t’s that time prior to a long holiday weekend where we’re getting as much work done as humanly possible.  Okay.  We’re totally lying here.  We’ve been pouring hours into the final version of Prey for both the Xbox 360 and PC. We’ve been getting a lot of questions on which version we prefer.  We take both versions through their paces and give you a crapton of direct feed widescreen videos and break down some of the main differences between the two.

For the comparison, our PC was running in 1600 x 1200 in widescreen mode with all the bells and whistles turned on.  The video card in the PC was one of the brand new XFX NVidia GeForce 7950 GX2 with a whopping gig of RAM.  Needless to say, this card could handle this game well.

While I’m not going to get into the whole mouse/keyboard vs. controller debate, it’s basically up to preference. Both the X and Y axis can be altered separately, so you can adjust your movement to your liking.  There’s a number of different button presets, and the Xbox 360 allows you to do everything detrimental for gameplay.  However, with wall-walking I felt the PC controlled much smoother.  Personally, I totally prefer mouse keyboard, and felt that I could get a bead on an enemy or touch a specific area on a panel much easier with the mouse.  I’m sure that’ll differ for those who purely use controllers.  Also, PC allows for the usual keyboard short cuts for weaponry and screenshots.

Visually, I have to commend Venom Games for their port from the PC version.  Outside of Call of Duty 2, Prey is the best Xbox 360 PC port I’ve come across.  While Quake 4 also uses the Doom engine, Prey makes Quake 4 look like a bad joke.  While this game looks quite impressive on an HD display, seeing it with all the goods on a fast PC is truly the way to go.  Sure, you’ll get the lighting and particle effects on the Xbox 360, but the amount of detail that the PC can deliver cannot be matched if you’ve got a powerful video card.  Textures are much crisper, and effects pop much more.  That said, the Xbox 360 version is quite dark, and there were many moments where I had to use the lighter to see things – not so on the PC version.

Framerate will obviously vary between PCs, but with our rig we could get 25-45 FPS on average, and looked solid overall. The Xbox 360 version seemed to run at least at 25-30 fps, and we didn’t notice slowdown yet in our play through of the first number of levels. 

As far as the online feature set, both versions out of the box will support deathmatch and team deathmatch with eight different maps for up to eight players.  However, the mod community will be able to make maps and different game types for PC players.  That said, 2K is promising some sort of downloadable content for the Xbox 360 version.  What that is specifically will be announced at a later date. What would be nice is if a mod became popular (cough…capture the flag) 2K could snatch it up and have it as downloadable content for 360 owners.  Xbox 360 owners will benefit with the built in voice chat, where PC owners will have to use a third party voice program since Prey doesn’t have one built in.

One final bonus (if you’d consider it a bonus) is that 3D Realms is using Triton for pre-loading and downloading the game.  It’ll actually stream so you’ll be able to play the game while it’s downloading after it’s partially complete.  While the beta version of this service has been rather buggy and clunky in comparison to similar services, the whole interface is supposed to get a re-haul before release.  We’ll update you on that status in our final report on the game.

So which version is better?  That depends.  If you’ve got the beefy rig with a recent video card, it’s hard not to go with the PC version for detail and fluidity – especially if you’re interested in mouse/keyboard controls and the potential mods .  However, if you don’t have the PC to handle all the frills, the Xbox 360 version is still top notch, especially if you’ve got an HDTV.

Overall, we’re enjoying the game so far, and plan on getting our feet wet with the entire game over the holiday break both in single player and online. We’ll have our full report next week.