Technology

How to treat your customers with respect

A big round of applause to Polish developer/publisher CDProjekt for actually giving their customers the respect they deserve. While Electronic Arts continue to shaft consumers with draconian digital rights management, CDProjekt have not only gone on record encouraging the rest of the PC games industry to abandon DRM altogether, they have also seen fit to reward people who bought their RPG The Witcher by providing a massive revision of the game completely free of charge.

The new version of the game, labelled the Enhanced Edition, is a direct response to community and critical feedback and contains a massive number of bug fixes, improved dialogue and animation, interface modifications and a host of other tweaks. The version on store shelves, which, as far as I can tell, will completely replace the original version once supplies are exhausted, also comes with a bunch of additional goodies including a soundtrack CD, a strategy guide book, a map and a "making of" DVD, but, for those who already own the game and don't want to buy another copy, most of this is available to download for free.

I applaud CDProjekt, I really do. I don't consider The Witcher a masterpiece, but the news that this new edition had been released was enough to prompt me to crack open the DVD case again and give the new and improved version of the game a whirl, and I'm definitely well on the way to sinking in several more hours of play-time. I also think that, if more companies took this attitude instead of looking to screw their fans at every opportunity (EA, I'm looking at you again), we would see far less piracy. Case in point: the DRM restrictions placed on Spore were intended to reduce the number of people playing pirated copies, but an unauthorised DRM-free version of the program was available on the major P2P networks before the boxed copy was released, and the irony is that those who download a bootleg for free will have a far more hassle-free experience than those who actually fork out for a retail copy.

Or, to use another example, Mass Effect. Like a growing number of EA-published games, the PC version features SecuROM DRM. I tried out the Xbox 360 version last night, and could really see myself getting into it. Unfortunately, I'm a died-in-the-wool PC gamer at heart and, try as I might, I simply can't get used to controlling the game with a gamepad (I believe that the ideal control system in most cases, but particularly for first- and third-person action games, is a keyboard/mouse combo), so ideally I'd like to pick up the PC version. However, thanks to SecuROM, I won't be doing this, so EA can consider themselves to have lost a sale to me because of their automatic assumption that anyone interested in playing their games is a filthy rotten pirate. Sucks for both of us.

Update, September 26th, 2008 05:40 PM: I've just discovered that another EA title and one of my most anticipated purchases of the year, Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3, will also feature the same DRM implementation and sneaky rootkit shenanigans as Spore and Mass Effect. In their immense magnanimity, however, EA have decreed that customers will be allowed to install the game not three times but a whopping five. How generous of them! I'm sure I'll eventually come across some means of playing it, but I certainly won't be installing a retail copy on my machine.

I have a new toy

Today, I found myself in possession of an Xbox 360 Arcade System. If you've been reading my brother's blog, you'll know that his Xbox 360 recently died a tragic death. It came back the other day after being repaired after Microsoft refused to service it (apparently it didn't have enough red rings or something), sounding like a vacuum cleaner thanks to its new cooling system, which we both agreed wasn't ideal for watching movies: until it pegged it, it doubled as both a games console and our HD DVD player.

With prices of standalone HD DVD players having gone through the roof after being discontinued, I decided that the only semi-cost-effective solution to having a way of playing my 60+ HD DVD titles was to pick up a 360 myself. I ended up getting a reasonable deal on the Arcade package, which gives you five free mini-games, plus a retail game of your choice (I went with Mass Effect, which I haven't checked out yet), and it arrived today. The timing was, though I say it myself, impeccable, as Lyris' 360 died yet another death within two hours of the new system's arrival.

The irony of the situation is that I've never bought a single console game in my life, and yet I now own both of the current generation of games consoles. (I hear there's a little thing called the Wii as well, but last time I checked there wasn't very much software available for it that actually qualified as what I would call "games".)

It's Keira Knightley HD Screen Capture Day aboard the HMS Whimsy

...well, not really, she just happens to appear in both the films I've put under the magnifying glass. First up is King Arthur, a rather mediocre cash-in on the whole medieval war epic craze by Jerry Bruckheimer and friends, which arrives on Blu-ray with rather odd transfer that virtually defines the word "inconsistent". Its "look" seems to change on a virtually shot by shot basis, going from noticeably edge enhanced and undetailed to completely natural-looking and razor sharp, and from virtually grain-free to extremely rough and grainy. Sometimes the grain is extremely clumpy, other times it looks very natural. This often happens multiple times within the same scene, and I'm at a loss to explain it.

The bottom line is I just don't know what to say about this disc. Sometimes it looks stunning, other times it looks quite disappointing, and everywhere in between.

King Arthur
(Buena Vista, USA, AVC, 32.1 GB)

Up next is Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, an even worse film but one with a considerably more consistent transfer. Actually, this one is pretty close to perfect. Some very mild compression artefacts are visible at times, but broadly speaking only if you're scrutinising for them. The only other flaw in this transfer is a very odd moment in the final third of the film, just before the sword-fight which takes place on a water wheel, where, for a single shot only, the entire image suddenly seems to drop to a lower resolution with lots of visible jaggies. Actually, it looks a lot like the Weinstein Company's train-wreck of a BD for 1408. This shot lasts for less than a second and is easy to miss, but I spotted it the first time I watched the film and thought "What the hell?" It's really the only negative thing I can say about this otherwise stellar disc, and it lasts for a fraction of a per cent of the running time. The rest of the time, it looks like this:

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest
(Buena Vista, USA, AVC, 32.1 GB)

Film on Blu-ray in "looking like film" shocker

On Saturday, I received my copy of The Godfather: The Coppola Restoration on Blu-ray, containing all three films in the series, the transfers for the first two being derived from new restorations carried out by Robert A. Harris, arguably the best man in the field of film restoration. The Godfather Part III, intriguingly enough, is the best-looking of the bunch on Blu-ray, although to what degree this is due to the state of the elements, the way these elements were manipulated, or Coppola's original aesthetic choices, is unclear.

What is clear is that this disc constitutes the new gold standard to which all film-sourced transfers in high definition should aspire. I was floored by how good this disc looks. As a broad rule, I've tended to find that the best-looking titles released in high definition are invariably those sourced from a digital intermediate rather than film elements, with film-sourced materials generally either being treated poorly (see many of Universal's back catalogue titles) or simply having less available "resolution" to begin with due to the inherent shortcomings of a process which results in reduced quality with each subsequent generation. The Godfather Part III, however, is up there with the best of the DI-sourced transfers. I can see no evidence of any sort of tampering - the grain is wonderfully reproduced, the detail is excellent, and (a rarity, I've found, in film-sourced transfers) there is no artificial edge enhancement or ringing to be found. This would be a definite 10/10 were it not for the fact that the compression seems slightly dicey at times - strange, given that the bit rate is approaching 40 Mbit/sec more or less throughout.

Still, a phenomenal achievement throughout and one that has raised the bar as far as transfers for catalogue titles are concerned.

The Godfather Part III
(Paramount, USA, AVC, 44.3 GB)

There's an excellent article on the restoration process at the American Society of Cinematographers web site.

Site update

It occurred to me today that, with all the Ren & Stimpy screen captures I'd been posting lately, my main news page had been getting pretty cluttered. More crucially, I'd imagine it was starting to take a long, long time to load all these images for people with slower connections. With that in mind, I've decided to make use of Movable Type's "MTEntryMore" tag for posts with excessive numbers of images. Basically, what this means is that, in order to view the full post, you'll have to follow the link to the individual entry page (e.g. this one for Ren Needs Help and Ren Seeks Help): on the index, category and monthly archive pages, you'll just see the first few paragraphs of text followed by a clickable link to the individual entry. I appreciate that this might be a bit of a pain for visitors with faster connections, but it should lighten the load for those whose Internet connections aren't up to the task of quickly crunching through over 400 jpegs.

I've edited all the Ren & Stimpy posts to take this new feature into account, and will be applying it to any future posts that I feel warrant it.

[Continue reading "Site update"...]

I know kung fu, doop-dee-doo!

My copy of the Blu-ray release of Kill Bill Volume 1 arrived yesterday while I was at work. We watched it in the evening to put my brother's beefy new sound system through its paces: finally, uncompressed PCM 5.1 support aboard the HMS Whimsy! It was my first time watching the film in a while, and I have to admit that, although I still got a lot of enjoyment out of it, it went ever so slightly down in my estimation. While more or less everything in the House of Blue Leaves and beyond is top quality entertainment, I must confess to finding quite a lot of the stuff along the way plodding and overly focused on banal dialogue. In that regard, it has something in common with Quentin Tarantino's most recent film, Death Proof, which had a great final half-hour but meandered along for its first 80 minutes obsessing over trite conversations that I'm sure sounded very cool and absolutely fascinating to Tarantino but left me clock-watching. Kill Bill is a significantly better film overall, but it definitely suffers from similar flaws.

Seeing the US cut of the film after being used to the Japanese cut for so long was a bit of a shock to the system. In particular, I felt that the switch to black and white during the showdown with the Crazy 88 didn't really work, and ended up making it overly difficult to see what was going on (which, from a censorial standpoint, was presumably the aim all along). I also missed all the little moments of blood-letting that had been snipped away here and there: I'm not what you'd call a gore-hound, in the sense that generally speaking a movie has to be more than deliriously violent to keep me entertained, but remembering what was present in the Japanese really made me miss it. I hope Universal gets round to releasing this film in HD in Japan - or, better yet, the Weinstein Company finally puts out The Whole Bloody Affair, which they and Tarantino have been promising for god knows how long.

Image quality-wise, Volume 1, as I expected, looks more or less exactly like Volume 2 - which is to say very good, but sadly not perfect. Once again, temporal noise reduction is evident throughout, reducing the grain and giving the image a somewhat digital look. I also spotted a handful of instances of the NR causing artefacts, mostly in the anime sequence, where some of the black outlines of the animation ended up being ghosted from one frame to the next. Most of it is fairly minor, but it does baffle me that this was done in the first place. After all, the animation was created entirely in the digital domain, with the grain that is present in the final composite having been added artificially. Since the technical crew had complete control over the grain in this segment to begin with, why add it and then reduce it? Unless, that is, the NR was added specifically for the Blu-ray release (or the master from which it was derived) after all rather than at the DI stage. Ah well, at least detail is, for the most part spot on, and, NR aside, there is no other obvious digital interference, barring a smattering of what looks to me like edge enhancement in certain shots in the snow garden outside the House of Blue Leaves.

Oh, and can I just say that the PCM 5.1 track kicks major derriere? I haven't compared the compressed Dolby Digital 5.1 track yet, so I've no idea how big a difference the uncompressed PCM format makes, but it certainly gave me a new appreciation of the importance of having a decent home audio system.

Kill Bill Volume 1
(Buena Vista, USA, AVC, 29.3 GB)

The spirits without

I picked up a couple of Blu-ray discs yesterday in a sale at Zammo that I probably wouldn't otherwise have bought were it not for the fact that they were on sale in a "2 for £20" deal. (Anyway, I was in a buoyant mood because I'd just received a large sum of money that had been incorrectly taken off me in taxes over the past twelve months of so, and felt like treating myself.)

One was Tekkonkinkreet, which caught my eye a while ago because it's one of those rare anime productions that I actually think has a semi-interesting visual style. The other, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, is a film that I'm not a massive fan of - in fact, the only reason I tolerate its soulless, stilted, so-called "realistic" visual style is the knowledge that the various imitators it spawned (e.g. Robert Zemeckis' butt-ugly The Polar Express and Beowulf) are a whole lot worse. Still, I kept hearing about how good the BD transfer supposedly was, so eventually I got fed up waiting for it to become available for rental and decided to plonk down the cash for it.

Anyway, I took a look at it tonight, and yes, it's a very good transfer. Not perfect, but still really impressive. My purchase of the standard definition DVD release, back in 2001, actually marked something of a special event for me because it was the point at which I started becoming aware just how many DVD reviewers were full of the proverbial. Put simply, the glowing 10/10, A++ and 100% ratings for image quality didn't match my own impression of it being overly filtered and riddled with compression artefacts. But I digress. The Blu-ray release is about as far as you can get from the DVD as you can get, although a small amount of filtering has been applied and is present throughout: check the light ringing around the text in the final capture below. It's fairly minor, but it means that the disc does just fall shy of perfection. I wonder why they thought it was necessary to do this.

Oh, and, as a side note, I do like that, despite the film never having touched celluloid, someone was thoughtful enough to actually try to make it look like film by adding a sheen of grain to it. The illusion is actually quite effective and goes some way towards making the motion captured CGI visuals look slightly less clunky and fake than they otherwise would have.

Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within
(Sony Pictures, UK, AVC, 25.2 GB)

An ode to B-movies that looks oddly glossy

Last week, I ordered the recent US Blu-ray releases of both volumes of Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill. I'm sure I said at some point that I wouldn't buy Volume 1 in high definition unless it was the longer, gorier Japanese cut (which most people know as the version which includes the House of Blue Leaves fight scene in full colour, but which in fact also features increased bloodshed and some additional tweaks here and there), but that doesn't appear to be anywhere on the horizon at the moment. Anyway, the image quality of my Japanese DVD of Volume 1 is so god-awful I decided "to hell with it" and ordered the cut American BD.

Due to a delay in dispatching, Volume 1 hasn't arrived yet, but Volume 2 turned up yesterday while I was at work, and I took a look at it last night. The bottom line is that this is a good transfer and one that I suspect is an accurate representation of the master. I say this because I seem to recall that, at the time of the films' release, Tarantino stated that he wasn't entirely happy with the look of the DIs (digital intermediates) prepared for them, feeling that they were too clean and failed to successfully recreate the gritty texture of the films he was aping. (I'm afraid I haven't been able to dig up a source for this - sorry.) I have a feeling that the cleanness he complained about was in fact the level of temporal noise reduction that has been applied to the material. It's not the horrible waxy kind you see in the likes of the Dark City BD, and as such doesn't really show up to a great extent in the captures posted below, but it is noticeable when in motion, giving the image a slightly synthetic look, with textures and facial details tending to drag a bit. The closest equivalent I can think of is Flightplan, also from Buena Vista and also with the NR applied at the DI stage (a fact confirmed independently on IMDB and by my brother, who noticed the artefacts when he saw the film at the cinema).

What's particularly interesting is that, on certain occasions, particularly the extended Pai Mei section, the NR is either turned off completely or at least lowered to an acceptable level, which I take as further evidence pointing to this having been done at the DI stage rather than some inept technician simply flicking a switch when the Blu-ray transfer was being encoded. (At the risk of sounding like a jerk, most people in the encoding business don't seem to want to invest the effort required to approach things on a scene-by-scene basis, unless their name happens to be David Mackenzie and they work on DVDs of Andrzej Zulawski films.) The result is that the Pai Mei sequence is the best-looking part of the film, despite the fact that I get the feeling Tarantino shot it with an eye to it looking like the roughest, lowest budget segment.

So, overall what we have is a reasonably pleasing-looking disc that has a slightly synthetic feel to it but is, ultimately, a massive upgrade on the rather mediocre-looking standard definition release. For the most part, all 1080 lines of resolution are being put to use and many scenes feature a per-pixel level of detail. It's too bad about the NR, but, if my suspicions are correct, then nothing much can be done about that short of going back to the original camera elements and redoing all the post production work.

Kill Bill Volume 2
(Buena Vista, USA, AVC, 35.8 GB)

Top-rate film gets third-rate treatment

Much to my surprise, I discovered yesterday that one of my favourite films, Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Amélie, had, without my knowledge, received a Blu-ray release, courtesy of Canadian label TVA Films.

I was all set to pick up a copy... until, that is, I read the review at Blu-ray.com. Not only does it not feature English subtitles (not unreasonable, given that it is a French film and TVA Films services the predominantly French-speaking Québec community), it also features a 1080i transfer, with a very mushy, low detail appearance, which can be seen from the screen captures posted along with the review. (You need to register with Blu-ray.com to see them at their full 1920x1080 resolution.)

So, while I would love to own this film in high definition, and while I don't doubt that it constitutes a noticeable upgrade over the standard definition DVD releases, I'm going to exercise considerable restraint and bide my time until another studio comes along and does it justice.

The depths of insanity

I got home from work yesterday to discover a veritable storm brewing over at the AV Science Forum. The topic was The Descent, one of my favourite horror films of the last few years and also one of my favourite Blu-ray releases. The controversy surrounded what can only be described as the most baffling anomaly I have seen regarding the format so far: apparently, there are two separate encodes being sold, one AVC and the other MPEG-2.

Yes, I wasn't prepared to believe it either at first. Why on earth would Lions Gate go to the trouble of pressing two completely different discs of the same film? We're still no closer to finding the answer to this perplexing conundrum, but what we do know is that, thanks to the in-depth investigations of AVS poster msgohan, there is absolutely no doubt that two different versions are doing the rounds. Does this ultimately make any difference to the end user? Well, take a look at the captures below and judge for yourself. They show the same frame on each of the two different discs.

Now you can understand why people who were sold the MPEG-2 version are rightly aggrieved and demanding to know what on earth is going on. I own the AVC version and I too am not a happy bunny. After all, last Halloween I reviewed the AVC version and gave it a 10/10 for image quality, a rating I still stand by. However, the fact that there is no actual discernible way of knowing which version of the disc you are picking up when you purchase it complicates the review somewhat. My 10/10 rating, after all, most assuredly does not stand for the MPEG-2 encode, which not only features more noticeable compression artefacts, but has also been pre-filtered to remove grain and fine detail. Now I'm in the unfortunate position of having written a review that may or may not actually be valid on a case by case basis.

As msgohan quite rightly puts it:

Not at all what I expected. So much for a nice, fair codec comparison. The Descent has been Warner'd! What numbnuts at Lionsgate thought this was a good idea?

You can see a whole series of captures, saved as lossless .png images, comparing the same frames from both versions, here.

The first person who says it looks grainy gets a good hard slap

Way back last December, back when the ill-fated HD DVD format was still just hanging in there, I was pretty psyched when German distributor Senator Home Entertainment announced high definition releases of Planet Terror and Death Proof, the two instalments of Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino's ode to the B-movies of yesteryear. With US rights holders The Weinstein Company having disappeared off the face of the HD map, it looked as if Senator were our best chance of seeing these films in full 1080p glory.

Then Bob and Harvey struck. Apparently the Weinsteins didn't like the idea of these films appearing in HD in Europe before they had been given such a release stateside, so the release date was pushed back and back and back again. Then, of course, the HD DVD ship capsized, with Blu-ray editions remaining on the schedule; however, with the likelihood of them being coded for Region B only, they obviously wouldn't be of much use to Region A people like myself. Anyway, to this day they still haven't come out.

Thankfully, The Weinstein Company has finally got off its fat ass and announced US Blu-ray releases of both films. As High-Def Digest reports, they will be released separately on December 16th. No specs have been revealed yet, but I would imagine that they will mirror the currently available standard definition DVDs in terms of content - in other words, they'll be the longer extended cuts, and Rodriguez's Planet Terror will be in its home video aspect ratio of 1.78:1 instead of its theatrical 2.39:1 (when paired up with Death Proof, it was reformatted to match the ratio of its stablemate). Currently, the Japanese 6-disc release from BroadMedia is the only way to see both films as they were shown in cinemas, and by the looks of it the picture quality on the theatrical version isn't too hot.

I'm rather looking forward to seeing these films again. I rented the DVD versions of both earlier this year (these days, I'm rather reluctant to buy standard definition copies of major studio films that stand a good chance of an HD release), and liked Planet Terror considerably better than Death Proof, which was Tarantino at his most annoyingly self-indulgent, with only the killer final half-hour redeeming it. I'm definitely interested to see how the intentionally grubby, scratched-up look translates to 1080p, having only seen them in SD so far.

Quelle surprise!

I got home from work yesterday to find this waiting for me.

Now, before anyone gets a head of themselves, I need to point out that La Femme Publique is not actually shipping just yet. This is an advance copy that was sent to me by the good people at Mondo Vision, and a very nice surprise it was too. (Entering shameless self-promotion mode for a moment, it was also very cool to see my name in the "special thanks" section on the DVD credits screen.)

It's a very nice package overall, with a 24-page booklet including translations of materials from the French press kit and a new essay by Daniel Bird, as well as a handy little sheet that tells you how to set up your display properly (why more DVD releases don't include this basic information is a mystery to me). And, of course, that's in addition to the excellent transfer, exclusive interview and commentary with Andrzej Zulawski (his story about how he persuaded the 20th Century Fox executives to agree to the casting of Valérie Kaprisky is priceless), and, last but not least, the film's first ever English subtitle translation.

Permit me for one moment to sound like a shill, but, if you want a copy of the film and haven't ordered it yet, get yourself to Amazon.com and pre-order either the special edition or premium edition now.

Playing the integrity game, redux

Remember the Kane & Lynch: Dead Men reviews fiasco that kicked up a shitstorm last year? Well, I know how much you all enjoyed reading doctored reviews of a mediocre game, so guess what? I've got some more for you.

If you're interested in the computer gaming world at all, you've probably heard of a little game called Spore, the latest creation of legendary SimCity and (shudder) The Sims designer Will Wright. You may also, therefore, be aware that it has attracted some controversy over its extremely stringent digital rights management (DRM). Basically, the game allows you to install it up to three times, after which you will have to get down on bended knee and beg publisher Electronic Arts to be allowed to once again use the software you paid for. Perfect for those of us who routinely reinstall Windows, I'm sure you'll agree.

Anyway, some people had had enough of being violated by the well-lubricated member of PC gaming's most reviled publisher, and decided to let the world know they weren't going to stand for this sort of infringement of basic consumer rights. Their retaliation came in the form of negative reviews on various web sites, stressing the overly draconian nature of the game's DRM and urging potential customers to boycott the product (or at least be fully informed of the risks if they then chose to go ahead and buy it). One such site, Amazon.co.uk, decided to retaliate by systematically deleting negative reviews of the game. Positive reviews, now they're fine and dandy, but have something less than glowing to say and you'll quickly find yourself choking on Amazon's ball-gag. (Some of the reviews were luckily PrintScreened before the evidence disappeared for good.)

It seems pretty clear to me that this is the Kane & Lynch fiasco all over again: (1) Publisher releases problematic product. (2) Reviewers/fans (delete as appropriate) respond with negative criticism. (3) Publisher leans heavily on sites on which said negative criticism has been posted. (4) Said negative criticism mysteriously disappears.

Now, I know what you're going to say: a flood of one-star reviews which say nothing about the content of the game itself is hardly a measured response against some intrusive DRM. And you may be right. However, this still doesn't change the fact that to dictate to consumers who have forked out money for a product how many times they can use it, which a number of publishers seem to be increasingly fond of doing lately, is utterly absurd and demands a frank and unequivocal response. It's not a game that interests me greatly, but I am now even less likely to pick it up than I would have been before wind of this fiasco reached me. The greatest irony of all is that this is simply going to send more people scurrying to BitTorrent to download a crack to remove the DRM... or perhaps even a pirate copy of the game itself. Once again the studios bleat about piracy, the consumers get screwed, and the pirates shrug their shoulders and carry on as normal.

Update, September 12th, 2008 03:53 PM: Somewhat surprisingly, it appears that Amazon's US wing is not expurgating reviews criticising the DRM.

Update #2, September 12th, 2008 08:37 PM: Oops, spoke too soon. It appears that Amazon.com have deleted all the reviews of the game. However, the overall 1-star rating, based on 2,216 customer reviews, still stands.

Update #3, September 13th, 2008 08:21 AM: And the Amazon.com reviews are back again. This is like playing musical chairs.

The lavish detail before my eyes

Tonight, Lyris and me watched his recently-acquired Blu-ray release of The Life Before Her Eyes, a film by The House of Sand and Fog's director, Vadim Perelman, in which Uma Thurman and Evan Rachel Wood play the same character in two different time periods.

In addition to being a very good film, albeit one that knocked me for six at a certain point (not unlike, say, Swimming Pool), Magnolia's Blu-ray release has a really nice transfer. The bit rate is occasionally a little low for the material being thrown at it (check the mild artefacting around the text in Example 1), but for the most part this is an excellent encode of excellent source materials. I did spot some evidence of light degraining having been applied, occasionally causing facial details to smear slightly, but this is about as far from the horror of Dark City or Patton as you can get. Yes sirree, this disc gets the thumbs-up from me.

The Life Before Her Eyes
(Magnolia Home Entertainment, USA, AVC, 15.6 GB)

Additional Nightmare notes

My post from a few days ago on the new Blu-ray release of The Nightmare Before Christmas attracted some negative attention from a small number of people, including a fellow Blu-ray reviewer who accused me of "irresponsible sensationalism designed to stir up controversy". I'd like to take the opportunity to address some of the issues relating to both the disc itself and my post.

First of all, the reviewer in question feels that my post "blows any small issues with the disc way out of proportion" and "makes almost no mention at all that the disc actually looks pretty damn terrific". To some extent, I agree in principle with the latter point. The disc certainly does not look "pretty damn terrific" (then again, on certain occasions I have found this reviewer's impressions to be so far off the mark as to be laughable), but it does look pretty good for the most part, with a high level of detail in most scenes, solid compression and rich, deep colours. Admittedly, I neglected to stress these positives in my review, but here's the thing: I expect high detail, a lack of compression artefacts and an accurate colour palette in my HD transfers. So sue me, I'm an optimist and like to think, when I pop in a shiny new disc, that I'll get gold. Despite the number of times the studios have let their customers down, I still hope for the best.

As a result, when I notice flaws, I have a tendency to make them the focal point of my posts and reviews. That, to me, is not unreasonable. Of course it's important to accentuate the positive so that the studios can see that we appreciate a job well done, but it's even more important to call them on the boners they pull so they can take steps to ensure that the same things don't happen again. If you look through the various Blu-ray and HD DVD image quality reviews I've written on this site, I think you'll find that, if a disc looks particularly good, I'll be sure to shout it from the rooftops. I take the opportunity to point out problematic discs, but equally well, if a disc is flawless (or nearly flawless), I have a feeling that I'll be among the most vocal in my praise of it.

I can appreciate the need for balance in reviews, so let me take the opportunity to fill in the gaps in my previous post by summarising the situation.

The Nightmare Before Christmas on Blu-ray is:

- Colourful
- Well encoded
- Detailed in around 90% of shots
- Still the best film Tim Burton attached his name to
- When all said and done, the best representation of the film on optical disc

It is not:

- Flawless
- An accurate representation of its source materials
- Film-like
- Free of DVNR artefacts

Overall, it works out at around a high 7/10 in my book. No, it's not a "pretty damn terrific" transfer, but it's not exactly shameful either.

See the president get shot at in full HD!

Attention Disney, Universal and all other DNR bandits: here is film grain. It is not your enemy. Learn it. Live it. Love it.

Vantage Point
(Sony Pictures, UK, AVC, 22.9 GB)

Christmas comes early

My brother received Disney's recent Blu-ray release of Henry Selick's The Nightmare Before Christmas today. This is a film that Disney initially got cold feet over releasing and so put it out under the Touchstone Pictures banner instead, only to reclaim it years later (quite probably after they realised what a money-maker it was).

Anyway, the disc has been the recipient of some extremely positive reviews. I'm sorry to report, however, that it is yet another DVNR victim. That's not to say that it's an awful transfer by any stretch of the imagination, but it's extremely inconsistent. Some shots are Dark City bad, but others are as good as, say, Corpse Bride, with most shots lying somewhere in between the two. Grain-sucking has been applied, but not consistently, so some shots retain their original grain, but the majority don't. For the most part, the grain reduction is not massively destructive, but some shots look extremely waxy, with the optical effects shots (basically everything with Zero, fire, glowing lights, etc.) looking particularly bad. Overall this could have been a lot worse, but don't believe the people who are claiming that this film is unmolested.

Overall, it's a definite upgrade over the DVD releases (and that includes the very good anamorphic 1.66:1 release from Scandinavia, which trounced every other version), but, as is often the case, it's frustrating to think how much better it could have been. The massive irony is that, had this been a modern film made within the last couple of years, the technicians would probably have assumed that it didn't need any sort of digital "restoration" applied to it and, as a result, it would therefore have ended up looking far grainier.

Oh, and, in a further instance of tampering, the Touchstone Pictures logo at the start of the film has been replaced with a Walt Disney one. I'm not happy about that. It may not sound like the end of the world, but it's yet another example of the creeping revisionism that studios feel they can get away with inflicting on their movies. From there, it's a slippery slope towards modifications of the George Lucas variety.

The Nightmare Before Christmas
(Buena Vista, USA, AVC, 21.7 GB)

Update, September 2nd, 2008 10:19 AM: While watching the film last night, we both spotted a number of instances of the DVNR eroding picture elements such as characters' limbs. A comparison with the Scandinavian DVD revealed that this problem is new to the Blu-ray release (and probably also the concurrent standard definition re-release). An example can be seen at Lyris Lite. At least four instances were spotted in the course of a single play-through.

DVNR city

As "a pretentious arse [...] with no sense of humour" (it's fascinating the sort of things you can happen to find written about yourself on the Internet), it's sometimes difficult for me to tell whether something is meant to be a joke, so here's my question: is New Line's treatment of Dark City intentionally funny? That's certainly how it feels to me, and I certainly can't imagine any semi-competent technician actually thinking this looked good, but oh well. Take a look at the waxworks on display and judge for yourselves.

Then have a look at how one of director Alex Proyas' other films, the vastly inferior I, Robot, looks on Blu-ray, and weep.

Dark City: Director's Cut
(New Line, USA, VC-1, 20.3 GB)

Another day in bland collect-'em-up world

With the release of Diablo III still a long way off, many gamers are doing their best to find the Next Big Thing in the action RPG world to keep them entertained in the interim. A lot of people thought that might be Hellgate: London, designed by the creators of the first two Diablo games, but that turned out to be a disappointment for many. Others have looked to Titan Quest (which I can't say impressed me a great deal), which offered similar gameplay mechanics, this time in a world inspired by Greek Mythology.

Recently, a little game called Space Siege, developed by Gas Powered Games, came out for the PC. This is a game that sounds like great fun on paper: a slick, down-and-dirty ARPG pitting a solitary hero against hordes of aliens - a sort of heavily streamlined Diablo set in space. Its creative director - Gas Powered Games' CEO, Chris Taylor - also has an interesting pedigree, having masterminded a number of successful games, including Total Annihilation, Dungeon Siege and, most recently, Supreme Commander. Barring the latter, which I haven't played, his games have never done a great deal for me, with Total Annihilation's revolutionary use of terrain elevation and real-time 3D models (a rarity at the time in real-time strategy games) seeming to distract people from the overall blandness and homogeneity of the games design, and Dungeon Siege playing like a third-rate, dumbed-down version of Diablo with a few interesting tweaks in the form of party support and a dynamic character development system which automatically adjusted to the player's style of gameplay instead of going down the usual rigid class-based route. Still, despite not being particularly impressed by any of these games, I was more than willing to give Space Siege a go. After all, Diablo in space? Sounds like fun.

Then the reviews started coming in, basically summing up the game as bland, easy, dumbed-down beyond belief and completely, utterly generic. Undeterred, I downloaded the demo and had a go myself. Fifteen minutes later, having completed it, I promptly uninstalled it from my hard drive.

It's interesting, because one of the main criticisms levelled against Hellgate: London was that its developers were guilty of overreaching, setting their goals too high and over-hyping what was otherwise a pretty unremarkable game (which has always slightly confused me - were people expecting them to trumpet their game as "a middling game that doesn't aim too high" or something similar?). Space Siege's problem is the exact opposite: it's essentially a freeware casual game with lavish production values and an A-list price tag. Everything about it has been pared back to the barest minimum, resulting in a game that can't be accused of aiming too high because it doesn't seem to aim at all. There are no character classes, just a single generic hero with the mega-bland name of Seth Walker who gets access to a range of around ten guns over the course of the game. There are no stats or experience: instead, you level up at pre-determined moments and occasionally find a new weapon to replace your current one (you can't keep both). Effectively, the experience, loot and currency have all been homogenised into a single system of mechanical parts which are periodically dropped by fallen enemies, and in turn can be used at various stations to buy health, grenades etc. or upgrade your weapons and armour. It's all very flat and unimaginative, and the lack of a meaningful stats systems means that it's unclear what an upgrade of "+4 to armour" actually means in practice. It doesn't help that all of this is visualised in the form of graphics that are technically proficient but completely and utterly unimaginative, making Hellgate: London's oft-criticised monotonous environments look positively varied. In a sense, I suppose it looks the same as it plays, which is to some degree appropriate.

The one relatively original idea in the entire game is its system of cybernetics upgrades, in which Seth can choose to replace various body parts (e.g. eyes, arms, legs) with various robotic equivalents, which improve his abilities but in turn reduce his "humanity" rating. I'm told that the absolute ultimate is a cybernetic brain, but that in practice even this barely changes the gameplay one iota, beyond slightly altering other characters' reactions to him and resulting in a slightly different ending. As the inimitable Jeff Green (one of my favourite gaming journalists) said in his review at 1UP:

I went full robot, taking the ultimate final step: a cybernetic brain, which -- all told -- reduced my humanity to 5 percent. Fully expecting a dramatic or even traumatic change in my character (would I still be speaking the same heroic-yet-wooden dialogue?), I discovered that the game barely acknowledges it. In the final cut-scene, I saved the world...and apparently lived happily ever after as a robot.

If a bland, derivative, completely unimaginative and over-simplified point and click action game pitting a witless hero against hordes of witless space mutants sounds to you like a good use of your $50 and a fine way of passing the time before Diablo III's release, knock yourselves out. Myself, I think I'll just play Diablo II some more.

Could you shake that camera a bit more, Mr. Bay?

At the time of its release, Transformers was the fastest selling film on any HD format, shifting 100,000 copies in its first day, for a total of 190,000 in the first week. As such, it's fair to say that this would be a large number of people's first introduction to high definition, so it's probably a good thing it looks as great as it does. That's not to say it's perfect: in terms of compression, the action-packed final half-hour is something of a struggle for the encoder, whether because of disc space or bandwidth limitations, but by and large it looks excellent. I suspect that it may have been pre-filtered just a teeny-tiny bit, but this is still a sterling effort from Paramount and one that would belong in every HD enthusiast's collection if the film itself wasn't such a heap of dung.

Transformers
(Paramount, USA, AVC, 25 GB)