Rymix @ Oct 9th 2006 3:15PM

I have a feeling that some people might disagree with me here, but I'll say this anyway...

I have an Xbox 360, a very good quality 32 inch 480p CRT and a friend with a cheap 37 inch LCD HD thingy from Panasonic.

I love how my 360 looks on my 'old fashioned' SD TV, and a quite dislike how it looks on his. Fair enough, his has more pixels, thus more detail, but I have two problems with his setup: 1) it's a bottom of the range HDTV and it simply doesn't look that good, and 2) something happens when a game goes HD that I almost can't describe. It kinda gets flimsy.

Take my favourite game of the moment: PGR3. It looks awesome at 480p. The cars look like they mean business, strong and solid. But in HD they suddenly look thin, papery, more like model cars than the real thing, and the game loses a sense of power and weighting. In still shots the HD version is simply stunning, but on the move I just don't like it as much.

Having said that, N3 in HD is something spectacular to behold, and knocks spots off the low res version.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that more detail doesn't necessarily mean more immersion. I feel like the additional detail can actually detract from a game, perhaps by making its flaws more apparent, or simply by losing some of the punch in the 'blurry' version.

Further to this, I suspect that the quality of the HDTV also plays quite a major part. My local PC world has a 360 hooked up to a Sony Bravia KDL 40v2000u and it looks absolutely amazing. (And yes, I did also wonder at the audacity of them hooking up a Microsoft console to a Sony TV.)

And to backtrack once more: extra pixels is all well and good, but its only a first impression. Last week I spent all my gaming time playing Doom, downloaded from the Xbox Live Marketplace. In my collection I have PDZ and Ghost Recon AW, but it was Doom that got all my loving recently.

Pixels, shmixels? What do you lot think?