The Richter Scale^®

During lunch with my 9 year old son and a couple of his friends a few days ago, I suggested that next time he plays Star Wars Battlefront II, perhaps he might want to try it on the Xbox 360 as another compatibility update had been made available by Microsoft to allow that Xbox game in particular to run on the Xbox 360. I explained that this might improve the graphics quality of the game play (which, in my opinion, is the only serious weakness of the Xbox version of Star Wars Battlefront II).

I asked him if graphics quality was important to him. He was quick to answer that the graphics didn’t matter much - the particular game was what mattered, and more specifically, the saved profile data (an issue I addressed back in December). After all, the original Halo didn’t look any much better on the Xbox 360 than it did on the Xbox.

I decided to see for myself if there was any difference in graphics quality running the Xbox version of Star Wars Battlefront II on the Xbox 360, much to the annoyance of my son, who felt that my tinkering was eating into his game time.

The difference was stunning. Whereas on the Xbox everything (even with component video out) is kind of blobby and pixelated, Battlefront II felt almost crisp running on my Xbox 360 (using a VGA cable for a high resolution display on my TV). And, amusingly, all my son’s preconceptions about how graphics quality was not important flew out the window. On the Xbox 360, playing four player split-screen is actually rather usable (vs. nearly unusable on the Xbox), and that’s really important to him.

So, now my son will only play Star Wars Battlefront II on the Xbox 360. But Halo is still played on the Xbox, since that’s where all his saved game data resides. I found this an interesting commentary on relative values of data vs. presentation, especially considering it comes from a nine year old. But I agree with him.