A picture is worth a thousand words, the cliché goes. But what if a picture actually tells a thousand lies about the quality of your videogame? As developers, publishers and publicists try to build buzz for their PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 titles, they're faced with a growing problem: games that look awful in screenshots even though they look amazing when they're being played. Why? Because a number of the shader programs and particle effects running on these titles look good in action, but fall apart in stills.

A prime example is Activision's recently released superhero brawler, Marvel: Ultimate Alliance. When we first saw in-game images in magazines, it looked terrible. Then we saw a playable version and were forced to do a 180, because the game looked stellar in motion. "When we do screenshots, we have to turn the shaders off," says Marvel: Ultimate Alliance associate producer Chris Palmisano. "That's because there are all these shaders that look terrible when they're not in motion." As a result, Activision publicist Aaron Grant tells us that he's recommended to his bosses that they reverse the ratio of video to screenshots that they send out to promote their next-gen title.

A similar problem afflicted Sony Online Entertainment's PS3 game Untold Legends: Dark Kingdom, which has made tremendous strides since it was first shown at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in May. "Particle effects are meant to be continuous and moving," says producer Andy Sites. "When you stop them, it's like looking behind the curtain and saying 'Hmm, that's what a fire effect looks like when it's not moving.' Honestly, I wish we could never send out screens, just video. It's a lot harder than in past to create stills that communicate what our games really look like." SOE publicist Katie Hanson adds that video generates twice the response of screenshots, suggesting that they too will place more emphasis on video going forward.

The last person we discussed this with was Sony Computer Entertainment America's Kyle Shubel, producer of the most beautiful PS3 launch title, Genji: Days of the Blade. "A picture says a thousand words, a video says a million," says Shubel. "I would rather see a 4 second video than 20 screenshots. The problem is, now that we've got high-definition games, you're going to get a 2-minute long trailer in 1080p HD, and that'll be a gigabyte download. We'll just have to take this to the next level, and make sure we've got bigger pipes."

To compare video footage of these games in motion to the screenshots pictured below, click here; keep in mind that YouTube's video compression will impact the quality of the clips we've uploaded.