There seems to be a wide range of graphics quality in this first run of titles. EA's SSX, Madden, and Swing Away Golf all show how the PS2 can be visibly better than the Dreamcast, while Wild, Wild Racing, Eternal Ring, Time Splitters, and Silent Scope could have been done just as well on the Dreamcast.

Compared to what a PC with current 3D hardware can do, the limitations of the PS2 are immediately obvious. Even in Unreal, which does sport graphics that are better than anything I have seen yet on the DC, the pixel power clearly is not used to provide tighter texture detail. The blurries are obvious as you approach a wall, looking a bit like the first generation of accelerated Quake. Look as well at some of our screen grabs from Summoner, where many of the 3D objects lose their detail quickly up close.

Distance detail, however, is very strong, both in Unreal and even Wild, Wild Racing, where you get a much clearer downfield view of things than I have seen on most DC games. Likewise, the processing power allows for much more effective uses of the view camera. In Summoner, for instance, you can zoom in and out of your character and take in vast amounts of terrain without any slowdown.

For those of you who recall one of the basic premises of the Emotion Engine that Sony touted when it announced the PS2, you may be looking forward to the kind of facial detail and gesture rendering we saw on some of those demo models way back when. You may remember the demo of a wrinkled old dude cycling through his personal catalog of winks, nods, mouth contortions and such when Sony unveiled plans for the PS2. After all it is where the graphic chipset got its name. In theory, Sony knows well that facial expression is among the most important ways in which film communicates emotion, drama, and our sense of identification with a character. One of the promises of the supposed “Emotion Engine” is to bring that dimension to game characters. In the games we tried, however, there isn't even a hint of that. Sure, the texture maps wrapped around heads in games like Unreal and Summoner, are more detailed than we have seen in most PC and console games, but frankly I saw more thoughtful use of human expression in the recent Chrono Cross RPG for the PS or Zelda for the N64.