Xbox 360 Degrees:

It's now emerged that most of the demonstrations that Sony have been showing of the PlayStation 3 are fake. This won't strike anyone as being very surprising with Sony's past record (the PS2 announcement, lots of fancy demos and "Toy Story graphics in real-time" look at what we actually got).

Earlier Epic's Mark Rein had confirmed that only their Unreal 3 engine demo was being rendered on early PS3 hardware and a few other less then spectacular titles, it even emerged that the Fight Night demonstration that EA showed had been put together on an Xbox 360 and then ported over to the PS3 as Sony had been so late in delivering their development kits to EA, despite the advanced graphics chip the PS3 had it still suffered from slow down and aliasing.

The most astonishing demonstration was definitely the Killzone video - Guerrilla's Jan-Bart Van Beek finally let it slip that it was all pre-rendered.

Is the Killzone sequence a fair example of what people can expect from realtime gameplay on Playstation 3?

Jan-Bart: It's basically a representation of the look and feel of the game we're trying to make.

It represents what you're trying to do with the game? Well where's the actual game then? Stop showing us videos and show us the game.

While Microsoft have their own surprises:

On the Microsoft front, after several people came out speaking about the hardware their demonstrations were actually running on - not being anywhere near the final machine... Dual core 2Ghz CPU and a Radeon 9800 Pro (in comparison the PC I'm writing this on is about even) shocked a lot of people. Microsoft's Robbie Bach finally confirmed them to be true, stating that they were only using the alpha development kits and that the final kits won't be ready until about July.

AnandTech found out more.