LFS is good, but I'd much rather play GTR-2 myself - I think the guys have done wonderful things in their little team with LFS, but it's significantly worse if you look at it as a game, rather than its core job of being an online simulation for hardcore nerds. As someone who isn't the greatest online racer, it's off-putting to the point that I just gave up.
As good as Gotham 4 will when it turns up around the same time, perhaps? Bizarre are getting a LOT more out of the 360 now they've had some more time with actual units; the resolution drop was a last-minute fudge to get the game out of the door for launch, and won't be needed for 4.
Not that it looks anything less than completely gorgeous anyway, if you ask me.
Substitute "most car companies" with "Honda" and you'll find the actual case. Polyphony consider them to be too important in their native Japanese market to leave out, so everyone else gets pristine equipment, too.
You'll notice how most other manufacturers you'd want in a racing game (Ferrari, Lamborghini, Lotus, Ford, RUF (as the standard Porsche cheat), Aston Martin, Jaguar, Pagani and so on and so forth) get the merry crap beaten out of them in the Project Gotham Racing series.
I'm plain not good enough at simulation games to know, and I can't afford the equipment for a setup more fancy than my basic Logitech Driving Force, but my gear-head friends have good things to say about Simbin's GT-R games and Live For Speed. All of Simbin's games (I liked GT Legends the most) and LFS too have fairly generous demos available, so give them a try.
I don't know; the PS3 won't be here until March, so I've not seen one running myself. But Ridge wouldn't be Ridge at 30fps, so I'd imagine Namco have thrown out whatever they needed to in search of 60.
1080p at 60fps isn't that hard; PCs do it all the time with graphics cards no more powerful than the ones in the 360 and PS3. It's just that most developers on these consoles would rather plan for 720p and push more work to each pixel.
It's too late for that. I mentioned Bosconian, because it's already on one of the Ridge Racer 6 cars. Gotham is modelling road cars instead of dedicated racing ones, which is why there is no advertising currently on them.
Not that you need any; while they got a 0% recognition for the trackside advertising, I can certainly tell you that the F50 GT I was driving is sold by Ferrari.
Ah, thanks for that. Assault thingy is the only title so far to explicitly say that it is doing 1080p, and poor little old me doesn't have access to the frame buffer on my home kit.
I agree about the scaler, by the way, upscaling to 1360x768 for my LCD's native res is just gorgeous.
Bogart's performance doesn't change, but Casablanca is stunning on HD-DVD because it looks so much more like film; the detail of the lighting, set design and indeed subtle details of the performances show up with a stunning clarity that does the film justice.
And yes, the way the light catches Ilsa's hair is pretty damn lovely, since you ask.
Serenity is a great movie, but the US release doesn't offer video quite as good as some of the titles on that list.
It had to have a new encode for Europe, to make room for a couple of extra languages, and the updated VC-1 encoder means it's actually slightly better over here, apparently.
So buy it because you like the film by all means, but I think they're right to leave it off the list of best transfers.
It feels like a big difference to you when the DVD version gets heavily discounted (due to volume numbers) in Walmart and Best-Buy.
Ordering these things for import to the UK, I found I can get the "overpriced" dual-format discs for only £2 to £3 more than the 2-disc standard-def releases. As I've not been able to find an HD-DVD player yet, these are great.
I know it's a completely shit film, but watching a demo of Tokyo Drift projected onto a 8 foot screen by a 1920x1080 projector looked completely stunning; no sign of anything I could possibly criticize the image for at all, nor the audio.
Given that it was also tricked out to the nines with the kind of ludicrous in-movie bonus features as any disc on the market, there's nothing to worry about on that front; even a 30Gb HD-DVD can happily get 4 hours or so of top quality 1080p video and lossless audio now, and a 50Gb Blu-Ray could obviously go even longer if Sony would only use VC1 like HD-DVD does (it's in the spec, but MPEG-2 is quicker to encode).
The discs that look rubbish are either early titles, or mastered badly; it's not the extras' fault.
On the PS3, some games are 720p (most of the big hitters like Resistance and Motorstorm, for instance), but others (Ridge 7 for a start) are 1080p.
Right now, I think the only 1080p-native title on the 360 is that vertical shmup that was on Live Arcade last week, because it's such a new feature, but everything else can be internally scaled from 720p because Microsoft had the foresight to put a hardware scaler in there, unlike Sony.
That's true. It also possibly explains why so many of the big scenes (the dogs and the climax in particular) took place at night, where you can hide the rough bits in the shadows.
Which is what really annoyed me about the film, I think - bits of it were just so dark I couldn't actually see what was going on any more.
But yes, having some time for characters really worked with Hulk. Unlike most of the Batman sequels, where they throw so many villains at it that no-one (least of all Bruce Wayne) gets enough character time to give them some depth.
No-one looks at trackside adverts in Gotham, because we're too busy looking at where the road is going, what the other cars are doing and so on.
Real motorsport doesn't just have trackside adverts, but sponsorship on the cars, too. If the rear bumper of the opposition has a big Bosconian logo like in Ridge 6, I'm rather more likely to notice it when trying to get past him.
Sorry you got modded by some idiot as a Troll. Because you're not.
Personally, I was fairly disappointed by Hulk, because in trying to have its artistic cake and also trying to eat big CG-heavy action sequences, it fell between two stools. I thought most of the second hour could do with a serious trim, people who just wanted to see HULK SMASH!!! would want most of the first hour gone, and ultimately everyone lost. Oh well, at least he tried.
Mind you, I'm sure that some people would say the same about Batman Begins, and I loved that.
VHS only doesn't have DRM because the D stands for Digital, anyway. The Analogue Rights Management of Macrovision is (if anything) worse, because it's actually affecting picture quality, unlike on a DVD or HD-DVD where it's invisible on a working machine.
I'd suggest you start with Casablanca, which is even better than that blurb makes it sound - the amount of texture detail and those deep shadows are just stunning. I can't believe this film looks better than I've seen far more recent movies look when projected from actual 35mm film, when watching on an 8ft screen.
Next up, and almost as good (the larger grain of the original print being pretty much about it) is The Searchers. Finish off an initial purchase run with Forbidden Planet, and you'll be very happy.
Blu-Ray has suffered quite a bit, if you ask me, from a studio perception that it's going to be almost entirely for people with PS3s, rather than standalone players. So the movies are being picked to appeal to that sector of the market, and pretty much only that.
I flat-out adored three of your list, and even Hulk was passable.
But this isn't about quality of film, it's quality of transfer, and of the HD discs I've seen of either format, Hulk was probably the best overall; the picture is just jaw-droppingly good, with luminous colour and natural texture.
Second best I'd place Casablanca, and if you're going to call that shit, you can step outside.
1) No, 1080i and 1080p work just fine on the 360. Image Constraint Token has not been implemented on a single public disc yet, and is highly unlikely any time in the near future, given the speed at which these add-on drives are flying off the shelf. By the time it does become an issue, you'll have almost certainly got your $199 worth of fun out of the drive, and the standalone players that you'll need will have come down by that much.
2) The grandparent is strictly off-topic. Burning karma to get his question answered is, I'd suggest, a real issue.
I'm not _that_ unusual in having an iPod, a 360 and a PSP, am I? Deciding whether I want to buy my movie from one store, and not be able to play it on either of the other two devices is a bigger pain than buying a DVD and letting the PC do a bit of conversion work (or just sticking it in the machine in the case of the 360).
As obsessed as some departments of Sony are with DRM, the PSP and PS3 are surprisingly nice, actually.
Or at least, I've got a PSP and an XBox 360, and converting downloaded video files to a format that works on the PSP (and would also play on a PS3 if I had one) is a hell of a lot easier than the WMV-or-nothing setup on the 360.
To the extent that I'm considering doing without HD, and converting everything to H.264 then connecting my iPod to the TV instead.
Reading the full article (there's a subscriber copy here), their argument was that Test Drive was a really nice, as well as innovative, use of online in a console title - the MMO feeling that there were other drivers on the road who were about their own idle business, and that you _could_ stop, chat, race against them, but equally could just nod and carry on. Normally, you're in a racing game to race, and those people are purely your opposition; the casual nature of encounters in TD:U is pretty refreshing, and a great way around the "annoying teenager" phenomenon that ruins so many other XBox Live titles.
Re:As Famitsu is to Japan, Edge is to the U.S. and
on
2006 Edge Awards
·
· Score: 1
Next Generation is certainly the closest US-based equivalent to Edge, not least because they used to regularly share feature articles. I don't believe it happens any more, however, because Edge is starting to make a push for the US market; they've not been able to move there in the past, because there is another magazine title with the same name (about tattooing or somesuch, if memory serves; Not games, anyway.)
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LFS is good, but I'd much rather play GTR-2 myself - I think the guys have done wonderful things in their little team with LFS, but it's significantly worse if you look at it as a game, rather than its core job of being an online simulation for hardcore nerds. As someone who isn't the greatest online racer, it's off-putting to the point that I just gave up.
As good as Gotham 4 will when it turns up around the same time, perhaps? Bizarre are getting a LOT more out of the 360 now they've had some more time with actual units; the resolution drop was a last-minute fudge to get the game out of the door for launch, and won't be needed for 4.
Not that it looks anything less than completely gorgeous anyway, if you ask me.
Substitute "most car companies" with "Honda" and you'll find the actual case. Polyphony consider them to be too important in their native Japanese market to leave out, so everyone else gets pristine equipment, too.
You'll notice how most other manufacturers you'd want in a racing game (Ferrari, Lamborghini, Lotus, Ford, RUF (as the standard Porsche cheat), Aston Martin, Jaguar, Pagani and so on and so forth) get the merry crap beaten out of them in the Project Gotham Racing series.
I'm plain not good enough at simulation games to know, and I can't afford the equipment for a setup more fancy than my basic Logitech Driving Force, but my gear-head friends have good things to say about Simbin's GT-R games and Live For Speed. All of Simbin's games (I liked GT Legends the most) and LFS too have fairly generous demos available, so give them a try.
I don't know; the PS3 won't be here until March, so I've not seen one running myself. But Ridge wouldn't be Ridge at 30fps, so I'd imagine Namco have thrown out whatever they needed to in search of 60.
1080p at 60fps isn't that hard; PCs do it all the time with graphics cards no more powerful than the ones in the 360 and PS3. It's just that most developers on these consoles would rather plan for 720p and push more work to each pixel.
It's too late for that. I mentioned Bosconian, because it's already on one of the Ridge Racer 6 cars. Gotham is modelling road cars instead of dedicated racing ones, which is why there is no advertising currently on them.
Not that you need any; while they got a 0% recognition for the trackside advertising, I can certainly tell you that the F50 GT I was driving is sold by Ferrari.
Ah, thanks for that. Assault thingy is the only title so far to explicitly say that it is doing 1080p, and poor little old me doesn't have access to the frame buffer on my home kit.
I agree about the scaler, by the way, upscaling to 1360x768 for my LCD's native res is just gorgeous.
Bogart's performance doesn't change, but Casablanca is stunning on HD-DVD because it looks so much more like film; the detail of the lighting, set design and indeed subtle details of the performances show up with a stunning clarity that does the film justice.
And yes, the way the light catches Ilsa's hair is pretty damn lovely, since you ask.
Serenity is a great movie, but the US release doesn't offer video quite as good as some of the titles on that list.
It had to have a new encode for Europe, to make room for a couple of extra languages, and the updated VC-1 encoder means it's actually slightly better over here, apparently.
So buy it because you like the film by all means, but I think they're right to leave it off the list of best transfers.
It feels like a big difference to you when the DVD version gets heavily discounted (due to volume numbers) in Walmart and Best-Buy.
Ordering these things for import to the UK, I found I can get the "overpriced" dual-format discs for only £2 to £3 more than the 2-disc standard-def releases. As I've not been able to find an HD-DVD player yet, these are great.
I know it's a completely shit film, but watching a demo of Tokyo Drift projected onto a 8 foot screen by a 1920x1080 projector looked completely stunning; no sign of anything I could possibly criticize the image for at all, nor the audio.
Given that it was also tricked out to the nines with the kind of ludicrous in-movie bonus features as any disc on the market, there's nothing to worry about on that front; even a 30Gb HD-DVD can happily get 4 hours or so of top quality 1080p video and lossless audio now, and a 50Gb Blu-Ray could obviously go even longer if Sony would only use VC1 like HD-DVD does (it's in the spec, but MPEG-2 is quicker to encode).
The discs that look rubbish are either early titles, or mastered badly; it's not the extras' fault.
On the PS3, some games are 720p (most of the big hitters like Resistance and Motorstorm, for instance), but others (Ridge 7 for a start) are 1080p.
Right now, I think the only 1080p-native title on the 360 is that vertical shmup that was on Live Arcade last week, because it's such a new feature, but everything else can be internally scaled from 720p because Microsoft had the foresight to put a hardware scaler in there, unlike Sony.
That's true. It also possibly explains why so many of the big scenes (the dogs and the climax in particular) took place at night, where you can hide the rough bits in the shadows.
Which is what really annoyed me about the film, I think - bits of it were just so dark I couldn't actually see what was going on any more.
But yes, having some time for characters really worked with Hulk. Unlike most of the Batman sequels, where they throw so many villains at it that no-one (least of all Bruce Wayne) gets enough character time to give them some depth.
No-one looks at trackside adverts in Gotham, because we're too busy looking at where the road is going, what the other cars are doing and so on.
Real motorsport doesn't just have trackside adverts, but sponsorship on the cars, too. If the rear bumper of the opposition has a big Bosconian logo like in Ridge 6, I'm rather more likely to notice it when trying to get past him.
Sorry you got modded by some idiot as a Troll. Because you're not.
Personally, I was fairly disappointed by Hulk, because in trying to have its artistic cake and also trying to eat big CG-heavy action sequences, it fell between two stools. I thought most of the second hour could do with a serious trim, people who just wanted to see HULK SMASH!!! would want most of the first hour gone, and ultimately everyone lost. Oh well, at least he tried.
Mind you, I'm sure that some people would say the same about Batman Begins, and I loved that.
VHS only doesn't have DRM because the D stands for Digital, anyway. The Analogue Rights Management of Macrovision is (if anything) worse, because it's actually affecting picture quality, unlike on a DVD or HD-DVD where it's invisible on a working machine.
I'd suggest you start with Casablanca, which is even better than that blurb makes it sound - the amount of texture detail and those deep shadows are just stunning. I can't believe this film looks better than I've seen far more recent movies look when projected from actual 35mm film, when watching on an 8ft screen.
Next up, and almost as good (the larger grain of the original print being pretty much about it) is The Searchers. Finish off an initial purchase run with Forbidden Planet, and you'll be very happy.
Blu-Ray has suffered quite a bit, if you ask me, from a studio perception that it's going to be almost entirely for people with PS3s, rather than standalone players. So the movies are being picked to appeal to that sector of the market, and pretty much only that.
I flat-out adored three of your list, and even Hulk was passable.
But this isn't about quality of film, it's quality of transfer, and of the HD discs I've seen of either format, Hulk was probably the best overall; the picture is just jaw-droppingly good, with luminous colour and natural texture.
Second best I'd place Casablanca, and if you're going to call that shit, you can step outside.
1) No, 1080i and 1080p work just fine on the 360. Image Constraint Token has not been implemented on a single public disc yet, and is highly unlikely any time in the near future, given the speed at which these add-on drives are flying off the shelf. By the time it does become an issue, you'll have almost certainly got your $199 worth of fun out of the drive, and the standalone players that you'll need will have come down by that much.
2) The grandparent is strictly off-topic. Burning karma to get his question answered is, I'd suggest, a real issue.
That's not the developer, it's the publisher.
This list is based on the publisher saying "We plan to release X titles on the PS3", and little more, really.
Arrgh.
I'm not _that_ unusual in having an iPod, a 360 and a PSP, am I? Deciding whether I want to buy my movie from one store, and not be able to play it on either of the other two devices is a bigger pain than buying a DVD and letting the PC do a bit of conversion work (or just sticking it in the machine in the case of the 360).
As obsessed as some departments of Sony are with DRM, the PSP and PS3 are surprisingly nice, actually.
Or at least, I've got a PSP and an XBox 360, and converting downloaded video files to a format that works on the PSP (and would also play on a PS3 if I had one) is a hell of a lot easier than the WMV-or-nothing setup on the 360.
To the extent that I'm considering doing without HD, and converting everything to H.264 then connecting my iPod to the TV instead.
Ah, I see - that's a different thing entirely, then. Microsoft are certainly doing all that stuff themselves, without any 3rd-party help.
Reading the full article (there's a subscriber copy here), their argument was that Test Drive was a really nice, as well as innovative, use of online in a console title - the MMO feeling that there were other drivers on the road who were about their own idle business, and that you _could_ stop, chat, race against them, but equally could just nod and carry on. Normally, you're in a racing game to race, and those people are purely your opposition; the casual nature of encounters in TD:U is pretty refreshing, and a great way around the "annoying teenager" phenomenon that ruins so many other XBox Live titles.
Next Generation is certainly the closest US-based equivalent to Edge, not least because they used to regularly share feature articles. I don't believe it happens any more, however, because Edge is starting to make a push for the US market; they've not been able to move there in the past, because there is another magazine title with the same name (about tattooing or somesuch, if memory serves; Not games, anyway.)