Well, X-Cult.org have posted Sega of America's official bugs listing from an ex-playtester. It's in Filemaker format so isn't too easy to open, but I persevered because I have an obsession with all things SEGA during the Dreamcast era. Here's where it gets good: obviously, the bugs reported by the playtesters are often pretty mundane and uninteresting (and many of them seemed to make it into the final product), but what's funny are the suggestions and complaints made by the team:

These include creative and artistic demands to the game producers, where the playtesters tell the actual creators of the game how they should have done it:

Often with a strangely precise degree of accuracy:

80%? Not 75 or 87%? Definitely 80?

The absolute best ones, though, are the moral and ethical concerns of the game testing staff. You can draw your own conclusions from these.

(How the fuck did Jet Set Radio, the game about spraypainting, ever get past this?)

Hey, hands on the desk!

If they're concerned about marijuana leaves, it's probably for the best that these playtesters were probably all looking for work a few years later, when the acid-trip known as REZ would have been kicking around.

There are also legal concerns:

And this utterly baffling ethical worry, filed under "Advisory":

Yes... yes it is.

This is an interesting comparison not only because we get to see two different attempts at encoding from the same master (OK, the order of the studio logos is swapped, but that's it), but also because of the different codecs used. Warner's fairly cozy past with Microsoft (a full story which isn't publishable, sadly) means that they're using VC-1, whereas Paramount, like most, are using AVC.

OK, so image one...

Paramount (AVC) | Warner (VC1)

The first thing to note is that both versions basically have the same amount of detail visible, for the most part. Neither appears to have been prefiltered, and both are pretty pleasing on the eyes (in the technical sense, that is).

Ah, but look closer. The same amount of detail, perhaps, but only on the Y channel.The Warner version has had the Cb and Cr (color components) quite strongly denoised. I think a lot of encoders actually do this on their own, behind your back, for compression efficiency gains - no idea if that's the case here, or if this has been induced by the compressionist as a manual step. If you look at the magazines on the far right of the frame, the color resolution is lower in the Warner version. Also, the wooden table is harder to differentiate from the wall.

Look also at the bedside railing at the very bottom of the frame. The chroma denoising is strong enough to have actually removed some of the purple lens aberration.

The Warner version does, however, exhibit less mosquito noise. Take a look around the girl's hair.

Onto image 2.

Paramount (AVC) | Warner (VC1)

From later on in the same sequence. Much the same characteristics as above: take a look at the pink/purple flowers and note the heightened color bleed on the Warner disc. Also, the cyan-colored screen on the hospital equipment near the right of the frame is quite interesting. Compare the two versions and you'll see that on the Warner disc, its color extends many pixels above and below its proper position. This is only on the vertical plane - horizontally, nothing seems to be different. Very odd. This is some way away from the 4:4:4 captured by the cameras!

However, once again, there is less mosquito noise, and also a little bit less grain/CCD noise on the Warner frame when compared to the Paramount. Again, it's difficult to know if Warner's disc has been intentionally grain reduced, or if the lessened grain is just a result of the different compression algorithm (probably the latter).

Image 3:

Paramount (AVC) | Warner (VC1)

Very few differences worth noting. Again, more mosquito noise on Paramount's disc.

Image 4:

Paramount (AVC) | Warner (VC1)

Paramount's is clearly better here, showing better grain retention. Warner's job begins to look more like deliberate grain reduction, but without seeing the master, it's impossible to say for sure.

Image 5:

Paramount (AVC) | Warner (VC1)

As above. I'm not head-over-heels in love with the compression on either version, and have seen better results from AVC before. Granted, though, this film is nearly three hours long.

Conclusion: both discs are good, but I don't feel that either of them are 10/10s. My own encoding experience with AVC is nowhere near that of MPEG-2, so if there are any BD compressionists out there who want to chime in, please do. (Still, that's still more experience than most "reviewers"...) Personally, I think that the Paramount version has a very slight advantage, as I don't feel that the higher level of mosquito noise will be as visible during motion as the lessened chroma resolution.

One final thought: neither disc makes this plodding 165-minute tech demo any less excruciating to sit through.

Typical 10-bit to 8-bit conversion with rough steps visible

Sony's process adds noise to great effect. Images from AV Watch.

Because animated content like this is digitally produced from start to finish now, there is no chance of the picture becoming noisy or grainy. This means that there is no noise or grain present in the master to act as a dither, and rough color banding transitions suddenly become apparent. Sony's process carefully injects noise into the image to hide said banding.

An interview with Mr. Yokota Kazuki, who works at Sony's PCL authoring/encoding facility, explains the BD creation process. Because the studio master tapes (almost always HDCAM SR in the case of BD) used as masters are already 10-bit, rough color banding can be expected during the encode to BD-friendly 8-bit AVC. (The iteration of H.264 Advanced Video Coding used in BD only allows for 8-bit, as do the other two codecs supported by the format).

That's all good if the source is 10-bit (most are), but what if the material arrives in 8-bit? Mr Kazuki explains that an 8-bit master can also benefit and be "de-banded" using Super Bit Mapping.

The article also has some great comparison images - no idea if they've been exaggerated for effect, but you get the idea.

Of course, such processes do not seem to be unique to Sony. Microsoft have developed a similar process as part of a utility called "xScaler" which pre-dithers 10-bit video to allow it to degrade gracefully to 8-bit. In fact, you may already have watched the results - it was used on the BD release of "Ratatouille".

Noise really is a wonderful thing. Sony and Microsoft have created more advanced processes, but I also routinely use noise generation when working with low-detail sources to increase the perceived detail and "fill in" areas corrupted by compression.

OK, more like a couple thousand of them. But they're all lovely, I promise.

No longer do our friends in the NTSC territories have to put up with grubby standards conversions if they want to check out this classic of French cinema. And no longer does everyone else have to make do with watching a green, mucusy, DNR'd version which runs one frame per second too fast. In fact, barring a Canadian VHS, this will be the first time anyone outside of Parisian arthouse cinemas will have heard Georges Delerue's musical score undistorted since the 1970s. Or the hideous German release which looks like someone rubbed vaseline in the telecine gate (sorry, but it seriously is awful).

You can buy the standard edition, which has the DVD and a booklet, and some lovely packaging - or...

You can buy the limited edition package, which comes with a leathery-style finish (it's fake, don't worry, the only things killed were the souls of the people at StudioCanal servicing after I harassed them constantly asking for video fixes), a soundtrack CD, a bigger booklet, a numbered certificate of authenticity, a little card I wrote explaining how to set your TV up correctly, and these poster card reproductions. I spent a good few days Photoshopping the scratches out of the one in the middle.

Both versions came out in the USA two days ago (only on Amazon.com so far), so people should be receiving their copies right about now. Greencine seemed to like it! Oh, and both versions have the original French soundtrack, with new English subtitles approved by the Director himself, and also, because I still had some disc space left over, the English and German dubs, which I included for comedy purposes (plus, we had them, so why not use them?)

The encoding quality on this release is way, way better than the accepted standard on SD DVD. For a start, it's not been lowpass filtered (blurred), because this cheap trick is absolutely not necessary with a high quality encoder (and even without, it's questionable). Second, there is no film grain reduction, because even the better processes to remove film grain create an unpleasantly plasticy-looking result. Lastly, it was encoded with Cinema Craft SP2, which boggles my mind with its quality. There are just about no visible compression artefacts in the entire film, thanks partly to the fact that CCSP2 lets you fine-tune the quantization characteristics on a scene-by-scene (frame by frame) basis, and thanks partly to the fact that it must have been written by super-geniuses.

I actually started out using a different encoder for this film, but the combination of grain and entirely hand-held camera movement (and unfiltered detail) proved to be too much for it. No amount of messing around with the quantization matrices or changing the GOP structure (the placement of frames within the MPEG stream) created a result that I was totally happy with. Still better than other DVDs, but still not a good enough facsimile of the film. Cinema Craft SP2 came at a hefty priced, but saved our backsides.

Going through player bank testing right now... L'amour Braque.

LucasArts has put up a new site" for the remake, and it features an interesting video with developer interviews, screen shots, and concept art. Most unnervingly, it features a new, hip-n-happening version of Guybrush Threepwood, who has apparently now become a douche-baggy fitness trainer with a deformed eyebrow line and the same generic smug, one eyebrow up, one eyebrow down expression that every damn animated character now has:

1991

2009

Anyway, it will be fun, and also slightly unnerving, to see a re-imagining of this game when it comes out. I'm also very pleased to hear that Dominic Armato is returning as the voice of everyone's favourite wannabe pirate. Even stranger is the fact that Telltale Games are working on a new, totally separate episodic series for PC and Wii Ware, featuring many of the original development team. Visually, the character renders look pretty amateurish, but I'm sure it'll be fun to play.

Weird, huh? You wait ages for a new Monkey Island game, and a whole bunch come along at once.

How amazingly deranged!

And then there's this: tits and John Kricfalusi on one page. John certainly understands the needs of a growing boy.

But everywhere I hear that Apple memory is supplied as the EEC type, and cheap RAM is not the EEC type. Has anyone out there used proletariat-style RAM sticks in their fancy machines? Did it work OK?

Apart from the absurdity of this situation (they're pixels on a screen, for fuck's sake), it also creates a few problems. First of all, what is and isn't OK with the BBFC changes as the years go by. In the past, they didn't like chainsaws. For a while, they didn't seem to like head-butts. I think their most recent fear has been of hanging scenes, but I haven't been paying attention to them much lately since most of what I buy is from the US (where a much more mysterious and unpredictable organisation holds the scissors).

Much worse though is that it limits what's available and creates financial difficulties for UK DVD labels. The BBFC don't work for free, so you have to pony up the cash if you want them to look at anything (and you do, if you want to release anything). "Anything" includes feature films, moving DVD menus, any extra features, and yes, if you want to include an audio commentary, you have to pay them double so they can watch the film again and decide whether or not the director's comments raise the rating. If it moves and makes sounds, you pay for it.

There's a fee calculator on their web site which lets you calculate costs, which are based on run-time. To release a DVD of a 120-minute feature film with an audio commentary and with 30 minutes of interviews, it would cost £1695 - no problem for the big studios, but a problem for the little guys. Does this have an effect on the quality of the final product? Yes. I can tell you for a fact that smaller UK distributors sometimes omit audio commentaries from their releases so they can stand a better chance of breaking even, or even making a profit on a niche title.

Oh, by the way - if you're releasing a film in cinemas AND on DVD AND on a video on demand service, you have to pay three times. Apparently, the environment you watch the film in can change the rating. By the looks of it, they're also charging again if you want to release your film on a Download service (presumably iTunes), how they can possibly justify this for online material is beyond me, so this could be a misunderstanding on my part.

All of the above is partly why people talking about film "certificates" pisses me off. "Horny McDouchebag's Wild Adventure was awarded an 18 certificate". It's not a fucking achievement, it's a bureaucratic, conservatively inspired annoyance which quite frankly, everyone except for some naive parents (who think a little red circle with "18" in it is going to stop their kids from seeing simulated violence on a TV screen) - and of course the people profiting from the operation - could do without.

To the best of my knowledge, this is a world exclusive: a review of the slightly gimped but still absolutely excellent UK version of a higher-end 2009 Panasonic Plasma.

You may be reading this thinking that you could never own one of these, because you're worried about Plasma screen burn, or power consumption (or even worse, you've listened to the idiot at Curry's or the Sony Centre who's told you that Plasma is an inferior display technology). Please, get the hell over it and stop putting scare stories above high quality video. The power consumption is actually very low for a 50" screen, and the chances of screen burn on a properly looked after (that is, not run on the comedy "Super Bright" mode) NeoPDP screen is either non-existent or incredibly minute, depending on who you ask.

To summarize:

• The THX mode has FANTASTICALLY accurate colors which seriously improve the image quality. It is VERY hard to find a TV that gets this right.
• The greyscale is also excellent.
• The standard-def scaling isn't very good and there are no film cadence detection options, but that's not a big deal: just use an upscaling DVD player.
• And on top of this, you have the inherent advantages of NeoPDP: fantastic contrast, fantastic viewing angle, fantastic motion resolution.

When you live in Britain and aren't allowed to watch Britain's Got Talent on YouTube (even if you actually wanted to), it's clear that something is badly wrong. It's becoming more and more obvious as the years go by that American internet connections are apparently superior to everybody elses', with many video sites locking out filthy foreigners.

The situation peaked last night when I was trying to watch a video interview with Tim Schafer regarding Brutal Legend, his new video game. You can lock out Britain's Got Talent and I'll be pissed off as a matter of principle, but locking out content that I can't get ANY OTHER WAY is unacfuckingcceptable. The game will be available all over the world, but the interview video box stayed black and didn't show anything. In the comments of the page, the guy who himself conducted the interview reported that users download a program called UltraSurf, which somehow re-routes your web connection and makes sites think you're based in the US.

UltraSurf is a little Windows program which launches Internet Explorer (and can work with Firefox if you're using the optional extension and gains access to the verboten videos. There's a speed penalty, but it's better than being shown a "Filthy foreigners go away" message. Granted, there's very rarely anything worth looking at anyway, but the matter of principle is intact.

Here's a little comparison of what YouTube looks like to American eyes, compared with the cut-down international version. If you are not an American, or if you do not live in America, LOOK AWAY FROM THE VIDEO AND PUT YOUR ARMS DOWN ON THE GROUND AND DO NOT LOOK AT ADVERTS FOR THE DISNEY CHANNEL BECAUSE THESE ARE FORBIDDEN:

(By the way, the program was originally developed so that Chinese citizens could bypass internet censorship. Now we have to use it to watch interviews with game developers. Jesus).

I keep forgetting to keep people here up to date with what I've been testing! So hopefully you'll enjoy now reading about the Sony BDP-S5000ES, a largely pointless BD player (which I believe the UK magazine press has showered in praise - after all, it's expensive, right?). Less disappointingly, there's been Panasonic's usual no-nonsense TX-P42G10, which features ruler-flat grayscale (once calibrated), tolerable color inaccuracy, lovely contrast, blurry SD scaling, and an insanely good price.

And in the LCD arena (or should that be the LCD leper colony), we have a good effort from Samsung in the form of the LE40B651, which in some respects is a nice display despite some quirks.

The Sony Computer Entertainment consoles are far from my favorite games machines, but at the same time, I find anything related to the history of gaming fascinating (especially during the 32-bit era, which really was the beginning of the end for Sega). For that reason, l loved reading this EDGE Article called "The Making of: PlayStation". Some of the info here is so juicy that you re-read it several times just to soak it up.

Tomorrow I am running out to buy either a) new tacks/pins/whatever they're called in your village or b) a staple-gun. And then obviously, the screen will go in the middle, covering the funny headache-wallpaper. And blackness will cover the ceiling, which is right now one of the worst contrast killers in the room. The job must be completed!

Anyway, me and my brother watched Changeling tonight (great film it was too) and I decided that enough is enough, so I've just spent £80 on the most light-absorbing black fabric I could lay my hands on (it's from these guys).

So from now on, I'll be watching films - not films plus wallpaper plus the deactivated radiator below the screen.

Or if you are in Europe, October 16th. Not a bad delay at all, at least not compared to Tim Schafer's and Double Fine's previous game PSYCHONAUTS, which became available in a downgraded 50hz version here 10 months after its summery Yank debut.

Games that Mr. Schafer's had suitable involvement in have always had an inherent likability to their characters and worlds, which anyone who's played Day of the Tentacle or Psychonauts will attest to (this is the guy, or at least one of the guys, responsible for turning the Monkey Island series from "serious" games into the comedies we know and love). Brutal Legend looks to be more of the same, and judging from the screen grabs so far, I'm going to be grinning like an idiot in October.