My only real concern was the build quality – I called it “acceptable for the price”, and the fact that the 525 now goes for £45 should tell you what that’s euphemistic for – and that’s turned out to be what necessitated an upgrade. It’s survived being sat on and thrown across rooms without increasing in creakiness, but heavy use of the colour buttons (they’re my ad-skip hot keys for my DVR) has left every rubber button on the thing requiring a painful degree of force to activate, if it decides to activate at all.

The 525 and its cousins are a holdover from before Logitech acquired Harmony, so in an effort to get something with the tank-like build of my other Logitech products, I went for a more recent design in the form of its flagship, the Harmony One. One may be a lower number than 525, but it’s spelled out so that you know that it’s better.

The first improvement is in the build quality, which is great. It’s solid, without creaking when you manipulate it, and the buttons are a huge improvement. Gone are the frankly rubbish rubber keys, replaced with ones that feel solid and all have a satisfying click to them so that you’re not reliant the glow of the remote to know if you’ve registered a press. The way that just the white button text glows looks a hell of a lot nicer than the cheap blue glow of the 525, which was itself an improvement on the old-school orange and green glows of the other models.

I’m kind of ambivalent about the touch screen. It allows for cool features like custom channel icons – although, disappointingly, no custom activity icons (yet), so no 360 logo on my ‘Play Xbox 360′ activity – but the screen with mappable buttons on the old one was much easier to use blindly, without actually having to look at the screen. Maybe it’ll come with practice, but it’s not as intuitive.

The One – [insert Matrix reference here] – also doesn’t have ‘hard’ buttons for the four colour functions that are so important for digital TV, and increasingly important on Blu-ray for accessing the bookmarking and PIP functions. Obviously they can be mapped to the screen, but when I’ve gone from a four-button screen with four colour buttons to a six-button screen with no colour buttons, that’s a net loss of two functions, which have to be moved to the second screen. I miss having teletext constantly at my fingertips already, and it seems like a silly little omission.

There’s another good/bad change, which is in how it’s powered. It’s rechargeable and comes with an AC-powered dock, so no more buying batteries. However, a full charge will apparently only last a week of normal use, and I’m not entirely sure that having to charge the remote every week or so is preferable to a couple of quid on AAAs every six months. Financially, sure, but when plugs are at a premium with the amount of equipment that I have, I’d rather not have to dedicate one to my remote. Maybe future firmwares will increase the efficiency, because it’s quite profligate with the screen: it’s obviously the most power-hungry feature, so how about not turning it on whenever I nudge the remote?

Those who aren’t set in their ways with a previous model and especially those who still juggle a small army of remotes will love it, and the Harmony system remains the best around whether you’re spending £100 on the One or £45 on the 525. Most of my concerns have fallen away in the weeks that I’ve been using it as I’ve got into new habits, but that’s not to say that the remote hasn’t been subject to some strange design decisions. Still, a tentative thumbs up from me.

I’d been thinking about LCDs in the 37-inch range and set myself an absolute maximum of £1,000 to spend, but when I found that decent models were well below that price (as low as £650 online), I decided to go all out. Why settle for an 8 ms response time and 8,000:1 contrast ratio when I can get 0.001 ms and 30,000:1? That’s how I came to have such a magnificent beast as the Panasonic TH-42PZ80B – that’s a 42-inch 1080p plasma, reviewed here – sat at the end of my bed.

As much as I enjoyed having the old LCD, I found that when I was watching HD video material I wasn’t really getting the full benefit. It looked sharper, but from my perch it didn’t look worlds beyond an upscaled DVD. Indeed, a competent DVD could be almost indistinguishable, which meant dropping the extra cash on the Blu-ray/HD DVD over the standard DVD was done as much for being future-proof as anything. Not to mention that black levels of LCDs have never been great (check out this comparison), which annoyed me with low detail in darker films. Batman Begins on HD DVD, for example, has a highly rated video transfer that was frankly a bit grey and murky via LCD.

Compared to the old one, this is a revelation. Watching a Blu-ray in 1080p at 24Hz with no overscan at that size would convince anyone that it’s worlds ahead of DVD, to the point where even my excellent little player upscaling to 1080p can’t keep up anymore. My go-to demo disc, Pixar’s Cars, looked amazing, with vivid colours, sharp detail and smooth motion, as did the recently acclaimed Narnia.

While the black levels are undeniably superior, it’s not all roses, though. I’ve found that I’m one of the few per cent of people who can see the phosphor trails on plasma displays, a flaw endemic to the technology. Films are largely – though not entirely – unaffected, but certain games like Call of Duty 4, with its high contrast and fast movement, can almost look like one of those red-on-green 3D double images. Thankfully it’s something that will supposedly fade as the panel wears in over the first couple hundred hours, but I’ll suppose I have to get used to it. Even so, it looks dramatically better than any LCD that I’ve seen, so I’m going to take it as a worthwhile trade.

Still, given the choice between the grey blacks, slow response and poor scaling of an LCD and the phosphor trailing of a plasma (admittedly that only a small percentage of people can even see), it kind of makes you wish that reliable old CRTs weren’t so bloody big.

So CES hasn’t officially started yet, but the first megaton of 2008 has been dropped as Warner, currently the biggest studio for HD releases, confirmed that in May they’re dropping support for the HD DVD format. With only two major studios now supporting HD DVD, and one of them on a time-limited contract, it looks like the end of the HD format war is in sight.

The writing has been on the wall for a while now. Despite occasional better versions and, for me at least, a number of compelling exclusive titles, that was probably the death blow for HD DVD. It’s being reported as such, and even the comments from Toshiba have an air of resignition to them. There’s none of the bullishness that was usually found in press releases from both sides, and the cancellation of the HD DVD conference speaks volumes. They were blindsided and need a miracle, frankly.

Ultimately it’s good for HD movies. It will bring stability to the market that it hasn’t had and has probably been a contributor to the tiny size of the market for HD movies so far. I still don’t think Blu-ray will ever come close to the popularity of DVD, but now those who have been sitting on the fence can grow the market. Paramount certainly won’t stay exclusive when their contract period is up, and that will leave Universal as the last ones at the party.

I’m keeping my HD DVD player and keeping my collection, but now I’m only buying the biggest exclusive titles on HD DVD. That means Sweeney Todd and…uhh…hmm…

*goes to watch Serenity on HD DVD again*

Enter Joytech. I was wary of their HDMI switch after the serious performance problems with their component switchbox (the first version had problems with HD sources, making it all but useless), but for £30 (minus HDMI cables) I thought it was worth the risk.

What a fantastic little box! I’m going to have to gush a bit here because, aside from the lack of even one included HDMI and the fact that the blue indicator light is too bright in a dark room (I stuck tape over it to take the edge off), I have no complaints. It does exactly what you want it to – that is, it switches between HDMI sources quickly and is HDCP-compliant – and has a couple of handy touches that make it especially easy to recommend.

The first is that in addition to the normal plug, it comes with the option to power it over USB. With so many consoles and modern STBs having USB on the back it can save a valuable slot on the mains. The PS3 doesn’t send power to its USB slots when it’s turned off but the 360 (and HD DVD drive) and Wii both do, as does the Sky HD box, I’m reliably informed. This is an option that more low powered items should have, and in future I want all phones and portable devices to support charging over USB as standard, please.

Secondly it comes with an infra-red extension attached to a small box that can be taped to the TV or somewhere discreet. No need to have the box on display in order to change it remotely so it can be safely chucked into the jungle back there where you never have to notice it again. Unless you’re in a dark room, in which case you’ll notice the aforementioned blue glow all the time. The day that electronics companies realise that as cool as blue LEDs look, they’re usually far too bright will be a happy one.

Considering that only a year ago you’d be looking at well over £100 for a half-decent HDMI switch this is an absolute steal. Just don’t get suckered into buying overpriced leads (95p through Amazon Marketplace) to go with it.

Xbox Live pisses all over PSN. Poor friends integration (besides the fact that I only know a handful of people with one), different interface in every game, and they apparently remove older content because I can’t get the Everybody’s Golf demo or the first Uncharted trailer now. Plus no way to arrange content by game. I know PSN is free, but that doesn’t change the fact that I’d rather stay at the Ritz than a homeless shelter.

Live would do well to steal the idea of selling things in real money, though. At the current exchange rate Tekken 5 would cost me approximately 700 points. Although I’d have to buy 2,100 to get it. Fuck.

The PS3 is a better Blu-ray player than the 360 is HD DVD. I’ve watched a couple of films now (Apocalypto and Casino Royale) and have been thoroughly impressed, although despite the bigger library on BD I still struggle to find more than half a dozen films I want. There are a number of titles that I’ll be buying before the end of the year, though. And 1080p video doesn’t make Casino Royale any less overrated.

When the price drops I’ll probably buy a 360 with HDMI. It looks pin sharp and really is a surprising improvement over component or VGA. Oddly this is the first time I’ve watched native HD content over HDMI, since I’ve only ever used my upscaling DVD player previously.

Remote Play is a brilliant feature. Let me stream a DVD or BD to myself on the bog and it’ll be perfect.

Although the disc drive is significantly quieter than the 360′s, the fans aren’t. It’s near silent when turned on until they kick in after a few minutes (or is my room just too hot?), at which point I can hear them over a movie. Still, credit where credit’s due: it doesn’t sound like a jet taking off during a game which is an improvement.

I love the open standards for peripherals. Bluetooth means that anyone can put out wireless accessories, and being able to use any old flash memory card or USB drive as a memory card – allowing me to back up saves and even downloaded videos to my computer, no less – is fantastic. Ditto being able to use any old Bluetooth headset. Microsoft needs to note that charging £25 for a 64MB memory card is insulting when I can buy a 4GB flash drive to use with the PS3 for less.

On the subject of Bluetooth, why haven’t the syncing issues with the controller been fixed? Probably half a dozen times now my controller has stopped responding to leave my character running into a wall, and it’s not on when other wireless controllers like the 360′s and even the Wavebird have been absolutely rock solid. Because Resistance is so obnoxiously stingy with the checkpoints I had to do a whole – quite difficult – section again when it cut out and sent me gaily walking out in front of a big enemy with an equally big gun.

And why isn’t there an IR receiver? I see no real benefit to a Bluetooth remote (the ergonomics of a remote mean that it’s generally pointing at the device anyway) and it only serves to annoy the AV geeks who have their expensive universal remotes. You know, the ones who you’re trying to convince that the PS3 is a high end piece of AV equipment. Mine can turn on and control the 360 and PS2 but not the PS3, the one with movie playback that I might want to use with some regularity.

Stop plugging ‘CELL?’ and ‘Blu-ray Disc?’ at every opportunity. We know you have big discs (I said ‘discs’!) and a powerful CPU but we don’t need to be told in game trailers. It comes off like vapid marketing speak and undermines how good the technology actually is.

Most of all, the PS3 needs more games. Resistance, Motorstorm, and Ninja Gaiden don’t cut it at this point against two competitors that are ahead in sales and software. Thankfully there’s some good stuff coming this year.

If you thought getting hold of an Xbox 360 late last year was difficult, you should try finding one of the HD DVD drives. The shop where I had my original order didn’t get any and, according to my friend who owns it, Gem (the main UK Microsoft distributor for indies) only had a couple of dozen for the whole country. Gameplay told me that they couldn’t supply my preorder until, after much ado, it turned out that they could.

Obviously an external drive isn’t the most elegant way to play HD DVD but what this does is make an excellent stopgap until the standalones come down in price a bit. How many HD movie players are there for £130 again?

It’s admittedly a bit disingenuous to say that this is an HD DVD player for £130 when you need a £200 machine to run it, but a quick calculation tells me that £130 + £200 = £330, which is significantly less than the £400+ for the standalone HD players or the PS3. It comes with the remote (usually £20 on its own) and the King Kong HD DVD (£14.99 on Play), and when you look at the aggressive pre-Christmas bundling going on with 360 consoles I don’t think it’s a bad deal.

Pricing aside, the most important thing is how well this works. The answer is pretty well. Not perfect, although it does represent excellent value for money and the quality is very high. It’s certainly the best way to play HD movies without breaking the bank.

The drive itself is slightly bigger than I expected – see the above picture for it next to the 360, and it’s the same depth – and, since it has its own power supply, runs independently of the console so that it can be opened and closed without turning on the 360. The build quality on it is actually a little better than the 360′s standard DVD drive, with the eject icon lighting up and the button itself not feeling as cheap and clicky as the other one. It’s mercifully quiet but unfortunately you’ll still have the 360′s fans going. Generally it’s not too bad, but it can be audible in quieter moments.

Installation is quick and painless, and when you’re finished the drive icon on the 360 dashboard becomes some weird Pokéball that lets you switch between the DVD and HD DVD drives. My one complaint about this system is that I often use my remote to eject discs and, at the moment at least, my Harmony can only control the built-in drive. I couldn’t find any new remote codes that they may have added, so unless I’m missing something that should be on the to-do list.

Playback quality is the most important thing and it seems very much comparable to the Toshiba HD-A1 that I saw a while back. Although I’m never going to get the full effect on my 26″ LCD, it’s a noticeable step up from upscaled DVD, albeit not as night and day as some might expect. There’s obviously more detail in the picture (close ups and things like King Kong’s hair really benefit here), but there’s also a lot more pop and three-dimensionality to the colours. I’d be quite interested to hook it up to a standard def CRT and see if the improvements carry across to that. Possibly the biggest improvement over DVD is how the menus work – they work without interrupting the film and let you change settings on the fly, and are just extremely smart. The bundled Kong disc is a fantastic showpiece that looks gorgeous; it’s just a shame about the film.

Audio is the one area where connectivity limitations become apparent, as it encodes all audio formats (typically only Dolby Digital Plus or Dolby TrueHD at the moment) to standard Dolby Digital. There’s no option to output the PCM audio to your amp or, for obvious reasons, output them over HDMI and while it’s not too big of an issue for me since I’m limited to DD and DTS, the volume it was outputting seemed a bit low. I suppose for those with better equipment than mine it’s something to bear in mind, though.

So overall it’s a very credible HD DVD playback solution, with a few quirks that should hopefully be worked out in future updates. And, it’s worth noting, this one can actually scale your HD movies to 720p.

I’d heard that a good number of PC World stores would be getting a handful of units each for general sale. Got up bright and early at 8am this morning so that I could be at PC World in Poole, the biggest around, for when it opened at 9. I asked in there and they said they were expecting a few but they haven’t turned up, and they might be in their delivery later that day. Went home via the Christchurch branch (the other side of town) but they weren’t getting any, checking every place that might have had them (Tesco, Currys, Comet, etc) on the way. No joy.

Then I had to go to uni so I checked PC World in Southampton while I was there, along with Gamestation, two branches of Game, Virgin, HMV, and CEX. Nothing.

On the way home I detoured over to Poole again to see if their delivery had arrived. Nope. Maybe Monday, they said. By then I was resigned to getting an import on Tuesday, obviously at a premium but not as unreasonable as the current eBay prices, so I went to cancel my unfulfilled Gameplay order which still said “Ordered” since I’d missed out on the initial shipment. Went through their cancellation process and then noticed – after I’d cancelled it, mind – that it had changed to “Being Picked”.

I rang them up to see if that was accurate and, if it was, to see if I could cancel my cancellation. The guy there informed me that they’d managed to get a few more units and mine had been shipped out this morning via courier, so I should get it on Monday.

A happy ending, then. Now I think I need to lie down…

With all of the big three espousing network connectivity and, to wildly differing extents, higher resolutions, will those days ever come back? Getting the full experience from a games console is no longer a case of picking up a SCART cable along with the new hardware. As well as needing an expensive TV, just setting it up relies on an intimate knowledge of your TV’s supported inputs and resolutions as well as the favoured sound formats of your audio setup. I’m a technical masochist and so actually like fiddling with settings, but I doubt the average person does. We all must have cringed at friends with nice widescreen TVs but with their DVD player set to 4:3.

Networking is just as bad, requiring either a wired network within range of the console or a headfirst dive into the world of wireless networking – encryption protocols, DHCP servers, MAC filters, SSIDs, keys, and other such fun – to get what can be the main thrust of the hardware in the case of the 360.

And then there was firmware. The risk of completely killing your hardware aside, it’s more than slightly annoying to find yourself unable to play a PSP game because it has a mandatory firmware upgrade on the disc and your machine doesn’t have enough battery power to let you flash it. So much for ease of use there. Since its release the PS3 has had two firmware updates weighing in at nearly 100MB each, which is no quick and painless download on a 2Mb connection with a bandwidth limit. I’m sure you’re familiar with the stories of firmware updates killing 360s and Wiis, as well. Don’t even get me started on game patching and modern developers’ inability to notice players randomly disconnecting from online games.

Necessary evils though these may be if we want these new experiences, surely someone out there can come up with some kind of standards. Why not make TVs that can tell your devices what resolution they want? Why not test your bloody games before you ask us to pay for them?

• I want it now.
• I want it in widescreen and 480p. Strictly speaking I want it in 720p, but I’ll take what I can get.

So get the Wii version, right? Well…

• I don’t want to look like a twat while I’m playing it. That may sound shallow, but my reservations over the controls go into the functionality as well: I want to be able scratch my nose without clattering the poor maiden who I’m trying to save with my sword, for example. In short: I want to play it with a controller. The ports are there so why not give me the option to use them?
• Twilight Princess is the only Wii game that I want for the forseeable future. I’m reluctant to buy a whole new system for this game when there’s a perfectly functional, albeit slightly crippled, one on a system that’s been gathering dust since, well, the last Zelda. Doesn’t my faithful Cube deserve its last hurrah?

What’s a guy to do? It’s tempting just to get pissed off with Nintendo for doing this, since ultimately if they’d put widescreen and 480p into the GameCube version I wouldn’t have any issues here. The Cube can certainly handle it in 480p (the game runs on the Wind Waker engine, and that was progressive four years ago) so it’s clearly a deliberate decision to annoy the gamers with a side job in geekery. And get them to buy a Wii, of course. The console that’s designed to draw in non-gamers…

Gah!

With the obligatory bash out of the way, on with the impressions. First, the hardware itself:

• This mutha is mahoosive. Imagine the monolith from 2001 with an HDMI port. It’s slightly bigger than the 360, and a similar size to the original Xbox. Where are all the jokers who made the size quips when that came out, I wonder? Queuing for their PS3s, I’d assume.
• It has the same shiny finish as the PSP. Thankfully you’re not required to touch it and therefore smudge the hell out of it as you were with that, but it looks nice.
• (whisper quiet). A very good thing. A bit louder than the near-silent slimline PS2, quieter than the 360…not that that’s difficult.
• Slot loading disc drive and touch-sensitive buttons are extremely slick.
• If you’ve used a PSP you’ve used the “XMB” dashboard-thingy. I wasn’t that keen on it then and I’m still not, but it’s a dramatic improvement on the PS2′s frontend…not that that’s difficult.
• The web browser is decent but a mouse and keyboard is a necessity. The controls for it are even more convoluted than on the PSP.
• 100MB firmware updates? Let’s not make this a regular occurrence when some of us have bandwidth limits.
• The jury is out on the SIXAXIS. I’m not a huge Dual Shock fan anyway, and although the sticks have a nicer finish than the DS2, they’re still not nearly as accurate as Nintendo and Microsoft’s analogue sticks. Rumble is one of those things that you miss when you don’t have it. It’s not as light as I’d heard, and so I was expecting to hate it since I’d been given comparisons to the SNES controller; it’s still a bit on the cheapy side, but not bad. I’ll talk about the motion sensitivity where relevant in the games.

Right then…the games. I tried five of them.

Resistance: Fall of Man

On the day that I got Gears of War any shooter is going to look its worst, but through composite if it wasn’t for the smooth framerate you could be watching someone play Killzone. Playing it with the same floaty sticks just made it feel like playing a PS2 game to me. It’s competent and I’m sure it looks a ton better on an HDTV, but it just struck me as a very generic shooter.

Ridge Racer 7

It’s Ridge Racer (insert “RIIIIIIDGE RACER” joke here). That basically sums it up, because once you’ve played one of these you know what you’re getting – insane drifts in sports cars around coastal roads – and it does what it does well enough. It looks nice, if unspectacular, but most importantly runs rock solidly.

The fact that it recycles many of RR6′s tracks makes me even more inclined to call it Ridge Racer 6.5. But hey: people who don’t like Ridge Racer won’t buy it anyway.

Genji: Days of the Blade

Must…resist…urge…to make…crab jokes…

The reviews have summed it up really. It’s an above average hack-and-slash romp that, to be honest, wasn’t as bad as I was expecting. Notable for the addition of real-time weapon change.

Tony Hawk’s Project 8

As glad as I am that they resisted the urge to call it ‘Tony Hawk’s Pro Sk8r’, they still can’t match the series’ apogee in Tony Hawk 2. Yes, that one was better than THPS3. The poor framerate that the reviews had complained about is definitely there, and it dropped to unacceptable levels with a lot of foliage on screen.

Out of curiosity I tried it with tilt control and, in this situation, it doesn’t work. Even with the sensitivity turned down it felt way too twitchy, and even motions that you don’t realise that you’re making get translated into moves. Tilt is potentially a good idea but I feel that it has to be used in natural situations such as, for example, shaking enemies off in Resistance or COD3. I’m sure it’d kind of work here if I was to take the time to learn it, but when the tried-and-tested conventional controls work so well, why bother?

Marvel: Ultimate Alliance

Meh. Wouldn’t buy the 360 version and I wouldn’t buy this one either. It’s probably better than my quick blast suggests but I wasn’t inclined to play it any more.

So overall my impressions are similar to what I said about the PS2 back in 2001: it’s a nice bit of kit, but unless you’re really desperate wait for the kinks to be ironed out (notably that hideous upscaling oversight), the price to come down, and the really good games to come out. I look forward to being able to walk into a shop and walk out with one, hopefully without hassle, when MGS4 comes out.