Technology

They don't make 'em like they used to

Why is it that, with all the advances made to games technology in the past decade, actual gameplay has either remained stuck in a rut or, worse still, actually regressed? Over the past few days, I've been replaying Starcraft - or rather, it's expansion set, Starcraft: Brood War. This game came out in 1998, and yet it remains the absolute pinnacle of real-time strategy games. Sure, its spiritual successor, Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos, added 3D graphics, neutral outposts, hero units, role-playing elements, four races rather than three, and so on, but it failed to better the actual gaming experience offered by Starcraft.

On paper, there's nothing particularly remarkable about this game. It uses the same real-time strategy template honed by developer Blizzard Entertainment with their previous RTS, Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness, and, to today's crop of gamers, used to the latest 3D bells and whistles, the 2D isometric graphics, rendered in 256 colours at a pixel-pizza resolution of 640x480, might seem crude. But, to me, it's a far more attractive construction than anything I've seen released in the last few years. The visuals are slick and cleanly executed, and the supposed "limitations" of the 2D pre-rendered graphics give the game a level of precision that you simply don't get in 3D games. I really wish I understood why developers all feel the need to use 3D graphics all the time simply because they're available. I suppose it has something to do with the fact that the medium of gaming is still developing, technologically speaking, at such a rate that the only way for a developer to compete is to sell their game as being more technically advanced than the competition. I find myself really hoping that this superficial one-upmanship comes to an end before too long, so developers can actually return to focusing on the gameplay that actually matters.

Kerbang! Boom! Crash!

My copy of Operation Crossbow (R1 USA) arrived from DVD Pacific this morning. As I mentioned back in August, back in May 2006 Warner gave fans the chance to vote for which catalogue titles they would like to see released. The only title in the list that appealed to me was Operation Crossbow, a World War 2 spy/action movie that I'd loved ever since I happened to catch it on TV back in the early 1990s, so naturally it was the title I voted for. Apparently I'm not alone in my love of this film, for it was one of the five titles announced for a December 2006 released (another five will be released in January).

I've seen the film several times before, but never in its original 2.35:1 ratio. Uncropped, you really come to appreciate the scale of the piece, especially the cavernous underground set in which most of the film's second half takes place. Warner's transfer is also very nice: it's certainly not a Casablanca or Citizen Kane style of restoration, but that suits me absolutely fine, because it looks just as I would expect a film from 1965 to look, with grain, white flecks and the occasional visible splice. I was a little concerned, initially, by the fact that the only English track on the disc is a 5.1 affair, but it turns out that the 70mm prints of the film were accompanied by a 6-track recording, on which I presume the DVD's track was based.

But what of the film itself? How does it stack up after all these years? Very well, for the most part. It certainly runs hot and cold, thanks to a rather uneven pace and an inability to keep the focus on the spies/saboteurs once they enter the underground rocket lab (it keeps jumping back to London, where the goings-on are considerably less interesting). Sophia Loren, who gets top billing, is also wasted in a role that turns out to be not much more than a glorified cameo. Otherwise, though, this is a great mindless romp that keeps me engaged despite the two-hour running time. It's no Where Eagles Dare, that's for sure, but it is the sort of movie you can pull out every few years and still find as entertaining as it was the first time you saw it.

Buy my crap!

One Sapphire ATI Radeon X850XT 256MB PCI Express video card
One Creative Zen Micro MP3 player - silver - 5 GB

Ideal for second-hand Christmas presents!

Update, December 15, 2006 11:29 PM: The Creative Zen Micro is sold to the gentleman in the delightful crimpolene suit for the handsome fee of £60.

Update #2, December 20, 2006 02:51 PM: The video card is now gone, sold for a whopping £77.

Strap yourself in and feel the Gs!

My new video card, the EN7600GT/HTDI/256M model of the nVidia GeForce 7600GT family, finally arrived today, after having accidentally been sent the wrong version by the supplier. Ripping out my old card and putting the new one in didn't take too long, and I even ended up with a bit more room for ventilation in my case due to the fan on the new card not hogging an extra PCI slot (the Radeon X850XT had a very large but very efficient and quiet one). I half-expected everything to go wrong at the driver installation stage (I've read horror stories about ATI drivers remaining in the system and causing problems with nVidia devices, and vice versa), but everything went smoothly.

As I expected, switching video cards made little difference to my overall gaming performance either way. Both are, after all, from roughly the same generation and as such are generally considered to be pretty much two sides of the same coin. My 3DMark '03 score jumped from 12,582 to 12,836 (the actual numbers are meaningless - they're simply a way of comparing performance between different systems, but obviously higher=faster), while my 3DMark '05 score fell from 6,067 to 5,875. In the real world, the differences are negligible either way, and I certainly have yet to find myself remarking "Wow, that's a lot faster!" or "Christ, it wasn't always this slow!" while playing a game.

Anyway, all this was to be expected. There were two reasons for me buying this card: (1) HDCP compliancy, and (2) improved video playback. Since I bought my X850XT, numerous improvements have been made to the PC playback of DVDs (and now, of course, HD DVDs), with yet more of the decoding being shifted away from the CPU to the graphics card to improve performance, as well as greatly improved deinterlacing quality, and a variety of other neat features that you would expect as standard on a decent stand-alone DVD player, including bad edit correction and inverse telecine. The GeForce 7600GT features all of these, in addition to a couple of tools that, as you can probably imagine, I won't be touching with a ten-foot pole: edge enhancement and noise reduction.

First impressions are very positive. I threw Ren & Stimpy: The Lost Episodes in and watched it in PowerDVD 6 with inverse telecine enabled. Where once lines jumped all over the place the image is now smooth, just like you would expect from a standalone player. The deinterlacer still occasionally slips up, resulting in the odd jumping line, but, unless you have a DVD player equipped with an extremely high-end chipset, you're going to get that anyway. The point is, my DVD playback is now greatly improved for non-progressive content.

Some quibbles, though. The first problem is that the fan on the new card is rather noisy. If you're simply browsing the Internet or word processing or whatever, the card is smart enough to not run the fan, because it's not needed. However, as soon as an application calls for the card to be used (we're basically talking games and video here), it kicks in, and it sounds a little like a quiet vacuum cleaner. In the past, I've generally left the side off my case in order to improve ventilation, but I've put it back on for the first time in a over a year, in an attempt to dull some of the noise.

Problem number 2: for a princely sum of $20 to $50, depending on which version you buy, nVidia allows you to use PureVideo, which apparently further improves the efficiency and image quality of video playback. I downloaded a free 30-day trial, but as of yet have been unable to get it to work. My system simply behaves as if it isn't there, and, based on what I've read on various forums, I'm not alone in this regard. I'm going to continue to search for a solution to this dilemma, but I'm extremely glad I didn't pay any money for this software, because this is really not an acceptable situation.

Ah well, time to eBay the Radeon (or, if you want to take it off my hands for a fine price, let me know).

Mann oh mann

This morning, I received a review copy of the HD DVD/SD DVD combo of Michael Mann's Miami Vice courtesy of DVD Pacific. I've never seen the 80s TV series on which the film is based, so I really didn't know what to expect.

All I can say is that I'm glad this was a review copy and thus something I didn't have to pay for, except with the two hours and twenty minutes of my life that I'll never get back. Miami Vice is an incoherent mess, an eyesore and assault on the ears. It's one hundred and forty minutes of Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx slicking back their hair and/or adjusting their shades as they swagger around various seaside locations with their jaws firmly set and their designer shades glinting in the sunlight. The plot feels like your average 45-minute cop show stretched out to beyond the normal length of a feature film, while the characters are nothing more than mere archetypes who spit out corny dialogue and offer us glaring insights into their tedious and insincere emotions.

Style-wise, the film is all over the place. Mann shot it using a combination of traditional 35mm and 1080p high definition. Some of it looks fine, but the night scenes look absolutely vile, filled with obnoxious amounts of digital noise. Meanwhile, a whole lot of scenes have what can only be described as a motion blur effect, presumably the result of shooting the footage interlaced and then deinterlacing it for the final transfer. Mann used similar techniques on his previous film, Collateral, and they were just as bad there. If this is the future of cinema, I think I'd prefer to remain in the past. Oh, and the camerawork is dreadful, too: I get that Mann wanted to convey a sense of urgency, but when your viewpoint is jittering all of the place, Blair Witch-style, I feel ready to vomit rather than being drawn into the action.

Simply put, this is the worst film I've added to my HD collection thus far. A 3/10 is, I feel, extremely generous. Not recommended. The disc itself, however, is very good, with an array of extras that I'll no doubt have to plough through and a solid transfer that does the best it can with the uninspiring quality of the source materials.

SD to HD image comparison

No, no, I haven't actually somehow magically managed to get HD DVDs to play in my computer. This is merely a demonstration to give you some idea of the difference in resolution between standard definition and high definition, using the 1080p QuickTime V for Vendetta trailer (available here) as a source. I'm afraid I couldn't capture the exact same frame, and the black levels are a little off (blame whoever encoded it, not me), but you should still be able to get some idea of the phenomenal leap in quality that is achieved. The DVD image was upscaled to 1920x1080, and a 508x721 portion was then selected to prevent the image from being monstrously huge on your average computer screen.

Mouse over to switch between versions:
Standard definition | High definition

Quite something, isn't it? It certainly lets you appreciate the added level of facial detail.

La haute définition

Feminists beware! My first HD DVD from Studio Canal is winging its way to me as we speak, and it's - gasp! - Basic Instinct. As it happens, I've never seen Paul Verhoeven's "classic" (so I'm not yet sure whether "classic" should ineed be inside quotation marks), but I know of its reputation, and, of the currently available Studio Canal titles, it's the one that I thought seemed like the most interesting. (Whether in a good or a bad way remains to be seen, of course.)

Anyway, I should hopefully receive this from Amazon.fr in a week of so. Isn't this whole universal 24 fps 1080p and no region coding lark great?

HD for High Disappointment

Two new HD DVDs winged their way to me from DVD Pacific this morning: An American Werewolf in London, from Universal, and Wolf Creek, from the Weinstein Company. Unfortunately, these are the most disappointing high definition discs I've received so far.

Let's start with An American Werewolf in London. Prior to receiving it, I was under no delusions as to how it would look. This is a low budget film from 1981, and one that, despite its cult following, is neither prestigious enough to be eligible for a Casablanca-style restoration, nor for the same standard of storage. So far, all of the HD DVD's I've bought have been of recent (i.e. less than 10 years old) films, many of them sourced from digital intermediates with the film negative itself being scanned almost as soon as it was shot. As such, there is a certain "look" that you can expect from them that you aren't going to get with something like American Werewolf. Still, I expect the technicians to do the best they can with the materials they are handed, and not to attempt any sort of invasive digital manipulation. Unfortunately, those responsible for the master used for this HD DVD clearly missed that particular memo from the HMS Whimsy, for they have attempted to compensate for the inherently somewhat soft look of the source materials by adding a tonne of edge enhancement. The aliasing on this particular title is the worst I've seen on any HD DVD, and would probably be considered pretty noticeable even on a standard definition release. All things considered, this gets a very low 6/10 from me.

Even the sound is a disaster - a 0/10 affair. American Werewolf was, unsurprisingly, mixed in mono, but, for the most recent theatrical re-release, Universal undertook a whiz-bang new DTS 5.1 remix, and in doing so not only fed the existing audio through multiple channels, but also threw in all manner of new sound effects not present originally. Unfortunately, on the DVD, and now the HD DVD, only this mangled 5.1 mix is provided. As far as I am concerned, this is not the film as it was originally released, and as such is a faulty product. Sorry to be harsh, but intrusive revisionism of this sort has absolutely no place on a disc whose cover art proclaims "The Look and Sound of Perfect™", unless of course the original version is also provided as an option.

Wolf Creek next, and I'm afraid things go from bad to worse. This film is actually not a "film" at all, since it was shot in 1080p high definition. As such, an HD DVD encoded at 1080p should theoretically provide a more or less perfect pixel to pixel replication of the original image that was recorded. Unfortunately, Wolf Creek has what Lyris refers to as "the Blu-ray look". The image is incredibly inconsistent. Some shots look absolutely brilliant, with razor-sharp details, while the fake grain added to many scenes to make the movie look a little more intense (and less like a home video) is accurately represented. Other scenes, though, show noticeable compression artefacts and give everything an odd "waxy" look, as fine details are smeared out, a little like the HD DVD of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Unlike most North American HD DVD studios, the Weinstein Company are using AVC/MPEG4 as their codec instead of VC1, and, while I personally was very pleased by the results that this produced for the Japanese HD DVD of The Machinist, I'm beginning to see why so many people are down on it if Wolf Creek is representative of how it generally looks. Another 6/10.

Oh, and the disc took absolutely ages - about three minutes - to boot. Apparently this problem affects all of the Weinstein Company's HD DVDs, for some reason.

We've been wii-ing all night!

Ha suckers! Guess what you didn't get!

Tonight is the European launch of Nintendo's new console, the hilariously named Wii (cue endless jokes about urination and, if you live up north, small things). To commemorate gamers in this part of the world being able to get their hands on a second-rate version of this new gaming system from midnight tonight, I thought I'd do a little post about the real European launch party, which happened in our house last Friday December 1st. It was a very exclusive event, with only six guests.

Lyris busts a movement.

For the princely sum of £130 (£50 less than it will cost to pick up in the UK), Lyris was able to arrange for a Wii to be smuggled out of the States in a suitcase by an American fleeing from the chaos of destruction wreaked by the Bush Administration, and have it rushed from London to Glasgow for express courier, all so that six grown men could spend Friday night making asses of themselves.

The anticipation is unbearable.

The Wii, you see, is, for the most part, not controlled by "normal" means. Instead of a traditional gamepad, you are given a remote and an Anal Love Bullet (™ & © UK Resistance), the latter of which is referred to as a nunchuk by those who fail to understand its true purpose. In order to play your favourite new game, whether it be tennis, swashbuckling adventures on horseback, or amateur surgery, you are required to use either the remote or both the remote and the nunchuk in tandem, and wave them around like a lunatic, while your on-screen character does its best to replicate your movements.

Another acolyte joins the anti-PS3 cause.

Sometimes this works well, sometimes not so well. My experience has been that swinging the remote around is great for tennis, baseball and the like, but not so great for making delicate incisions on the latest slab of meat... er, patient. It remains to be seen, of course, whether this new control system will ultimately be a blessing or a curse. In the short term, it has certainly given gamers a new method of control, and one that, depending on the type of game you're playing, provides a much more realistic representation of the activity displayed on the screen than mashing the buttons of a gamepad of keyboard. In the long run, though, I wonder to what extent this will ultimately force developers into making specific types of game. We've already seen that the latest Rayman game, Rayman: Raving Rabbids, dispenses with the platforming style of the previous games in favour of a series of mini-games designed to take full advantage of the remote. Obviously designers are, at the moment, excited by the prospect of being able to do things they've never done before, so it may be that, once the initial excitement subsides, we'll start seeing more conventional styles of gaming showing up.

Verily, looking like a twat is thirsty work.

I'm not a console gamer (I still maintain that, for the games I like to play, a keyboard and mouse combination is the optimal control setup), but I've enjoyed my experience with the Wii. The big question is, can it win the Console War? I'm no expert, so I don't want anyone to take my ramblings as informed predictions, but I can see a future where it is a very successful secondary system, co-existing alongside either an Xbox 360 or a Playstation 3 (boo, hiss!), with these two being restricted to the more graphically-demanding and more "serious" games. The Wii, after all, is essentially a beefed-up GameCube with a focus on casual social gaming (i.e. getting people who would ordinarily never play a computer game to pick up the remote and have a go). Still, a resounding success for GamesFest™ 2006, and I have to say that, of the three available consoles, this one is the most appealing from my perspective.

Captain Whiggles' Christmas list

It's nearly that time of the year again and, in order to avoid any potential disappointments, I've decided to put together my Christmas list and get my orders in now, rather than waiting till the last moment. Therefore, on the birthday of everyone's favourite fictional deity (Mithras), I shall (hopefully) be receiving the following:

• Looney Tunes Golden Collection: Volume 4 (R1 USA). For the last few years now, it has been something of a custom for me to receive the latest instalment in this collection of remastered (and sometimes mangled) cartoon classics, and to spend a copious portion of the morning watching them with Lyris. The notion of a whole disc full of Speedy Gonzales cartoons on this set doesn't exactly seem like the most welcome prospect... although I don't imagine it being considerably worse than the Road Runner disc in the previous set.
   
• The Double Life of Véronique: The Criterion Collection (R1 USA). Although Krzysztof Kieslowski's brand of spiritualism doesn't really do much for a heathen such as myself, I must confess to being absolutely enthralled by his use of colour and imagery. His Three Colours: Blue is one of my favourite films ever for its cinematography and lyricism. I already own the French release of Véronique from MK2, but, for some reason, I never got round to watching it, and the news that the new Criterion release duplicates all of its extras, plus adds several of its own, in addition to a better transfer, makes this a must-have in my book. Expect to see the French release on eBay before too long. Oh, and check out John White's review of the Criterion set at DVD Times.
   
• The Quiller Memorandum and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre: Ultimate Edition (both R1 USA). Two catalogue titles picked up in the same order from DVD Pacific for a very reasonable combined price. I haven't seen The Quiller Memorandum, but I do love me my Cold War-era spy thrillers, and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is one of the greatest American horror films ever made, so it makes sense to add what is apparently the definitive edition to my collection (having previously sold the non-anamorphic UK release).
   
• The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers: The Complete Recordings (on CD). Last Christmas, I bought the Complete Recordings package of The Fellowship of the Ring, a 4-disc set (3 CDs and one audio DVD) turned out to be a massive improvement on the heavily-truncated single-disc release, so it stands to reason that this instalment should also be a worthwhile acquisition. The Two Towers always struck me as having the weakest score of the three Lord of the Rings films, but I suspect that this is because, perhaps more than the other two films, it was severely short-changed by having some of its most impressive cues left out of the single-disc release.

I'm also currently pursuing replacing my current video card, Sapphire's ATI Radeon X850XT, with the similarly-performing nVidia GeForce 7600GT from ASUS, the EN7600GT/HTDI/256M model of which includes an HDMI output and HDCP compliancy, in addition to various high-end video processing features, such as inverse telecine, temporal de-interlacing, bad edit correction and hardware VC1 decoding. I'd originally planned on waiting to pick up a DirectX 10-enabled card from nVidia, but the price and power consumption of even the lower-end 8800GTS model were enough to persuade me to forego sheer brute strength and just settle for improved DVD (and eventually, I hope, HD DVD) playback. Besides, such a high power graphics card would probably be all but useless on my now-outdated Pentium 4 configuration.

Anyway, I bought a EN7600GT/HTDI/256M on eBay for a not unreasonable price, but, due to a mix-up, I was sent the non-HDMI, non-HDCP model instead. The correct model has been located, however, and I sent the other card back yesterday, so should hopefully be receiving the right one before too long. As an added bonus, the fact that I am buying what is technically a card from the previous generation of graphics technology means that I should hopefully be able to sell my current ATI card for not too much less than what I'm paying for this new one.

Xbox 360 beating PS3... in sales and performance

Don't believe the lies. Sony's overpriced and hard to find Playstation 3 is currently being trounced by the Xbox 360... and I'm not just talking about sales figures. No, I'm talking about graphics quality and performance. Gamespot has posted an article comparing eight different games that are available on both systems, and their findings were, for the most part, the same across the board:

The Xbox 360 had better graphics in almost all the games we examined. The 360's biggest victories were in Madden 07 and Fight Night Round 3, where the differences in texture detail and lighting stood out in our comparison shots. We couldn't capture this in the screenshots, but the Xbox 360 games generally offered better framerates too.

Hmm... where have we seen this before? Oh, that's right: the Playstation 2, that oh-so-amazing system that was supposed to be able to render Toy Story-like graphics in real-time; that system that was so powerful that Saddam Hussein would be able to power his nuclear warheads with it (Saddam with nuclear weapons - there's another myth busted)... when in fact it struggled to outdo the older Dreamcast. Seriously, Sony, we're sick of your lies, and it looks like people may finally be starting to cotton on to the fact that all your grand claims are nothing but empty promises. You see, folks? If you want to play boring excrement-coloured action games and painfully photo-realistic sports sims (not to mention watch HD movies), you can get all that on the 360, with the benefit of them running faster and looking (comparatively) better.

Of course, it goes without saying that, as a new device, it will take some time for programmers to be able to extract the full potential of the PS3. Even so, however, it's pretty damning that, even at this stage in its life, a machine that was touted as the be-all and end-all of console gaming technology is struggling to keep up with a system a year older than it.

Oh, and in other news, yet another formerly pro-Blu-ray analyst is now predicting HD DVD to win the high definition format war.

First Optimum HD DVDs announced

Source: DVD Times

The HD DVD cause has just been given another boost as Optimum Home Entertainment, holders of the rights to several key European and Asian titles, have leapt into the fray, announcing Mathieu Kassovitz's La Haine and Roman Polanski's The Pianist for release on December 11th. Both films will of course be in 24 fps 1080p format, while audio will be comprised of a variety of DTS-HD options: French 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio and German 5.1 DTS-HD Hi-Resolution Audio on La Haine, English 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio and French 5.1 DTS-HD Hi-Resolution Audio on The Pianist.

I can already think of several Optimum titles I would love to pick up in high definition. The entire Studio Ghibli catalogue, anyone?

And my first HD DVD double-dip is...

Bet you didn't think I'd be double-dipping this early in HD DVD's life, did you? Well, neither did I, but the news that the UK release apparently featured a better transfer than its American counterpart made it difficult to resist. (Well, actually, this is not technically a double-dip for me, since my brother owns the previous version, but it does mean that we now have two copies in the house.) The US release of Serenity was one of the very first HD DVDs to be released, and it was also one of the first to be encoded, using an early and less efficient version of the VC1 codec. For the European release, therefore, the compressionists decided to revisit it and encode it more efficiently, partly to allow for additional language tracks to be included, thus facilitating a Europe-wide release of the same disc.

I know what you're thinking: "But Captain Whiggles, isn't Serenity your number one HD DVD demo disc?" It is, or rather was, because the US disc has just been knocked down a peg by its younger European sibling. No, the differences aren't massive, and I don't expect the majority of people to even notice them, but the new encode takes an already spectacular-looking disc and makes it look just a hair better. The most significant difference, if we can actually call it significant, is that the grain is very slightly more pronounced, further amplifying the film-like nature of the HD presentation. It also seems to be microscopically more detailed. This tends to be most noticeable in the form of improved definition of the skin texture during facial close-ups, although some of the wider shots also look a little crisper. Ultimately, I'm not sure I'd recommend that everyone immediately rushes out and picks up the UK release if they already own the US version, but the difference is there. I rated the US version a 10/10 for image quality, and I don't think I'd drop it to a 9 even having seen the UK version - perhaps more of a 9.8 (although I prefer not to get that specific when it comes to overall ratings). It's too bad I don't have more than one HD DVD player, and it takes upwards of a minute to switch discs, because that makes it pretty much impossible to perform any sort of a scientific comparison. I really hope that affordable PC drives and software capable of displaying titles in their full 1920x1080 resolution become available before too long, because I'm itching to subject some HD DVDs to the same in-depth comparisons as I currently do for standard definition material.

The UK disc also includes an additional bonus feature not found on the US release: the 20-minute A Filmmaker's Journey, which is not particularly substantial - but hey, the more the merrier!

A minor point, true, but the UK release has a much nicer cover. The US version, for some reason, has been designed to look like it houses some sort of intergalactic space porno, while the UK edition, while still a bit cluttered, looks considerably less embarrassing.

Oddly enough, the UK release comes in a different type of case from what I've been used to seeing for HD DVD so far. The spine, this time, is much wider - the same width as a normal amaray DVD case, in fact. The reason for this seems to be to allow UK stores to fit those special plastic security tags that can only be removed by a dedicated machine. Oddly enough, the other UK HD DVD release I own, Warner's Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, uses the same size of case as its US counterparts, so it may be that only Universal has opted to use this alternate design. Either way, if I end up buying more of them, my HD shelf, already almost full, is going to be filled up a lot more quickly!

Oh, and I also received, in the same order from Amazon UK, the ominous score to V for Vendetta by Dario Marianelli.

Site problems

If you've been having trouble accessing this site in the last few hours, it's because my host, Fuitadnet, are currently upgrading their service, and in doing so are transferring all of the data over to new servers. Depending on your web host, you may or may not be able to see the site.

Unfortunately, the backups Fuitadnet used were decidedly out of date - going back to around November 20th. Luckily, Movable Type managed to maintain an archive of all my news posts, so restoring them was a simple matter of hitting the "Rebuild Site" button. Unfortunately, it does mean that a number of the files uploaded to the site in the last couple of weeks have to be uploaded again, including my Profondo Rosso commentary. As such, the commentary is currently not accessible, but should be back online in the next hour or so (curse my slow upload speed!).

Update, December 4, 2006 09:12 PM: Everything should now be in its proper place once again, although a number of web hosts still seem to be unable to access the site.

Update #2, December 4, 2006 11:42 PM: A couple of comments seem to have been lost in the resulting chaos, including one may in the New Lizard DVD on its way (buy it!!!) thread.

Update #3, December 19, 2006 06:17 PM: Fixed dead link.

New Lizard DVD on its way (buy it!!!)

Over the past few days, I have been in correspondence with Richard York of Media Blasters, who is supervising the company's upcoming re-release of A Lizard in a Woman's Skin. Since I'm apparently "the most vocal critic" of their previous release (which both alarms and thrills me in equal measure), he wanted to give me the opportunity to ask any questions that I might have about the version they were putting together, and, having discussed the matter with him, I am now supremely confident that the upcoming release will not only blow away the existing Media Blasters version, but should finally be the definitive release of the film that fans have been waiting for for years.

First of all, this will not simply be a straight copy of the Italian release by Federal Video. Richard is aware of and has viewed this release, but instead Media Blasters have created their own transfer from the same film elements used for that DVD. In doing so, they have been able to identify and avoid a number of the problems affecting that release, including material missing from the opening sex scene and Julia Durer's party, as well as the mangled "rippled/unrippled" dream sequence and the dodgy splice where the same footage of Jean Sorel's character appears in two different places. The running time of the final version will be 103 minutes, making this a proper NTSC presentation rather than a PAL to NTSC standards conversion.

Currently, Richard feels that it is unlikely that the new DVD will be ready in time to hit its announced December 19th release date, expecting a late December/early January release instead, but an official statement should be forthcoming as soon as the entire package is assembled and the final specifications are known.

One thing's for sure, with this and One on Top of the Other (from Severin Films) on their way, early 2007 looks as if it will be an exciting time indeed for Fulci fans.

Blu-ray penetrated

Source: Gizmondo

Betcha all those studios that signed up with Blu-ray rather than HD DVD because of its "superior security measures" are a little worried now. And this just a few days after it was discovered that Playstation 3 games were being artificially bloated (i.e. filled with automatically generated garbage data to increase file sizes) to justify the adoption of Blu-ray as the system's storage format, and to push the "real" data further towards the outer edges of discs in order to improve read times on this "consistent read speeds across the entire disc" (or not) format. I wonder who will be taking home a pink slip from Sony Towers this Christmas?

Sorry America, we got your Potters!

Forgive me this moment of plagiarism, but I still think it's one of the funniest thread titles I've seen relating to this subject. As I laid out in an earlier post, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, still lacking an official date for its US released, came out on HD DVD in the UK on November 20th, and word quickly spread that, barring the inclusion on the cover of BBFC logos and the usual UK additionata (to borrow a phrase from Garth Marenghi), such as a quote from the Daily Mirror, this was actually just the as yet unannounced US release rebadged. Well, curiosity got the better of me and, despite only having a lukewarm reaction to the first two Potter films, I ended up ordering a copy from Play.com.

It arrived today, and the rumours are true: when you pop the disc in, you're greeted with an FBI warning screen, followed by the Warner logo and the same annoying and bombastic Warner HD DVD trailer that they've included on every single one of their releases so far, then an MPAA PG-13 logo, followed by the film itself. If the studios continue to follow this model of simply repackaging (and re-labelling) the US discs, this strikes me as being a good thing, for two reasons. First: it cuts down on costs, meaning that a single master can be prepared for both North America and the UK (and any other English-speaking territories, as well as other locations like France and Spain, provided the extras are comprehensively subtitles, given that these discs tend to include French and Spanish dubs). Second: it should help bury the horrible legacy of PAL speed-up in films and dodgy NTSC to PAL standards converted extras. At the moment, Potter is a rare beast indeed: a 24 fps film with 30 fps NTSC extras that you can pick up off a UK store shelf. Hopefully this trend will continue.

Anyway, enough of that - how's the disc? Superb, is the answer. In fact, it comes very close to toppling Serenity from its "best HD DVD transfer" throne. It's amazing that Warner can put out an edge enhanced, slightly filtered and noise reduced release like V for Vendetta one week, and then release something that, to my eyes, looks almost completely untampered the next. This is an amazing looking transfer, with excellent detail and a rich, smooth, film-like look, and the fact that there are no real problems with compression is a phenomenal achievement given the number of difficult moments in this film - crowd scenes, underwater chases, firework displays, not to mention dodgy CGI fire-breathing dragons. This is very much a 10 out of 10 affair, with my only concern being some prominent edge enhancement in a couple of background shots in an early scene, which is so much heavier than anything else in the film (or indeed the shots in question) that I'm pretty sure it was a result of some effects work rather than the encoding.

As for the film, I enjoyed it more than the first two Potters, although it is to my mind still heavily flawed, not to mention far too long. As has been something of a trend recently, it's also fairly clear that, rather than being a stand-alone film, it's merely a single part in a much larger story. This wouldn't have been a massive problem were it not for the fact that the film ends on a "to be continued" note in all but name: in the final half-hour, a hideous villain and arch-enemy of Harry's escapes from his prison and comes after him, but nothing is done about this and, as is usually the case, the film ends with the school year ending and the characters heading their separate ways. Harry might have said, "Gee willickers! There's a terrible villain who wants to kill me on the loose, but we'll deal with him next term." I did, however, appreciate the somewhat darker tone when compared to the first two films (I still need to see Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, the third film), and the child actors seem to be improving as they grow older.

Oh yeah, and I also finally received my long-awaited copy of Amber Benson's new film, Lovers, Liars and Lunatics, which she wrote, produced, edited, directed and starred in. The disc was posted to me by Ms Benson herself, judging by the fact that the signature on the customs declaration matches the signature on the front cover (she signed the first 500 copies). Full thoughts and impressions will follow as soon as I've had a chance to watch it, but, having taken a glance at a couple of minutes, I should probably warn you that the transfer is interlaced and non-anamorphic (although, unlike Amber's previous film, Chance, it's shot on 35mm film rather than video).

Update, December 19, 2006 05:54 PM: Fixed dead link.

New DVD image comparison

See just how bad the previous release of Home Alone was in my latest DVD Image Comparison!

This is my house - I have to defend it!

My copy of the recently released R1 US special edition (sorry, "Family Fun Edition") of Home Alone arrived this morning. If you've been reading this site for an extended period of time, then you've probably read at least one of my rants about the appalling picture quality of the previous bare-bones release of the film. Home Alone is probably my all-time favourite Christmas movie, and I'm not ashamed to say that. Growing up, it was always a huge part of the festive season for me, and, despite knowing every single line by heart, it never gets old. As you can probably imagine, I was absolutely elated to hear that Fox were finally bringing this classic out of the vault and giving it the full-on special edition treatment.

You know how these posts of mine usually go, don't you? Bla bla bla, I was so looking forward to this, bla bla bla. What usually comes next is the "What a phenomenal disappointment" rant... so here it comes.

Just kidding. I'm actually very pleased with this DVD. It's not perfect, by any means: a considerable amount of temporal noise reduction has been applied to the image, and, like most of the Fox DVDs I own, it looks rather soft (some of which may be a result of the original photography, but at least some of which is the result of digital tomfoolery). Still, when all said and done, it could have looked considerably worse, and I don't need to tell you that it's a vast improvement on the yellowy, smeary, artefact-ridden disaster that was its predecessor.

The extras are all of a high standard, and, unusually, myself and Lyris, who generally doesn't rate extras particularly highly, actually made our way through the entire contents of the disc without getting bored. Writer John Hughes, who supposedly banged out the script over the course of a weekend, is nowhere to be found, but director Chris Columbus, actors Macaulay Culkin and Daniel Stern, and a variety of crew members, are all over the bonus features, which include a neat little retrospective documentary as well as some archive materials from the time of the film's original production and release. Also included are a variety of deleted scenes, many of which are a hoot, and the contents of which actually made it into the novelisation I read when I was about eight years old. Finally, there's a great commentary with Columbus and Culkin, who gently take the piss out of the film and themselves, and provide a great deal of informative and fun anecdotes about the production.

I'm very surprised to find myself saying this, but this is actually one of the best DVD releases I've come across this year. Okay, so it's not exactly a multi-disc epic with seamless branching and a DTS-ES audio track, but it does exactly what it says on the tin and provides you with just about everything you could want for this film. With this, the special edition of The Omen and the extended cut of Kingdom of Heaven, Fox have certainly been releasing some decent packages recently. Let's hope we can eventually convince them to jump aboard the HD DVD wagon!

DVD telly fun

My copy of the R2 UK DVD of the fifth and final season of Alias arrived today. Given the excellent image quality of its predecessors, I'm expecting big things in the technical department, although I am a little wary as to the quality of the episodes themselves, given that (a) Jennifer Garner's pregnancy had to be written around, also resulting in a shorter season of only 17 episodes rather than the usual 22, and (b) Season 4 was a huge disappointment, barring the enjoyable but ludicrous two-part finale.

In any event, I won't be watching it until I've finished Season 2 of Veronica Mars. I'm about two-thirds of the way through that now, and my verdict, so far, is that, if you've already seen Season 1, it's very much more of the same, which is both a good thing and a bad thing. On the plus side, the various mysteries are generally well-plotted, and the longer arcs that snake their way through the entire season are enough to keep you tuning in - this is definitely a show that's very "moreish". On the negative side, I still find myself getting irritated by the fact that major plot developments and characters are introduced, only to be unceremoniously dumped and not picked up again till later. (In one episode at around the middle of the season, for example, Veronica and her father have a major falling-out, ending with her saying he won't ever be able to trust her again. Next week, they're bestest buds again.) I also tend to find that the vast majority of the characters are vaguely unpleasant at best, and downright despicable at worst, while the least offensive character, Mac, is hardly ever around.

Still, I shall persevere, and I'm certainly not finding the experience of watching it unpleasant. On the contrary, I always find myself eager to find out what happens next, and end up watching "just one more" episode. Hopefully I'll be able to deliver my final verdict on the season in the next week or so.