting information, specifically if you\'re interested in the Xbox 360 in all its glory. The company responsible for Project Gotham Racing 3 enjoys teasing its fans with tidbits and screenshots of information, like
the 3-D PGR3 screenshot they released last week. In another interesting screenshot, Bizarre shows off their spectator system running on an Xbox 360. Apparently one of their crew was trying to see how many individual people they could shove onto a system; the screenshot they released is a picture of 35,000 spectators crowding one turn of Project Gotham Racing 3. Keep in mind that there are still other corners with more people, all out of view. Apparently the system didn\'t hiccup at all, and was still running without any decrease in frame rate. Pretty amazing, considering the tradition of stripping actual spectators from the sidelines in favor of cardboard cutouts in racing games in the past.
This also reminds me of a similar story from E3 2005. Game journalists were being given a chance to run the Xbox 360 through some paces, and I sat in on a demonstration of
Kameo. I remember one of the developers commenting how proud they had been getting 10 to 15 independently controlled bad guys onto the screen at once on the original Xbox. He said that, of course, while demonstrating a battle on the Xbox 360 development kit involving 3000 bad guys at once.
It\'s my personal opinion that this is where the next generations of gaming lies; not in the graphics, but in the elements like physics, AI, and how many bad guys can appear on the screen at once.
Even though the final build of Project Gotham Racing 3 won\'t have 35,000 spectators per track, you can expect to find thousands of spectators. It\'s amazing to think how far up the scale that is from past consoles. I can hardly wait, and I\'m not even really a racing fan.