Monday, November 27, 2006

Beloved yuletide family film finally gets video transfer that isn't rubbish

Home Alone is one of my all time favourite films - I must have watched it at least once every Christmas. But if you thought that the only things that were rubbish that had the words "Home Alone" on were some licensed games, lunchboxes and a few naff sequels, you were wrong - Home Alone also had a DVD release that was most definitely RUBBISH. We're talking sharpened-to-hell, "melting wax look" rubbish.

Now, 20th Century Fox have released a brand new DVD that has excellent bonus features and a good video transfer. The fact that I'm celebrating a "good" video transfer rather than the excellent ones I usually expect goes to show you how offensively RUBBISH the old one was.

Head over to the comparison over at Whiggles.com to learn why this is one DVD that's actually worth buying again.

Posted at 11:04 PM | Permanent Link

Sunday, November 26, 2006

Wii Custom Cover #1: Wii Sports

You weren't expecting to see Wii custom covers on my site a weekend after the system was launched, were you? Aha, I surprise again! Of course, the first game to get cover'd is Wii Sports, which, as a pack-in game, comes in a cheap cardboardy case. Here is the solution! Oh, the things I give you people to make and do!

Head over to the Custom Covers page and get your own printable cover to cut out and keep. If you don't, then you are probably either OK with the cardboardy case (which is fine), or resisting the festive joys of the Wii, in which case you are probably dead inside (which is not fine)!

PS: If you are wondering why there is French blurb on the back of the box, it's not because I have suddenly found strengthened love for people from many lands, it's just because I couldn't find anything else to fill the gap and I wasn't going to make up text about a game I haven't played much. I am sorry if I got one of the és in the wrong place or got the / the wrong way around. I am a big dumb English-only speaker and am not used to these!

Posted at 10:12 PM | Permanent Link

Thursday, November 23, 2006

Attack of the new things!

Make them stop, make them stop!

It's The Age of S&M - finally! I've been waiting for this one since the start of the month, and Telltale's supplier's international shipping (or the cheap shipping I chose) seems to be a tad slow.

For the purposes of review, some brief excerpts. First, box art that never was...

TERRIFYING early drawings of some sort... wow, just wow...

The one time organised religion might actually be OK:

And Trauma Center: Second Opinion! With no Wii to play it on yet! Why do you torment me so?

CAUTION: Exciting disc art ahead. Did you see that? That was sarcasm!

Posted at 6:36 PM | Permanent Link

Wednesday, November 22, 2006

The waiting game

In the last 40 minutes or so, what must be the first American NTSC Wiis in Britain have begun arriving via DHL.

Unfortunately I'm going to have to wait just over another week until December 1st, so for now I will have to make do with seeing games arrive (without having anything to play them on) and gazing longingly at pictures of the beast on forums...

Posted at 11:31 AM | Permanent Link

Guess what's sold out and too expensive for me anyway?

This Dreamcast wrist-watch, imported from Sega's Dreamcast-Direct...sorry, SEGA-Direct Japanese only online store.

$135 not including shipping is more than what I'd ever pay for one of these portable clocks, especially an analogue one I'd have trouble reading and probably be afraid to wear ... but even still, what an item. Why was I not informed!

Posted at 11:23 AM | Permanent Link

Tuesday, November 21, 2006

Yoshi's Island DS

The only thing better than Yoshi's Island is its predecessor, Super Mario World. That's why I was completely ecstatic when I heard at E3 this year there was going to be a sequel.

I was a little puzzled when I opened the package this morning and pulled out not "Yoshi's Island 2" but "Yoshi's Island DS". Booting the game up reveals that it's not been developed by Nintendo, but has instead been farmed out to Artoon, who made the fairly OK-ish "Blinx" for the Xbox. Hmm. Not to worry though, because the game is still very good. I'm not entirely sure though, what Artoon were supposed to be making here - at times it feels like they've been told to make "Yoshi's Island Remixed" or something, because the first level is a more or less direct lift of that of the first game.

Fortunately enough, the originality kicks in later and some new gameplay touches start to appear. In the old game you carried only Baby Mario (annoying little son of a....) around, whereas in the DS 'sequel' you get to carry around a whole assortment of, ehh, cute little... things. There are some parts to the game that don't quite fit in with the original Nintendo designs, occasionally making the game feel like a very high quality fan-made one (well, I suppose that's what it is, in a sense). I have to say, I'm shocked at the negative reception I've read about this game on certain forums, though - I think it's a completely worthwhile platformer.

Posted at 7:32 PM | Permanent Link

Wii Component output uses the same DAC as the GameCube component cable

Ex-purveyor of fine modified GameCube video cables Saurian has, over at the NTSC-UK Forum, given us the good news that the Nintendo Wii in fact uses the same Digital to Analogue converter chip for its Component video output as the GameCube's component video cable did.

Why is this good news? Because the GameCube's video output quality via Component was nothing short of stunning and was the benchmark I used to test HDTVs I got in for review. Compare this to the Xbox's murky and generally more blurred offering (although on the Xbox, a few selected games ran in HD resolution, helping tip the scales just a little). The difference this time is that the necessary chip is now in the Wii console, rather than in the end of the video cable like it was in the GameCube days. This means that third parties can easily create Component cables for the Wii.

See this picture he posted on the forum - the top-right image shows the chip from inside the old GameCube's cable - see if you can find it in the Wii's innards (in the background).

The chip in question is high-quality and highly flexible. Saur tells us on the forum that since the H-Sync and V-Sync parts of the video signal can easily be tapped from the chip, it'll only be a matter of time before we see inexpensive cables that allow the Wii to hook up to VGA monitors (for 480p Progressive Scan games only, naturally).

Posted at 2:51 PM | Permanent Link

Sunday, November 19, 2006

I've ran out of "Wii" jokes...

When I woke up last Saturday to an e-mail telling me that I might not have my Nintendo Wii this side of Christmas, I was naturally a little disappointed. All of the GamesFest (TM!) plans I'd been hatching were going to have to go through a quick rethink (read: cancellation).

The alternative, to try and buy a PAL machine from a store here in the UK, was unthinkable, not least of all because PAL video games are expensive and typically come out far later than their American NTSC counterparts. I speak English natively and have an NTSC compatible TV set, so there is absolutely no point in me waiting for Nintendo of Europe to standards convert games and translate the screen text into languages like French and German.

But against what looked like some pretty ugly odds, the fun is going on as planned thanks to a kindly acquaintance who, as luck would have it, is emigrating here to the UK before the end of the month and offered to bring me anything I needed as thanks for helping him out with US/UK HDTV technicalities. Yes, my Nintendo Wii was bought in the wee hours of this morning and is currently waiting to get packed snugly into a suitcase to fly across the Atlantic on November 28th. As a result, the Wii will be with me on December 1, later than planned but still a full week ahead of the European launch (and with a better selection of software to boot!) So, everyone give Guyle (who's second name I won't publish here) a hero's applause (or a big sloppy kiss if you're a girl) for waiting in line at Target at 7am this morning just to get me a Wii. You made my birthday/early Christmas, buddy!

Posted at 8:33 PM | Permanent Link

The next generation of video games...

...starts TODAY, as far as I'm concerned. The Nintendo Wii will be launched across the East Coast of those crazy United States in approximately 70 minutes (assuming stores are open at midnight, that is), and hopefully, just hopefully, one of those machines is getting put aside for me.

I honestly can't wait. Over the years, Sega have come and (mostly) gone, Microsoft have done their part although it's not to everyone's taste, and Sony have been, well... Sony, but Nintendo are the only people around that don't seem to have lost the plot over the last ... oh, wait, 15 years? And I genuinely do mean that, it's not just a fanboy rant - the only company I ever had any sort of fanboy delusions for stopped producing hardware in 2001.

Aye chihuahua, I'm drunk. I love you Nintendo.

Posted at 3:53 AM | Permanent Link

Saturday, November 18, 2006

Xbox 360 all out aggressive advertising action assault

Although I normally say I don't care much about the Xbox 360 (I'm sure it's a great system - just hasn't grabbed me yet), I was pleasantly surprised to see such aggressive advertising from Microsoft when I opened the free crappy newspaper, the Metro, on the bus yesterday morning. Absolutely EVERY advert in it was somehow related to the Xbox 360. At the beginning of one page nearing the middle, I saw a massive King Kong advert that made me smile lots.

HD DVD in big letters at the top of a widely read newspaper. This is good. By contrast, I've not seen a single Blu-ray advert yet.

Absolutely excellent - 1080p, affordable. Everyone loves affordable, and the myth that HD DVD is 1080i (it's not) is nicely debunked. Nice to see someone who knew what they were doing put these ads together.

You can see a full sized version of the entire advert here.

Oh yeah, me and my friend went back to the Nintendo Wii tour in the Buchanan Galleries for more Wii fun! We absolutely BEGGED the Nintendo reps to put Zelda: Twilight Princess on and after much batting of the eyes, they did! The Nintendo Rep was the coolest guy ever and when we accosted him on his way to the nearest GAME store, he even gave me one of his "Official Wii Stockist" posters provided I rolled it up quickly and hid it under my jacket. Yay, I'm such a dork!

Posted at 3:15 PM | Permanent Link

Thursday, November 16, 2006

The Wii is amazing

Today me and my friends decided to take a trip to the Buchanan Galleries to have a brief go on the Nintendo Wii. Can't be bothered reading all of this? OK, well, playing the Wii was like playing video games again for the first time.

We waited in line for about 20 minutes (apparently earlier in the day it could take up to an hour) and finally we got to see people make fools of themselves! The exhibit had been set up outside the ritzy John Lewis store in the Buchanan Galleries mall, and was designed with a "lifestyle" theme with cheap flammable furnitures from Ikea, with a table with magazines, a picture of someone's family, and of course a wall-mounted LCD TV.

The Wii was hooked up via Composite video and was outputting a 50hz PAL video signal which meant that the game (Wii Sports) was showing visible frame skipping. That didn't matter though, because the final game will, for Europeans, no doubt have a 60hz mode and the visuals really weren't what I was there for. Although we begged the reps to put Zelda on (they had a copy), we were only allowed to play Wii Sports, which was understandable as Zelda wouldn't suit the "pick up and play and go away" nature of a popular event like this.

We played Wii Sports Tennis, which was amazingly good fun. After 1 or 2 misses, we soon got the hang of the controls and were lobbing balls around. Far from being embarrassing, it was actually great fun to forcibly whack the "racket" (remote control) around in mid air. There seemed to be a tiny bit of a delay from swinging the remote to the action registering and appearing on screen, but this is quite possibly down to the fact that the LCD TV being used was having to convert Interlaced video to Progressive on the fly.

We managed to sneak in a second try because our first one ended when the reps weren't looking, and quite honestly I had to be pulled away from the thing. Wow. I seriously can't wait!

The reactions the system was getting were also pretty interesting. On the escalators, a lot of curious older people were looking on and smiling at the sight of what was going on. Does anyone honestly think Nintendo can attract the older generation though? We'll soon see, I suppose... keep in mind I'm the guy who thought the Dreamcast would be a huge success (I was 13 and naive!) and more recently, that the DS would be a flop, so maybe I should just say I think the Wii will be a disaster so as not to jinx it...

Posted at 9:05 PM | Permanent Link

Sunday, November 12, 2006

Is the TV broken? No, you're just playing a modern video game

If you visited my site around E3 this year, you might have read me groaning about the look of most modern videogames. My biggest gripe is with the fact that game developers seem to think the public likes playing games that are almost completely devoid of colour. Apparently this is what sells so they may actually be right. That does not make me any happier about it, though.

One of the Xbox 360's "killer apps", Gears of War, is due out soon. It's yet another title on an Xbox console that I just couldn't care less about. Friends have linked me to videos of it playing and yeah, it looks technically impressive, but most of the time I stop the video playing before it reaches the end because the visuals bore the hell out of me. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure Gears of War will be a fun game for first person shooter fans who own Xbox 360s, but I'm going to be a grinch and say that it looks depressing as hell because of the colour, or lack of. Yes, I said it actually has a depressing effect on me. Look at some screens for yourself:

One of my idols, John Kricfalusi, cartoonist extraordinaire, coined the term "pee and poo colours" when he was talking about animation, for obvious reasons. I wouldn't even say that Gears of War looks as appealing as that. It looks more like metal, grey, and dark green from what I've seen. "Xbox 360: new video processing chip allows 650,000 different shades of dark brown!"

Now let's look at another upcoming game, Legend of Zelda: The Twilight Princess. On release, Zelda's graphics are going to be dated because although it's now a launch title for the Nintendo Wii, it's also coming out on the GameCube because it was originally intended as a Cube-only title. Add to this the fact that with the Wii, Nintendo are betting on their quirky and unique control methods rather than on better graphics - the Wii isn't a graphics powerhouse. Finally add to this the fact that as an Xbox 360 title, Gears will be in 720p HDTV whereas Zelda will only be standard definition with 480 lines of resolution.

But who gives a flying crap that Zelda is running on older technology? It looks looks at least 20 times more inviting and appealing. From a visual standpoint it's so much nicer to look at. There's absolutely zero denying that Gears will be the more technically impressive game but in my opinion, that's not a lot of good when personally, I'm barely motivated to even look at it. For me, part of what makes (made?) video games so fun was that they were, like animation, such a visual form of entertainment. No matter what you're playing, you're looking at a screen the whole time so it makes sense to have your eyes treated nicely, right? Think back to the old days of gaming, where even if the colours were limited, at least they were limited mainly to BRIGHT colours and you'd still get some degree of excitement.

Zelda is proof positive that you can do some degree of realism - OK, fantasy realism - without depressing the living shite out of people like me. More like this please. Now, OK, I realise that you can't create the sort of graphics you have in Gears of War by accident, and that the dark colour pallete is a stylistic choice. That's perfectly fine - there's a time and a place for realistic, dingy graphics in games. I can't imagine a neon glowing version of Silent Hill 2, for example (because unlike most games, survival horror puts entertaining you down into second place and prioritises on trying to scare you). The reason for my rant is that I'm sick of seeing a lack of colour everywhere in modern games. It's downright depressing and I want colours back. Despite being an HDTV freak I'll take low-res, pixellated, colourful games over dark grey HDTV epics any day.

Update (November 15): I was told last night that Gears of War actually does have an option to artificially boost the colours for people who can't put up with the dull look. I think my comments about the way the games industry is headed in general and the overall look of the game still stand, though.

Posted at 11:12 PM | Permanent Link

Friday, November 10, 2006

Toshiba UK spill some more HD DVD flavoured beans

The info nuggets just keep coming from the guys 'n' girls over at Toshiba, who continue to provide us with HD DVD loveliness. This time, more info on the European players, courtesy of AV Forums poster Goblin. Most of the full post is quoted below, but here are the key points:

• The European players will use FAROUDJA chipsets for their upscaling and deinterlacing of standard def DVDs. That means that the European player will almost certainly suffer from the Faroudja MBE error. However, it also means that you can count on excellent natural motion from all of your NTSC and PAL discs. They will also have Faroudja's DCDi technology, which smooths out jaggies from interlaced video.
• It sounds like Toshiba, erm, "wouldn't be surprised" if a code or firmware upgrade to remove the standard-def DVD region lock from the player, were to, erm, appear on the web somewhere. Are these guys the best or what?
• Toshiba say that any HD DVD players shipped as region free (for HD DVD, that is) will stay that way and will never be region locked through a firmware update.

Check out the full AVForums Post - it's full of great info.

Posted at 9:20 PM | Permanent Link

Thursday, November 09, 2006

Where's the follow-up to one of the best MP3 players ever made?

When I first ditched my unstable, naff-sounding 4th generation Apple Ipod just before the Summer of 2005, I took the bus into sweltering (by UK standards) Glasgow and picked up an MP3 player from a brand I had a lot of confidence in at the time - I went home with Sony's NW-HD5. Despite the fact that Sony seem to be quite the evil corporation everyone loves to hate lately, products like these remind me why they're worth keeping around.

Yes, you see, the NW-HD5 is still my MP3 player and it's everything that the Ipod wasn't. It's stable - the thing's frozen on me maybe four times in the 18 months I've owned it, and even if it does lock up, it has a removal battery which you can easily slip out and in again to reset. It's practically indestructible as well, there's no chrome mirror-like material on the back, and most importantly of all, the sound quality is excellent.

Yes, the major reason I got rid of my Apple Computer bar of soap was because of its sound quality. This seems to make most people gasp, because they seem to have the opinion that since the Ipod is a premium-priced product, it'll surely sound amazing. I told the guy in the Sony Centre store where I found my new digital audio buddy that I'd been disappointed with the Ipod in this regard, and asked him if he thought I was just expecting too much. He told me I probably was, but I bought the Sony player anyway because I figured it would still be an improvement stability-wise. I'm never going to forget grinning like a complete moron when I unboxed the thing on the bus and listened to the preloaded sample tracks on it. The Sony guy was dead wrong, the HD5's sound was better than the Ipod's by a ridiculous extent.

Most Ipod users I explain this to simply don't understand the problem I had with it, so I'm assuming they haven't noticed it themselves (or, no disrespect intended, are kidding themselves - like I did at first). They tell me, "Oh, well you should have used a higher bit rate, that will solve your audio problems". No, the problems with the Ipod are analogue ones, nothing to do with the files on the player's storage itself, but with how those sounds are output. In fact because the Ipod supports lossless audio playback - something the Sony doesn't do - deep inside it's actually capable of producing better sounding audio. It's just that it gets mangled before it reaches your ears.

So, how bad was it? Well, even with great ear/headphones and various different EQ settings, the Ipod's sound was harsh and crunchy. Rest assured, I'm not the only person who has noticed this. At first I thought I could live with it - I was comparing a portable player to the sound quality of my computer's sound card, after all. That lasted a rather spectacular 4-5 months. I could put up with the sound quality, but only just, and I always regretted the expensive purchase I'd made and wished I'd looked at alternatives rather than blindly buy into the Ipod phenomenon. There are certain tracks that I'd happily listen to at home from my sound card but wouldn't even bother transferring to the Ipod after a while because I figured they'd just sound bad. This was usually harsher-sounding metally stuff and it almost never left my hard drive. Yes, what I am saying is that the Ipod's sound quality was so irritating that it actually spoiled my enjoyment of an entire genre of music. You cannot tell me that that isn't a record of some sort.

At first I assumed that the Ipod's sound quality was somehow being limited to preserve battery life, but when I got my Sony player with it's 30-40 hours of battery life against the Ipod's 8-12, that little theory got blown apart!

Now, don't get me wrong - the sound quality on the Ipod isn't unusable by any means. I am just sick to death of seeing this player everywhere and sometimes hearing it billed as a premium-quality product. You don't need to be an audiophile to notice this, as CNET proved in a blindfolded audio quality test last Summer (where the HD5 was billed as the best and the Ipod consistently came in last). As I've said though, I've had people who wouldn't even touch any other brand of audio player assure me that I'm crazy, I'm told that "It works fine for me" and that I'm hearing things. That's awfully funny, because at around the same time I sold up, a company called Red Wine Audio started charging $200+ to perform a modification which involved drilling a hole on the back of the chrome casing and soldering on a new audio output which bypassed the poor quality standard one. Red Wine Audio claim that the faults with the Ipod's sound quality - the 4G model, specifically - stem partly from the "low quality stock SMT coupling caps after the Wolfson WM8975 DAC" and that their modification will get you "tighter, more articulate bass and superior treble extension" - exactly the things I wanted!

Ipod aficionados also told me that the latest models fixed the problem. I hadn't used an Ipod since early 2005 (and certainly had no intention of ever using one again, I hope the fad dies out and soon) so I had no grounds for not believing them. Well, very recently I got the chance to learn that the this was LIES! By chance me and my best friend Kit compared the sound from a new Ipod (not ours) with the same track playing on my own HD5. The result? We thought the Ipod sounded "cheap".

The sad part of the story? Sony discontinued the NW-HD5 after about two months because of a minor cosmetic issue - the buttons on it developed cracks after a few weeks of use. By the same logic, I think Apple should discontinue their scratch-o-riffic Ipods - I'd rather have Sony's cracked buttons (I sent mine back to be fitted with crack-proof ones though) than that ridiculous scratched-up back! Sony's replacement for the NW-HD5 was instead the current NW-A1000, which apparently has the same great sound quality (not heard it for myself) but is bigger, more prone to scratches, and lacks the removable battery. Ah well... the HD5 marks the time where Sony got things very close to perfect and I can only hope we'll see the NW-HD6 by the time my HD5 eventually dies. The prices the HD5 still goes for on eBay (they're not far off the original RRP) seem to indicate that there's still a lot of demand for it.

Posted at 12:33 PM | Permanent Link

Tuesday, November 07, 2006

Halo 2 and its controls, angry rant warning

I have a rant to get off my chest. It's about Halo 2. I will say it now and I will not censor myself. THE CONTROLS IN THIS GAME ARE *SHIT*. Arrrrrghh. There! I'm serious, every time I hear someone rave about how intuitive and wonderful and perfect the controls in this game are, I want to break things.

The fact that the controls are tough to master means that there's satisfaction to be had from finally getting them almost right. I've been there, back when I played the game almost every day. But coming back to it after even a short break is so hard that it just isn't worth it. Playing Halo 2 for the first time - or the first time in a while - feels like driving some sort of souped-up car that has two steering wheels that are both clamped together. You don't so much move the view and character around, you wrestle with both of the analog sticks and hope that you can aim semi-accurately before you're inevitably shot. Not only that, but Halo 2 feels like it's taking place in some sort of alternate reality where everyone has been doped. The movement of the characters is incredibly slow, so much so that once you realise you've been screwed, rather than having a speedy death, you're made to watch the event take place followed by a "You can respawn in 5...4...3....2....1" slow pan out of your rotting carcass. It's frustrating. I've been playing this game for a year and a half and never have the controls actually become anything to grin about. Now that I've attempted to start playing it again after a two-month hiatus, it's like learning from scratch. Game controls shouldn't be like that.

Bring on the Wii and the motion sensing remote is all I can say...

Posted at 7:52 PM | Permanent Link

PlayUSA's Blu-ray bias?

PlayUSA.com are misleading the public as regards to the high definition video disc formats. Look:

Notice how PlayUSA claim that Blu-ray has 5x the "quality" of a normal DVD and that HD DVD only shows a 4x improvement. This is of course nonsense because all releases on both formats have been in the same resolution: 1920x1080 pixels. PlayUSA noted the problem on August 29 of this year when I brought it to their attention (as did a lot of other annoyed HD DVD fans). It's now November and nothing has been done about it.

Hmmm... innocent mistake that's taking a long time to fix - or do PlayUSA have some sort of hidden format bias agenda? Either way, they'd do well to fix it soon, because some angry customers on forums who want to make this fight a fair one are already taking their business elsewhere.

Posted at 2:01 PM | Permanent Link

Monday, November 06, 2006

The Australian PAL DVD of "Cars" looks el magnifico!

Normally on this site, I'm complaining about how underwhelming most DVDs look. In case you haven't gathered, I care so much about visuals that an overly filtered disc (that means a BLURRY one!) can severely impair my enjoyment of a film. In the past, I've actually thought, "What disc should I watch.... hmmmm, nah, the video transfer on it's bad, screw it". That's why I am now going to rave about the video quality of an excellent film. You guessed it, it's the Australian (and also New Zealandish? New Zealander?) DVD of CARS!

The PAL versions of Pixar's movies always seem to look great. I assume that Pixar themselves do the encoding since they're the computer experts and have access to the original data files anyway (that'd certainly make sense, right?) Although the "Cars" DVD has some 10/10 video on it, the film doesn't look as good as the trailer at the start of the disc and the short feature, "One Man Band". "The Incredibles" and "Monsters Inc" both looked astonishingly good on PAL DVD, so it can be done, but remember that in the case of "Cars", there's quite a bit of video crammed onto the disc AND the film is full of crowd scenes, confetti, sparks, and other things that would make a video compression machine weep. It still looks fantastic though, so worry not.

Anyway, feast your eyes on these! This is what can be done with a standard definition DVD when common sense is being used. Thumbs up to Pixar or whoever did the encoding on these. The thumbnail pictures here are 200% PIXEL-RESIZED BLOW-UPS. Click them to see the actual frame from the disc.

Lots of lovely detail, without the ridiculous "let's blur the picture then oversharpen it to compensate" filtering!

If this disc had been authored by some bonehead company that sucked all the detail out to make things compress easier (to get home early) then those individual tiles on the roof on the right would be a big ugly blur and the rooftops would have big ugly white halos around them when they met the contrasting sky. DVD is a low-res format by today's standards and when you're watching on even a smaller TV (let alone a 32" HDTV) then this stuff seriously matters!

This is one of the first things you see when you put the disc in. Wow-a-wee-ah. It's from the trailer for Pixar's next film, which doesn't look too great, but that's not the point, the amount of detail in here is so good it's ridiculous. If all DVDs looked as good as this, then people would be a LOT more "meh" about the new HD formats. Seriously, I know nothing can compare to the real thing, but when you see this sort of thing coming from a 10 year old format, it makes you wonder why all discs couldn't be this well done. Look how much detail they've crammed into that 720x576 pixel grid (black letterbox bars not counting, of course).

I guarantee that when this film is released on DVD in a few years, it won't look as good as this trailer.

So how does the film itself look?

As I said, it's really, really nice looking and no part of the picture comes close to being obnoxious, but it's certainly not as good as the 3-minute examples I posted above (which is understandable for obvious running time reasons). You can see the difference in detail from comparing this picture to the Paris skyline one above, oui?

Yes, the Australian version of "Cars" is more than good enough in terms of video. It's a great release of yet another great Pixar film, so this should tide us over until Disney have the sense to release it on HD DVD. Go and get your collector's edition tinny box copy over at EzyDVD.com.au. The price is only $AU27.12 (£11) since us friendly foreigners don't have to pay Australian General Sales Tax.

Posted at 2:17 PM | Permanent Link

Saturday, November 04, 2006

Nintendo Europe say that US Wii consoles will work fine in Europe

Obviously, with a modern TV set (all TVs sold in Europe are now multi-standard and will show video from anywhere in the world) and the appropriate power converter, close to any American video device will work over here in Europe. That includes games consoles, and if you read my site you'll know that there's almost no reason NOT to import an American games console if you live in Europe. Better pricing, selection of games, and release dates for all!

With the addition of online functionality, things are a tiny bit less simple. With varying degrees of success, companies can actually detect where in the world you're connecting from. If you have some sort of anti-import agenda like Sony do, then this is bad news. Fortunately, Nintendo seem to have their heads screwed on properly, because in an interview with Computer & Video Games magazine, someone from Nintendo Europe has confirmed that us US Wii importers will be A-OK:

We are already aware that you won't be able to gain access to the Japanese or American Virtual Console in UK with a UK console. But if you import a US or Japanese Wii into UK, will that machine be capable of accessing the UK Virtual Console servers to download and play games made available to us Brits?

Nintendo: No. The European Virtual Console will be available only to European machines. If you import an American machine they would have to connect to the American service and use American Wii Points cards to buy content. Their warranty would also be void so this is not recommended.

It's phrased in reverse, but this good news means that we're guaranteed a good selection of titles, full-screen, full speed, and paying better prices for them as well.

Source: NTSC-UK forum post and CVG

Posted at 2:57 PM | Permanent Link

Friday, November 03, 2006

I'm 20 years old today so BE NICE!

That's right, I have existed for 20 years! So what did I get for my birthday? Here we go, in pictures!

Did you know, I painstakingly and lovingly crafted, I mean, compressed each one of these JPEG images to meet the fine line between quality and download time. So I hope you admire each and every pixel of them. These will also be in alphabetical order, due to technical reasons, and I'm too lazy to cut and paste them into a randomised mess.

A birthday hug from a girl on the street who was trying to get me to donate money to a homeless charity (not pictured). This was not really a gift because hugs are free!

Birthday cards! The one on top is from my brother!

How does one upstage cards, you ask? With CARS, of course! This is the Australia/New Zealand 2-disc boxed tin version of Pixar's latest meisterwerke. Not only is this in nice 576-line PAL video (OK, so it's not HD, but this film isn't on HD DVD anytime soon) but it is NOT the British version which has that smarmy git Jeremy Clarkson's voice overdubbed over one of the characters. The disc is flagged for Regions 2 AND 4, so if you were foolish enough to buy a region-locked DVD player, you can still enjoy the Clarkson-less fun.

The video transfer is very good, by the way. Not 9 or 10/10 stuff, but a solid 8 on the Lyris scale. All the crowd scenes and sparks are compressed very well indeed and the video filtering is mild.

Futurama Season 3! From the good old United States. I haven't watched this yet but the video quality is as good as the first two seasons (very good).

One of very, VERY, VERY VERY VERY few animated shows that falls under the "so bad it's good" category, the final season of Home Movies!

What is this foreign-looking package? It's Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney: Justice For All! And it's entirely in English despite being from Japan! America gets it in 2007 and hell knows when Europe will see it. I have it now. Yay!

This mysterious artefact is called a compact disc. It's how people listened to music before Apple Computer came along with their prissy little white earphones and rubbish-sounding "MPEG Audio Layer III" (which is a pretentious way of saying MP3!) players. When I make a new site layout then load it up in Internet Explorer and see it completely gacked, I find Walls of Jericho very soothing and appropriate indeed. (No I do not plan on redesigning the site again soon).

Fun trivia fact: none of any of this stuff came from the UK. Absolutely everything is an import. Now what does that tell you? Speaking of which, that's all until November 20something, when my Wii arrives from Canada. Miaow!

Posted at 8:30 PM | Permanent Link

Nintendo Wii UK tour

Nintendo UK will be bringing Wii consoles connected to cheaply made and badly set up LCD TVs to British locations near you (assuming you are in Britain of course, otherwise it will not be near you at all) November 2006 through April 2007. They could have called it something humorous like "Wii on Ice", but I believe the correct name is in fact the "Nintendo Wii Tour".

Go for it I say, anything to get as many non-gamers interested as possible! The full list of dates has been posted on a forum here. You might be lucky and see me at one of the Glasgow ones, in which case you can point and laugh at my hair cut! They're coming to Glasgow University on January 31st as well, so all the funny indie people like the kind I see in all my classes will be able to make themselves look even more silly by waving the remote around.

Only kidding, indie people, only kidding.

Posted at 8:03 PM | Permanent Link

Wednesday, November 01, 2006

Sam & Max - Episode 1 is great!

Fortunately, TellTale Games soon realised their passcode mistakes and quickly issued replacements and allowed us to play Sam & Max: Episode 1. If you're getting an error when you try to activate the game, then just drop Telltale Support a line at support AT telltalegames.com and give them your Hardware Fingerprint code (found in the "I'm having activation problems" screen in the game's launcher).

So, the game itself. Anyone who's ever watched Ren & Stimpy - another not exactly comparable duo reminiscent of the early 90s - will tell you how skin-crawling the results can be if loved characters are brought back by a mostly different creative team without one or more of the original voice actors. What I'm trying to say is that "Culture Shock" could so easily have gone badly wrong, but it hasn't. OK, that wasn't the fairest comparison, because S&M actually does have creator Steve Purcell supervising between jobs (although from what I gather, he's not technically a Telltale Games employee).

One criticism I've heard is that the delivery of Sam's lines is too dry. It's dry for sure, but so was the original. Only on one occasion was that taken to excess (like it seemed to permanently be on the kids' TV show). Max's voice was consistently great. I had absolutely no problem in "buying" the voice actors as the characters.

The interface has been totally simplified from the 1993 LucasArts game. Instead of having a variety of actions like Look At, Talk To, Pick Up, you now perform absolutely every action automatically with a simple click. I didn't find myself missing the old alternative actions - there's still plenty of humour to be found from the conversations that result from the game assuming what you wanted to know about items or characters.

All in all, I look forward to playing the rest of Episode 1. Hopefully it'll last a little longer, because Episode 2 isn't due until early 2007! Go and buy Culture Shock! It's $8.99 for crying out loud!

Posted at 10:56 PM | Permanent Link

Sam & Max Episode 1: a slightly bungled launch of a great game

Well, it's 7:49pm GMT on November the 1st and so far, I've played a 10-minute demo of the first Sam & Max game since 1993. First of all, I'm going to get the good out of the way. The game is absolutely fantastic. Nothing bad I'm going to say relates to the game at all. Some of the lines in the short demo I've played have made me laugh out loud, and the voice actors are as likable as you could possibly hope for (Max especially has retained all his charm).

The bad? Well, as I mentioned, I've only played the demo. Yes, it seems that the bad luck bunnies are in at the Telltale Games offices. Firstly, Telltale didn't set a specific time for when we'd be able to play the game, only the date - November 1st. Remember that since we've been waiting to play this game for one hell of a long time, the eager among us assumed that the switch would get thrown at midnight. In reality it was 19 hours into November 1st before the rumbles began and anyone got to play the demo of Culture Shock.

Far more annoying however, was the fact that the Digital Rights Management appears to be jiggered. The 72mb demo file actually includes all of Episode 1 in some sort of encrypted form, so if you want to pay up and buy the game, you can play instantly. Well, that's the idea, anyway. Those of us who pre-ordered and paid the $40 all-inclusive price for the whole six-episode season in advance have been punished, because nobody who pre-ordered so far has been able to unlock the game and only has access to the short demo.

Let me just say that when you've been waiting all day for a game you've been waiting a few years to appear and have already paid well in advance for, this is probably the last thing you ever want to read - being asked to re-attempt purchase! Grrrr!

The current mood of being very, very pissed off will of course subside later tonight (tonight, right?) when Telltale's support team get back to me with a working code. Oh well, at least Telltale Games TRIED to launch the game, unlike those carpet-baggers at LucasArts!

TellTale say on their forum that they're as pissed off as we are and they're working as we speak to fix the activation problem.

Posted at 8:01 PM | Permanent Link