Holy crap, tell me this is in game footage

What I have seen is not as polished but along those lines in complexity and the particle effects. The ps3 is a per pixel monster. It excels at fogs, dust and anything of fine particles.

The video looks perfect with none of the artifacts you see with a simulation based on physics. (like explosion items sailing through edges of items, etc).

I don't know if the intro is gameplay, I doubt it as there's none of the unavoidable inperfections coming from object interaction with all those explosions. It seems to be a plotted sequence, gone over many times for looks and mistakes.

However, I don't doubt that the in game can look that good, except with the usual quirks you get from a game of that style.
You would get unusual interactions between the exploding vehicle, the fire, the walls. I would have believed it was gameplay if I saw a piece of metal or explosion react to something in an unusual way that was accurate to the physics, but didn't look right.

The real "tell all" is the enemy that when shot, falls of the edge only to complete the fall when another enemy is clubbed off the edge on top of him.

That is a completely scripted event that would never be used in the game, it's too unusual and contrived a situation to ever be an in game reaction to gunplay from the player.

The thing is, how long has that team had the kit? They obviously have some favor from sony and better support direct from Japan. They must have highly skilled teams to even make a static render for the into like that.

To continue playing the devil's advocate, I would say that they would certainly have had aplayable or an interactive demo if the game was that finished.

A running game of that caliber would have buried microsoft in a grave so deep that we wouldn't even be having 360 vs ps3 arguements. It would have been decided.

So can ps2 look that good? Yes, it can.
Was that a canned render or plotted system render? More likely canned, but
not unrepresentative of the ps3 power.

Let's face it, every single demo shown at system launch has been exceeded in graphical quality by that system down the road. That is known.

So the way I see it, I expect graphics BETTER than that demo out of ps3 down the road.