It's blatantly obvious in many places anyway, though. Look at things like the cliffs on the level Halo; there are tons of places with a sheer edge in the original game, and a rough spot with tons of boulders in the new visuals.

And seriously, their own marketing includes direct comparisons that make it blatantly obvious that it's not well-matched.

Even if that wasn't true, it seems silly to implement a visual comparison feature designed specifically to make direct comparison difficult.

: But I guess that could be it too. The 360 had an awfully small RAM (not that
: I blame them, it was standard for the time).

The original game has 64MB to play with on its original hardware. The graphical assets alone will be less than that, but then Classic Mode uses HPC assets, so it might actually be larger (I have no idea). The 360 has 512MB of unified RAM.

My guess is that to support classic mode, you need at least 1/8th of the 360's pool. Having this dedicated at all times to Classic Mode assets might not have seemed acceptable to Saber's engineers. If so, they're probably caching Classic Mode stuff on the HDD and streaming it in during the transition, which would probably take long enough to cause a very noticeable hiccup.

: Right. It launched at $45/$50 here (depends on the exchange rate) and still
: costs $45...

Even from online retailers and such!?