Here's Your First Look At Cortana in Halo 4

Fun fact:

Every report from people who have seen in-game footage of Halo 4 indicates that it is the most stunning console game ever made. Claims of "if you had said this was 720 footage, I would have believed you" abound.

Makes sense. You don't hire mocap guys from Rockstar, artists from id and Naughty Dog, level designers from Retro Studios, and some of the best programmers ever and then not push the 360 in some way.

The best-looking console games so far, from a technical perspective, have historically been 360 titles. Metro 2033 never came to the PS3 because the PS3 couldn't handle its lighting. Alan Wake isn't being brought to the PS3 for presumably the same reason (Remedy owns the franchise and can do what they want with it), in addition to its long, long draw distances. Halo 3 had some of the best water in video game history (it's tesselated!), and it had a whopping 14km draw distance. Halo Reach doubled that draw distance, having some of the most high-poly environments in video games. Then you've got Gears of War, which started out as the first true next-gen-looking title, Gears of War 2, which did some amazing stuff with water, and Gears of War 3, which did great stuff with lighting. Plus, they all had really high polycounts. iirc, Forza 4 has obscenely high polycounts (at the expense of no AA).

That's not even getting into stuff like Kameo, B&K Nuts and Bolts, and Perfect Dark: Zero, which all did some pretty amazing stuff technically (but, being early 360 titles and very stylized missed a lot of stuff). I've heard that Crackdown was technically impressive as well.

With the exception of a few PC titles, like Crysis and The Witcher 2, there really isn't anything out there pushing graphics as much as the 360 has, and now, finally, Halo 4 is actually pushing it to its limits.

Can't wait.