Posts by Iain

So thin I can't see it

Oh wait, that's because you're faffing around with pointless videos again. Anyone know of another site with actual pictures?

BluRay or Combi?

I'll be interested to see if they just do a BluRay drive, or put the price up a bit by making it dual-format. LG's internal dual-format drive for the PC is only around £30 more expensive than a Blu-only one, and it would save me from having TWO external drives balanced on top of my 360.

@Joe K

The high positioning of BluRay titles at Amazon.com won't be linked to their near permenant 2-for-1 sales they've been running since mid-November, would it? If I lived in the US I'd have a massive Blu collection thanks to that offer, but the duty and postage to ship them here is a killer.

Hey hey, what a surprise...

Sony have their own proprietary answer to a new standard that no-one else will be using. I didn't see that one coming, oh no.

Why do they love to break standards so much?

Re: the picture

It looks like it was taken with a flash, so you've got the right-hand screen reflecting, and looking less good than the left-hand one. Oh well.

Yes, the Pioneers are plasmas, and bloody amazing. Even with natual light they'll kick any LCD's backside. At £3000 for the 50", they bloody should do, however.

I had 1 (one) failure

Then I retried, and it all worked again. Seemed fine to me.

Not that I'm turning a free game down, unless it's one I've already paid good money for like with Carcassonne.

Re: price differences

Since it's a real struggle to find a Wii without at least £50 worth of bundled rubbish, the XBox 360 Arcade is actually a feasible purchase now it has a HDMI socket, wireless controller and bundled memory card, and even a 360 Premium available for not much more if you shop around a bit, the price differences really aren't all that big between the two. Now you can get a PS3 for £299 they're not massively more expensive, either.

@Mark

What monitor have you been waiting so long for? I ordered an LG 20" Widescreen in the Play.com sale around yesterday lunchtime, and it turned up before work this morning. From Play, who normally take at least a week to get a mere DVD to me. I was astonished, frankly.

The download was a success

In that they've already said they made more money in the first week than the sum total of online sales of their EMI catalog, ever. All for a project that was more about getting the record out there in a legitimate manner before some random journo leaked it, as happened with every other release post OK Computer, and making a bit of cash on the side was a bonus.

Most may not have paid...

...but according to Colin Greenwood on Radio 4 the other week, they as a band still made more money off the "pay as much as you like" release than the sum total of download royalty cheques they've ever received from EMI for the rest of their catalogue. So it can't have gone that badly.

Old is new, black is white etc.

That's just Ultramarine, #120a8f, isn't it? Which is clearly Colour Of The Year 40,000, not 2008.

@BitTwister

Complaining about DirectX being a one-horse system used to work. But now it's the only option for running on the 360; a far nicer platform to play games on than Windows. Ever since I got mine I've given up on the concept of PC games. I suppose I might as well take the hints above, and get an OSX box.

Re: Why no Folding for 360?

I vaguely remember Sony throwing the Folding team a pretty large wedge of cash to keep it exclusive, or at the very least pay to get the best client possible. Microsoft obviously haven't done the same.

I remain unconvinced it's worth it, with the 360 - the energy usage for the payoff probably isn't good enough with its general-purpose CPU. Meanwhile the Cell is pretty much designed to deal with this sort of data; maybe Microsoft just don't want their performance to look bad?

Why, Hans?

If you don't think there are any games worth getting on the PS3, why buy the hardware, Hans? Are you expecting a major turnaround in the near future (i.e. before the next price cut that could have saved you money) or just as a BluRay player?

Back up a minute.

Can someone explain how candle parties allow you to protect your house?

@Highlander

We had this one out with the Reg staff the other week; a working party is in place to investigate the possibility of adding region coding to the HD-DVD standard, but they've yet to report any definite findings back. So current discs don't have anything on them, and current players don't know to look for it.

Apart from Fox, who demonstrate their outright contempt for consumers in so many ways (they're by far the worst in the constant re-release and repackage game, and only very recently started putting any extras on BluRay titles whatsoever, after seeing consumers ignore the rubbish they were shovelling out the door, for instance) most studios have a more sensible attitude to region encoding - using it on new-release titles that require staggered worldwide release, but not on catalogue stuff that is already available elsewhere. Paramount (while they were still releasing on Blu) and Warner match regionless HD-DVDs with regionless Blus across the board.

@Chris

It's my personal opinion, but that's all anyone can offer when it comes to the subjective quality of videogames. But "over-hyped trash" are precisely the words I'd use to describe the PS3's F1 game. It's the worst-handling driving game I've had the misfortune to play in years, and a massive letdown coming from Sony Liverpool, the team that singlehandedly made my PSP purchase worthwhile with wipEout purE. It's this one that set me off a bit.

Uncharted looks like it has very good exploration bits, even if the cover system reminds me of the horrid time I had trying to play Gears Of War on the 360 (another game that "over-hyped trash" was meant for). Ratchet & Clank suffers from coming out within a week or two of the latest Super Mario game, but in its own right is downright lovely.

I think that, rightly or wrongly, a huge part of the perception that the PS3 has "no games" is because most of the best games are multi-platform. So while they clearly have appeal for anyone new to this generation of consoles, 360 owners don't regard them as reasons to stick a second (or third, or whatever) machine under the telly considering how much it costs to do so.

Re: Bandwidth

Actually, BluRay's higher bandwidth has indeed proved to be useful. It's almost certainly the reason that Bay's Transformers HD-DVD doesn't have a lossless audio track on it, for a start. HD-DVD has plenty of room to encode a 1080p video stream, but not to have too many audio streams alongside it without a hell of a lot of work.

@RancidM

Yes, what I really mean is that the 360 can handle the H.264 codec, just not the pirated porn you downloaded. Boo hoo.

Re: HD media centres

Sadly, HDCP is already needed if you're going to play HD-DVD or BluRay on a digital output. The DRM that ruins your analogue VGA output hasn't hit yet, but it's there already on digital.

I've not done it yet, but a look at the specs for Power DVD Ultra looks like a T2500 or better would do it. As for audio, an optical output is ok, but really you want to go analogue outs in order to use Dolby TrueHD or PCM lossless.

I suspect the answer on the HDMI is probably to buy a 'proper' graphics card so you know the H.264 acceleration is up to snuff.

Oh please, pretty please

let me have an image of the prophet Mohammad as a phone wallpaper. To install on other people's phones, obviously; I'm not suicidal.

Other games?

Why would being beefy enough to play other games help? Anyone prepared to spend that much money on their WOW addiction doesn't have time for anything else.

They're both proprietary.

Or neither. Both are standards that any manufacturer of players or discs can license, if they've got enough cash lying around. Both require substantial wedges of that money to buy into.

BluRay = The New Laserdisc?

The way things are going, I suspect that BluRay will "win" in the sense that it is turning out to be more popular than HD-DVD. For a combination of reasons, though the main ones are Disney support and PS3 owners getting the best player out there for "free". Although that latter point must be rather galling for all the dedicated player manufacturers, who can't use software sales to subsidise their hardware.

But while DVDs continue to make up the vast majority of sales, and prices for the HD format software remain high thanks to unavoidable manufacturing expenses that come from the coating process, I wonder if it will ever take over the mainstream.

Re: 1.1/2.0 issues, as a fellow HD-DVD owner I say that they're not worth making BluRay owners worry about too much. Any BD-ROM disc that won't play on a PS3 would be commercial suicide, so it's just not going to happen.

Re: HD display

Yes, if you've got a PS3, or a 360 for that matter, it's pretty simple to connect the camera straight to the console to view images in HD. I tend to dump them onto the PC and view them streamed over the network, personally.

The only really interesting thing about the camera in this respect is that it allows you to (relatively) easily frame a 16:9 image without shooting at 3 megapixels and then doing a manual crop. Unless you're the sort of person who has gone and bought a 1080p telly, but has no computer or console that you could hook up to it, I suppose.

A particular release? Why, yes.

It's had a boom in demand due to the price on the new 40Gb cut-down model. Which also comes in a really nice shiny white edition.

There aren't many new games worth worrying about, but BluRay has the Spidey, Pirates and Die Hard movies. So that might be an influence.

Re: F1

Strangely enough, when Codemasters were launching the first Colin McRae Rally, they had demopods that went round all the major racing events that year.

The game has a nice big laptime leaderboard in there, and a certain "M. Schumacher" had the fastest on just about every single one of them...

So not every sport is hurt by videogame versions...

360 for the win

The XBMC is absolutely wonderful if you only want to play standard-def media. But now I've gone HD I use my 360, Windows Media Centre and Transcode360 for any formats the 360 won't do natively. It's surprisingly good.

Don't be silly, AC

We have to pay at LEAST £200, so Toshiba can make up for the losses they're accruing in the US, just like Sony did with the £425 PS3 at launch.

Don't worry, Scott

superdynamite still thinks there is a resolution difference between 1080i and 1080p for film-based footage. I kind of tuned out after that.

Horses for courses, Scott

I've got both at home, and while my wife loves the DS and won't touch the PSP, I end up spending more time on the latter, myself. I love the various Mario games, but I'm a Sega racing games fanboy, and between OutRun 2006, Sega Rally Revo and Crazy Taxi I'm very happy with it. PS1 games run really nicely as well.

Re: things other than games, the DS has a better browser (even if you have to pay for it), but the music playing (that I don't really use much, since I have a 30Gb iPod) and particularly video playback (the screen is better than the iPod's) is an awful lot nicer.

@Liam

You really want to update your PS3 rants, you know. Heavenly Sword isn't 'upcoming'; it came out a few months back. You may have missed the info, however, on the grounds that it turned out to be a load of rubbish. Modern fanboys have moved on to Little Big Planet and MGS4 as their upcoming saviours.

Yes, the PS3 is more powerful technically than the Wii. But not ten times more powerful, and certainly not ten times more fun.

@Scott

I don't suppose you could drop any hints on where to find the SD DVD multi-region hack? I've been waiting since this time last year for one to come out, and indeed gave up and bought a (really very poor) upscaling Philips player to handle SD discs until it became available.

Although, I have to say that I'm tempted to just keep using my 360 as an R2 and HD-DVD player, and get a US PS3 to play R1 and BluRay. Even if there isn't a single game I particularly want to play on it yet. That would still leave the odd R3 and R4 disc I have, but they're a tiny minority that could be ripped and rewritten if push came to shove.