DOA4 Reviewed

I’ve written a review of the latest Xbox 360 game, Dead or Alive 4. You can find it at that link or, as always, in my review index. I also don’t mention the bouncing boobies once, making this the first review of a DOA game ever to accomplish that.

Having unlocked most of what there is to be unlocked in the game (I’m only missing Tengu, who requires you to finish time attack mode with all 20 standard and unlockable characters) and played plenty of it and I really like it. As I say in the review, if this turns out to be the last DOA game as certain rumour-mongers seem to think it’ll be a loss since this is one of the few fighting franchises that seems to be have any momentum to it’s development. Maybe that’s just because both DOA3 and 4 have come at a time when players are starving for new games on their respective hardware, but they always seem to receive a good reception.

HDTV FTW!!!

Samsung LE26R41B

I finally did it. I just ordered my first ever HDTV, the Samsung LE26R41B. It set me back £616 from Novatech which is a little more than some online stores but this TV seems to have exploded in popularity and they can get it to me this week when everyone else is sold out, so I went for them. I’ve had good experiences with them in the past so let’s hope that they can deliver (literally and figuratively) because I can’t wait for this baby.

Incidentally, if you ever need proof that it’s better to shop online, I saw the same TV in Dixons on Saturday for over £200 more. Why they act shocked that more and more people are starting to buy things over the Internet I have no idea.

It’s a bigger version of the ones on the Xbox 360 demo pods so I’ve been able to give it a little test for gaming, which is pretty much the application that will make or break an HDTV by showing up any ghosting and stuff like that. Obviously it had to be good for gaming if I’m using it, and since MS chose it to be representative of their new system we can assume that it’s a nice gaming display. It’s hard to get a straight answer on response time but it seem to be 12ms at the most.

Specs-wise, they haven’t skipped on them here considering the relatively low price. Most importantly for future use it has an HDMI input which means I’ll be able to view HD DVD and Blu-ray in high definition (they’ll only output 480p over component) and play the PS3 over a digital connection whenever that turns up. It also has all the legacy connections like component, VGA, SCART (x2), composite, S-video, etc, and a resolution of 1366×768. I checked some impressions and non-HD sources are handled without any lag from upscaling, so retro consoles are playable on it.

So now I have a great DVD player, a great TV, a console that can show it off, and a shitty 5.1 system. Whatever should I buy next?

Dead or Alive 4

Just a quick post to let my fellow UK 360 owners who are starving for a new game that the US version of Dead or Alive 4 is following the current trend for third-party games and is multiregion, so you can import and run it on your PAL system without a problem.

I got my copy today and it’s seriously impressive and probably the best looking game on the system so far, although the Fight Night Round 3 demo which is on the Live Marketplace at the moment gives it a run for its money there. I’m starting to find that the games and demos trickling out are already showing some real next-generation visuals, and I can’t wait to see what tricks they’ve got ready for E3. Just look at some of the screenshots of DOA4 and imagine them running a 60fps with all kinds of interactive background trickery going on.

I’ll probably write some proper impressions when I’ve spent some more time with the game.

Highbury for Sale

This is pretty big news for the UK games magazine industry – Highbury House Communications, the parent company of Highbury Entertainment (of GamesTM, Play, etc) is now up for sale having had its shares delisted and announcing that it’s £31 million in debt.

You probably won’t remember that Future Publishing was looking at buying them back in April 2005 (I talked about it here) so I’m sure that’ll happen now. The OFT might not have been happy before but a monopoly is preferable to a few thousand people being out of jobs, and now that Uncooked Media and Imagine Publishing are on the scene it might have even been allowed anyway.

The annoying this is that Highbury Entertainment is very profitable, but thanks to the parent company’s insistence on publishing an endless stream of cross-stitching and health magazines the whole thing’s in trouble. Hopefully it makes it through because there are some good guys and decent magazines there.

Speak of the Devil…

…and he shall appear.

I should have guessed that they’d announce an HD-DVD drive for the 360 the day after I went into a rant on the subject, but I’m still trying to work out how it’s going to work. Considering how slow USB hard drives are in my experience I didn’t think that a USB HD-DVD drive would be able to smoothly stream high definition video, but unless they’re doing something that I didn’t even think of I guess I was wrong.

The far more interesting news for me is the other announcement in that news story that Street Fighter II is coming to the Live Arcade. Capcom have some of the best arcade games ever made in their resume and the almighty SF2 (in HD, don’t forget) could only be the beginning. Even their retro console games like the Mega Man and Breath of Fire series would make great downloads for a few hundred points. Just look at this list and begin salivating…

HD-DVD or Blu-ray?

With CES going on in Las Vegas at the moment all the news about the next-generation DVD formats is starting to come out and the whole debate over whether the “official” format, HD-DVD, will triumph over the technically superior upstart, Blu-Ray. The last thing anyone really wants is a format war, especially when the early players are so fucking expensive.

I’m a huge DVD buff so I’ve been following this whole thing pretty much since the beginning and know the relative benefits of each format (the respective Wikipedia entries here and here are a good starting point), and really hope that a compromise can eventually be reached because a format war will do nobody any good, but it’s impossible to guess which one of the formats will win out.

The most obvious comparison is VHS against Betamax, in which the technically superior Betamax was beaten out by VHS in the race to revolutionise home entertainment. That shows that even if Blu-Ray is superior in many ways (storage space for a start: 54GB and up compared to 30-45GB) it’s not going to ensure a victory. It could be argued that any technical superiority is made irrelevant by the fact that HD-DVD carries the familiar DVD name which BR won’t be able to use, and to a consumer who dislikes jargon and prefers recognisable names that’s an important coup.

What could make or break them is hardware support, and although much has been made of the PS3’s ability to play back BD-ROMs (obvious comparisons to the PS2’s place in cementing DVD as a mainstream format should be made) you can’t ignore that Microsoft are firmly behind HD-DVD. Even if the Xbox 360 doesn’t have HD-DVD compatibility, Windows is more ubiquitous than even the almighty PlayStation and if they sneak it into homes via the growing HTPC market that’s just as much a trojan horse as the PS3.

Part of me wants HD-DVD to win out for the simple reason that I’m all for standards, and Blu-Ray is another attempt by Sony to establish their own, often overpriced, standard when the current one doesn’t suit them. We’ve seen it so many times – Betamax, Memory Stick, DVD+RW, UMD, MiniDisc, ATRAC, etc – and it just locks people into Sony hardware, undermines standards, and confuses the average consumer.

Coexistence is a possibility like with DVD-RW and DVD+RW which seem to have established some form of equilibrium, but I don’t think anybody thinks that it would be a better solution than one unified standard with all movies on it. Our best hope is just that a compromise is still possible or, if a format war does happen, that it doesn’t undo all the good work that DVD has done in bringing home entertainment into the digital age.