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BDs and DVDs I bought or received in the month of July

11:59 PM / Blu-ray / DVD / 2 Comments

• Sunday, July 4, 2010: TRUE BLOOD: THE COMPLETE SECOND SEASON (BD, Region ABC, UK) [birthday present]
• Sunday, July 4, 2010: THE BOX (BD, Region B, UK) [birthday present]
• Sunday, July 4, 2010: FIGHT CLUB (BD, Region ABC, UK) [birthday present]
• Monday, July 19, 2010: AFTER.LIFE (BD, Region A, USA)
• Monday, July 19, 2010: WAKING THE DEAD: THE COMPLETE SERIES EIGHT (DVD, Region 2, UK)
• Wednesday, July 21, 2010: WAKING THE DEAD: THE COMPLETE SERIES SEVEN (DVD, Region 2, UK)

Films I saw for the first time in the month of July

11:59 PM / Cinema / No Comments

• Sunday, July 4, 2010: THE BOX (USA, 2009) 7/10
• Monday, July 5, 2010: FOR YOUR EYES ONLY (UK/USA, 1981) 6/10
• Wednesday, July 7, 2010: THE NUMBER 23 (USA, 2007) 6/10
• Friday, July 9, 2010: 36 (France, 2004) 6/10
• Sunday, July 11, 2010: BURN AFTER READING (USA/UK/France, 2008) 9/10
• Friday, July 16, 2010: THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNETS' NEST (Sweden/Denmark/Germany, 2009) 7/10
• Monday, July 19, 2010: TOY STORY 3 (USA, 2010) 9/10
• Thursday, July 22, 2010: AFTER.LIFE (USA, 2009) 6/10

Well worth the wait

8:26 PM / Games / 6 Comments

So, STARCRAFT II, huh? Would you believe it's great?

The last time I waited for a sequel that took forever to materialise, it was Dario Argento's MOTHER OF TEARS, a film which bore little resemblance to its predecessors, SUSPIRIA and INFERNO and, despite not being wholly without merit, was something of a disappointment. STARCRAFT II's twelve-year gestation period is small fry compared to MOTHER OF TEARS' twenty-seven, but in the world of computer games, where yearly sequels are all too common (Electronic Arts, I'm lookin' at you), over a decade is practically unheard of. The original STARCRAFT is justifiably regarded as one of the best of its class, if not THE best, and it's basically the unofficial national sport of South Korea, so developer Blizzard Entertainment obviously had a lot riding on it. If they screwed it up, I doubt they'd ever have heard the end of it.

Not that that was ever seriously going to happen. Blizzard is a developer with the luxury of being able to spend almost infinite time and resources on its games, and in the past has been more than willing to pull the plug on a title completely rather than release a subpar product (see WARCRAFT ADVENTURES and STARCRAFT: GHOST). In that regard I liken them to the Pixar of the computer games business (which presumably makes their bedfellows at Activision the equivalent of DreamWorks). STARCRAFT II has taken this long to arrive primarily because of the developer's commitment to quality: with so much riding on it, there was no way they were going to release anything short of perfection.

And what perfection it is! In terms of overall presentation, I don't think I've ever seen this much polish in a game before. Every single element - from the intricate, stage by stage construction of the Terran's mechanical structures to the rivets on the intricately designed main menu screen - looks like hundreds of man hours went into its making. Even if the underlying gameplay mechanics weren't so thoroughly awesome, the game would at least deserve some sort of award for its surface gloss. This truly represents big budget game development at its very best.

I've already discussed the core game mechanics at length in my earlier posts on the beta, so I won't delve into them too much today. Instead, I want to talk about the elements that weren't included in the beta - namely the single player campaign and of course the obligatory Collector's Edition. I ordered the US version of the latter, although given the game's current region-locked status (a sticking point that has been promised to be remedied within the next few months) and my desire to get the thing up and running on Day 1, I ended up also ordering the EU digital download version direct from Blizzard's online store (they were all sold out of analogue downloads, unfortunately ;)).

Contents: behind the scenes DVD, soundtrack CD, hardcover art book, STARCRAFT comic issue #0, exclusive avatars and in-game skin for the "Thor" unit, exclusive WORLD OF WARCRAFT pet, the original STARCRAFT and BROOD WAR expansion on a dog-tag style USB stick... and, of course, the game itself. Personally, I think that's a heck of a lot of material for £70, although if none of that takes your fancy, there's also the standard game for around half the price.

So, on to the game. Once I'd activated my copy (which basically means tying the provided game key to your Battle.net account), my first step was to dive straight into the single player campaign. STARCRAFT II is very much a game of two halves, and while the multiplayer component was thoroughly tested and reported on over the course of the online beta, considerably less information was available about the campaign, which wasn't available for testing. Blizzard were on the receiving end of no small amount of flak when they announced, a couple of years ago, that rather than continue with the regular STARCRAFT format of including around ten missions for each race for a total of 30, they would be splitting STARCRAFT II into three instalments, with the first focusing exclusively on the Terrans and the two expansion sets (currently in the pipeline) dealing with the Zerg and Protoss respectively. A lot of people cried "rip-off", claiming that Blizzard was charging people three times for a single game. Not so. Having completed the single player campaign over the course of a couple of day-long marathon sessions, I never felt like I'd been sold an incomplete product. WINGS OF LIBERTY is undoubtedly a fully-featured stand-alone game, and I don't doubt that the next two chapters will simply slot in in much the same manner as BROOD WAR did for the original STARCRAFT. All three races are fully playable in both the single and multiplayer skirmish modes, while restricting the focus to a single faction for the campaign allows for a far more coherent story to be told. (The Protoss, incidentally, do get a look-in in the form of a four-mission mini-story within the main Terran campaign.)

The hero of the campaign is one Jim Raynor, freedom fighter, outlaw and alcoholic. Raynor appeared extensively in the first STACRAFT, albeit in the form of a tiny 40x40 pixels talking head, and it's nice to see him again, even if his appearance has changed dramatically. On that note, it's a very good thing indeed that common sense ultimately prevailed and the original voice actor, Robert Clotworthy, was rehired. It lends the character a sense of continuity not present in his visual depiction. I've come across some degree of criticism of both the character and the manner in which he is written, most notably at Rock, Paper, Shotgun, where the cut-scenes, dialogue and characters are described as "bloody awful", but personally I'm not convinced. Raynor is admittedly an archetype, packaging virtually every sci-fi and western cliché known to man into one character, but in my opinion that's simply how Blizzard approaches its storytelling, and anyone claiming their previous games to have offered anything different is guilty of looking at them through rose-tinted glasses. STARCRAFT II's narrative and characterisation aren't exactly subtle, but they get the point across, and the voice acting and animation are, on the whole, pretty damn good for a computer game. True, put them beside MASS EFFECT 2 and they begin to look a little clunky, but that's hardly a fair comparison since MASS EFFECT 2 pretty much represents the pinnacle of animated acting in a video game. STARCRAFT II's numerous in-game FMVs (referred to by Blizzard as "cinematics", a word which sets my teeth on edge almost as much as "animations") are nicely staged, lit and acted, and go a long way towards bridging the massive gulf between Blizzard's infamous near-photo-realistic pre-rendered FMVs and the deliberately colourful, exaggerated nature of the in-game, top-down graphics.

Above: in-game FMV. Below: pre-rendered FMV.

Storytelling may be Bioware's forte, but Blizzard have come a long way since the basic "scrolling text with narration" delivery of the first two WARCRAFT games and indeed the "talking heads" mission briefings of the original STARCRAFT. Through the in-game FMVs and the point-and-click adventure stylings of the inter-mission segments, set aboard Raynor's battleship, the Hyperion, they convey a world rich with elaborate detail and allow the players to get as much or as little out of the story as they want. Those who want to explore every nook and cranny and click till the sun comes up, while those who just want to get on with the next mission are equally well-served. Of course, taking your time and examining every possible avenue provides a much richer experience than simply barrelling through the missions and skipping all the dialogue, but each to their own. Still, it's clear that the campaign is designed provide a vastly different experience to the multiplayer component - one in which the player is rewarded for taking his or her time and becoming immersed in the game world rather than cranking out units and steamrolling the opposition as quickly as possible. It ultimately pays off, and even if the characters remain broad archetypes rather than fully-fledged, believable individuals, and I was able to invest in the key characters of Raynor and Kerrigan to the extent that the ending (which I'm not going to give away here) manages to be genuinely emotionally affecting in a way that I don't recall any of Blizzard's previous games being.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the Hyperion segments, however, is the possibilities it affords players to customise their army and the technology at their disposal. By collecting Protoss and Zerg artefacts in the missions, the player adds points to two separate upgrade paths, each of which provides an either/or choice of which technology to purchase every five points. For instance, after obtaining 15 points in Zerg technology, you can choose to either unlock the Predator, an anti-infantry unit, or the Hercules, a massive transport unit. Credits earned by completing missions, meanwhile, allow you to outfit your units with a variety of upgrades. You won't earn enough credits to unlock every single upgrade during the course of a single game, however, so some difficult decisions have to be made. Credits can also be used to hire various mercenary groups - more powerful versions of regular units who can be called down instantaneously 2-3 times per mission. Finally, on three separate occasions the player is provided with a choice between two different missions, the results of which directly affect your future progress (i.e. by providing you with access to one piece of technology rather than another, or ensuring that you face a different line-up of enemies in a subsequent mission). The ramifications of these choices are far from world-changing, but they do a good job of adding a bit of variety, and I found myself wishing more use had been made of this feature.

Above: point-and-click adventure fun aboard the Hyperion.

Ultimately, though, all this detail is merely in service to the gameplay, which doesn't disappoint. In recent years, Blizzard have placed a far greater emphasis on technology than they did in the past (when DIABLO II was released in 2000, its 640x480 2D graphics were seen as positively archaic), but they haven't done so at the expense of what really matters: whether or not it's fun to play. And it's been well worth the wait.

PS: It's also worth pointing out that, although an internet connection is required to activate the game (something I generally don't approve of), this is a one-off and it is completely feasible for solo players who don't have a persistent internet connection to play the game's offline mode (called "guest mode"). This of course denies you access to any form of multiplayer mode given Blizzard's decision to remove LAN support (boo, hiss). It also means that you won't be able to earn achievements, but beyond being denied the bragging rights of collecting these shiny medals for killing a thousand Zerglings and so on, you still get the fully functional single player experience. Myself, I decided to play online to test the waters (and because I'm slowly becoming addicted to the pursuit of achievements), and I'm happy to report that I haven't had any problems. Unlike the problematic launches of DIABLO II and WORLD OF WARCRAFT, Blizzard's server infrastructure this time round seems to have been up to snuff, and I've yet to encounter a disconnect. (Either that, or I've just been uncharacteristically lucky.) Additionally, if you're playing a single player mission and your connection drops, you won't be kicked out of the game à la COMMAND & CONQUER 4 or ASSASSIN'S CREED 2. You can continue to play, with your progress being saved to your hard drive and resynced with your online profile the next time you connect.

Can't talk...

8:23 PM / Games / No Comments

...playing STARCRAFT II.

Not long to go...

1:27 PM / Games / 1 Comment

I've waited twelve years for this. I think I'll be able to handle another twelve hours.

BD impressions: After.Life

11:49 PM / BD Impressions / 5 Comments

No, I don't know why there's a full stop in the title either.

AFTER.LIFE attracted me with its interesting premise: a young woman, supposedly killed in a car accident, wakes up on mortuary slab and is informed by the funeral director that she is dead. She denies it - how can she be dead when she's here talking to him? - but he is insistent and tells her she must stop denying to herself what has happened. So what's going on? Is she actually dead and in some sort of afterlife/state of limbo, or is she the victim of an extremely twisted psychotic?

Unfortunately, we don't really get a whole lot of answers, and the few that we do get tend to contradict each other. In this, her feature debut, director/writer Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo conjures up some unsettling imagery and clearly has an eye for an interesting composition, but does little to exploit the coolness of the premise, and leaves you feeling that the numerous scenes featuring that yuppie from the "I'm a PC/I'm a Mac" commercials trying to get to the bottom of what happened to his girlfriend are basically just there to pad the running time. Liam Neeson is suitably creepy as the funeral director, but you can tell he's just cashing a cheque, while Christina Ricci seems to have been cast primarily due to her willingness to do copious (and I mean copious) amounts of nudity rather than because she can bring anything profound to the character. It's not a bad film as much as one that is more interesting on paper than it is in execution.

Image quality: Pretty underwhelming, to be honest. The grain looks rather clumpy and there are numerous shots in which facial textures take on a mushy, smeary look, suggesting (perhaps selective?) grain reduction (see especially Example 11). It's basically watchable, but I can't say it wowed me at any stage, and in fact for most of its duration I found myself thinking of underwhelming Warner offerings such as KISS KISS, BANG BANG. 7/10

After.Life
studio: Anchor Bay; country: USA; region code: A; codec: AVC;
file size: 18.5 GB; average bit rate (including audio): 25.83 Mbit/sec

Just arrived...

6:22 PM / DVD / No Comments

WAKING THE DEAD: THE COMPLETE SERIES SEVEN (DVD, 2 Entertain, Region 2, UK)

Spazzing out over morons

12:48 PM / Cinema / 8 Comments

You couldn't make this up. Mere weeks after passing Dario Argento's INFERNO uncut for the first time, the British Board of Film Censors have gone on what can only be described as a political correctness rampage (and I normally hate the phrase "political correctness", particularly when followed with "gone mad"), removing "offensive" words from children's films. The word "moron" was excised from the PG-rated ADVENTURES OF A TEENAGE DRAGONSLAYER, while the U-rated MARMADUKE has had the word "spaz" snipped out. In both cases, the distributor was offered an uncut "12" rating but chose to make the cuts in order to achieve a rating more in tune with the target audience's age.

It's worth pointing out that, under this new policy, the following films would all be censored: HOME ALONE, PROBLEM CHILD 1 and 2, THE IRON GIANT, the live action 101 DALMATIANS (already heavily butchered by the BBFC to remove several instances of the word "bloody"), THE PRINCESS BRIDE, multiple episodes of REN & STIMPY and THE SIMPSONS... I'm sure you can name plenty more.

Of course, "spaz" has always had a different history on either side of the Atlantic, with what is generally seen as a minor insult in the US having far more offensive connotations in the UK. Not that I agree with censorship like this at all, but I'm actually slightly surprised they didn't clamp down on it sooner. "Moron", though... seriously, guys? By requiring a "12" rating, that word has essentially been elevated to the same level of severity as "fuck". Think about that for a moment.

Why not let the BBFC know exactly what you think of their childish behaviour?

Just arrived...

10:48 AM / Blu-ray / DVD / No Comments

AFTER.LIFE (BD, Anchor Bay, Region A, USA)

WAKING THE DEAD: THE COMPLETE SERIES EIGHT (DVD, 2 Entertain, Region 2, UK)

BD impressions: Luftslottet som sprengtes

8:14 PM / BD Impressions / 2 Comments

...a.k.a. LUFTSLOTTET SOM SPRÄNGDES, a.k.a THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNETS' NEST. See here for my review of the film. To summarise:

I came away from THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNETS' NEST thinking it the weakest of the three novels. Conversely, I felt that THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE was the strongest on the page and the least impressive on the screen. Thanks to its slick production values and clarity of purpose, THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO remains, by a considerable margin, the best of the three adaptations, but director Daniel Alfredson has done a decent job of translating books two and three to the screen in spite of the limited resources at his disposal. I have a feeling that David Fincher, if he chooses to adapt the entire trilogy for the US market, will wipe the floor with Alfredson's take on the second and third instalments - at least in terms of visual panache - but at the same time there's something quirky, honest and altogether European about all three films that I doubt even a filmmaker of Fincher's calibre will be able to match. And, at the risk of flogging a dead horse, let me state, for the record, that no-one can replace Noomi Rapace.

Image quality: I was distinctly disappointed by the image quality of the BD release of THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE. To put it bluntly, the encoding sucked. Okay, so the grubby 16mm photography, a lot of it handheld, was always going to be a challenge to compress, but there was no excuse for some of the mush that made it into that encode. I had hoped that THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNETS' NEST, presented on a BD-50 instead of a BD-25, would fare better, and to be fair the encoding is an improvement on that of the previous disc, but there are some instances in which is screws up so badly that it obliterates any chance it might have had of scoring higher. There tends to be severe blocking in the shadows, and in a handful of scenes the heavy grain simply disintegrates into soup (see Example 17 and Example 18). On the whole it's a satisfactory transfer, but the weaker moments threaten to derail it completely. 7/10

Luftslottet som sprengtes
studio: Nordisk Film; country: Norway; region code: ABC; codec: AVC;
file size: 31.5 GB; average bit rate (including audio): 30.81 Mbit/sec

A few thoughts on The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest

8:01 PM / Cinema / No Comments

I don't envy those faced with adapting the third and final instalment in Stieg Larsson's posthumously published Millennium trilogy, THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE NORTNETS' NEST. The novel is extremely discursive, the dramatic tension is often lacking, and the heroine, Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), spends a good three-quarters of the narrative confined to a hospital bed under police guard. It works to an extent on the page but has the potential to be death on the screen. It's therefore something of a relief to be able to report that writers Jonas Frykberg and Ulf Ryberg have succeeded in sidestepping many of the issues that plagued Larsson's novel and have delivered a screenplay that is both more streamlined and considerably more tense than the source material.

As with the novel, the film picks up from the moment where its predecessor, THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE, left off, and teases out the final chapters in the Lisbeth Salander story that began when, at the age of twelve, she was committed to a psychiatric facility under false pretences in order to protect a valuable asset - her father, Soviet defector Alexander Zalachenko - from exposure. Although no longer suspected of the three murders that framed the previous film, Salander now faces a raft of new charges, including the attempted murder of Zalachenko. Initially, the primary concern is with the bullet lodged in her skull, but once it is clear that her recovery is not in any doubt, it falls to unlikely accomplice Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyquist) to uncover the suppressed truth behind the Zalachenko affair, dodge the bullets aimed his way by an increasingly desperate rogue offshoot of the security service, and provide the marginalised Salander with the chance to finally attain the justice that has been denied to her for her entire life.

Like the previous film, THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNETS' NEST is low budget and obviously made with television in mind. The conspiracy narrative, however, serves the pared-down visual style better than the somewhat more action-oriented nature of THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE, and gives less of a sense that the movie is trying to be something that it's not. Like the book, the film is largely static, with a small handful of action scenes punctuating a lot of very dialogue-driven material. However, by abridging, eliminating and re-ordering the narrative, the writers succeed in giving the film the sense of uncertainty that the novel sorely lacked. As written by Larsson, the outcome was in little doubt, and the stakes seemed strangely low thanks to the fact that all the cards were effectively laid on the table at the beginning, with all the evidence Blomkvist and co. needed to annihilate their opponents readily available long before Salander's trial got underway. For fear of giving too much away I won't go into precisely what changes are made, but suffice it to say that if the book had played out in a manner closer to the film - or if I'd watched the film before reading the book - I wouldn't have gone through the whole thing with a feeling that I knew exactly how everything was going to turn out.

With Rapace confined to a hospital bed for the bulk of the running time, Nyquist ends up having to carry the film to a far greater extent than the previous instalments, and he does rise to the challenge, although he remains a rather wooden and expressionless lead. In a way, it's hard not to feel sorry for him, because despite his character doing most of the legwork in all three films, it's Rapace who has received the bulk of the attention - particularly in the English-speaking world, where all three instalments bear the prefix "The Girl..." (in the original Swedish, only the second part uses this naming convention). Blomkvist's associates, Erika Berger (Lena Endre) and Christer Malm (Jacob Ericksson), also play far more significant roles than in the previous two films, with the latter benefiting from an exploration of his and co-worker Malin Erikson (Sofia Ledarp)'s reservations about the course of action pursued by Blomkvist (in the novel, everyone is more or less accepting and in admiration of everything Blomkvist does, a manifestation of the character's role as an idealised representation of the author himself). Speaking of Berger, the film's writers have wisely dropped the novel's seemingly irrelevant subplot involving her giving up her position at Millennium to work for a rival publication, integrating its strongest thematic element (the attempts to blackmail and terrorise her) into the main narrative. As a whole, the film feels far more cohesive than the book.

It's all about Rapace, though, and she proves that it's possible to be incredibly compelling even when lying in a hospital bed and staring into space. Her greatest asset is undoubtedly her ability to convey pages' worth of material with a single subtle change to her facial expression, and she repeatedly puts this skill to good use. Salander doesn't say a lot and this, coupled with her largely stationary role, means that she runs the risk of being submerged by the events around her, but because Rapace is so good, and because Salander remains such an iconic character, this doesn't happen. That said, even if Rapace wasn't such a good actor, it would still be pretty hard to forget anyone who turns up to her own murder trial in full goth regalia (would all those sharp spikes even be allowed in a courtroom?).

I came away from THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNETS' NEST thinking it the weakest of the three novels. Conversely, I felt that THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE was the strongest on the page and the least impressive on the screen. Thanks to its slick production values and clarity of purpose, THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO remains, by a considerable margin, the best of the three adaptations, but director Daniel Alfredson has done a decent job of translating books two and three to the screen in spite of the limited resources at his disposal. I have a feeling that David Fincher, if he chooses to adapt the entire trilogy for the US market, will wipe the floor with Alfredson's take on the second and third instalments - at least in terms of visual panache - but at the same time there's something quirky, honest and altogether European about all three films that I doubt even a filmmaker of Fincher's calibre will be able to match. And, at the risk of flogging a dead horse, let me state, for the record, that no-one can replace Noomi Rapace. 7.5/10

At my signal, unleash detail

1:27 PM / Blu-ray / 12 Comments

It looks as if the GLADIATOR BD tale of woe is finally coming to an end. Screen captures have materialised of the 10th Anniversary Edition released in the Netherlands, and it seems fair to say that the previous, substandard release has well and truly had its backside handed to it. Several comparative captures of the old and new versions have been posted at Dutch forum dvd.nl by user Freaky, and while they are not exact frame matches, the differences are blatantly apparent: gone is the softness, ringing, grain reduction and DVNR artefacts. Actually, I'd go as far as to say that the new release looks stunning enough to potentially hold its own against BRAVEHEART, which, when released on the same day as the previous release by the same studio, absolutely decimated its younger counterpart.

A couple of crops for your viewing pleasure (follow the link above for the full images):

(It's worth pointing out that the colour palette differs in some instances, with the new version looking a little more saturated. I can't claim with any certainty to know which one - if either - is "correct", but in any event the clear improvements to every aspect of the film with the new edition make it the one to go for regardless. Please also ignore the artefacting in the second new capture - it came from a heavily compressed JPEG source. I included it to illustrate the absence of DVNR artefacts.)

This is vindication for all those of us who stamped our feet and complained about the previous release, who did what we could to spread the word, who refused to listen to the naysayers who claimed this film would never look any better (including one supposed industry insider who shall remain nameless who told us to stop complaining and either sit further away from our screens or find a new hobby).

Now I just need to find somewhere that's stocking the damn thing.

Updated Saturday, July 17, 2010 at 01:32 PM: More captures of the new edition have appeared at the AV Science Forum.

Mass Dragon Age Effect

6:13 PM / Games / No Comments

The other day I finished the DRAGON AGE: ORIGINS expansion that I got for my birthday, DRAGON AGE: AWAKENING. I had fun with it, but wouldn't call it particularly in-depth or eye-opening. It felt more like a postscript to the original game rather than an actual continuation of its story. Barring the fact that you could choose to import an existing DRAGON AGE character (or alternatively create a new level 20 one from scratch), it might as well have been a stand-alone product.

Still, imagine my excitement when I quit the game only to discover that DRAGON AGE II had just been announced. Talk about percipient timing! There's not a massive amount of information available about DRAGON AGE II yet, barring a rundown of a few of the key features, some artwork and a handful of off-the-cuff comments from Bioware employees on the official forums, but it seems pretty clear that the developers are intent on shaking things up with the sequel. Or, as Rock, Paper, Shotgun puts it, "Mass-Effectification". In other words, DRAGON AGE II is appropriating a number of key features from Bioware's concurrent MASS EFFECT series of games, perhaps most notably a fixed protagonist, whose appearance, class and gender can be altered but who has a fixed back-story, voice and personality.

Bioware's reasoning behind this is clear: to enable them to deliver a more "cinematic" gameplay experience. "Cinematic" is a word that tends to be overused in relation to describing computer games (also overused are various stylistic techniques that the designers assume are cinematic but in reality are nothing more than third-rate, third-generation knock-offs of shots or moments they liked in the latest summer blockbuster), but it absolutely applies to the MASS EFFECT games. At times they do genuinely feel like interactive movies with their dramatic camera angles, fully vocalised dialogue and even the occasional subtle facial gesture. They succeed in doing this primarily because of their limited cast of characters and, just as significantly, the limited options for the customisation of said characters. Yes, you can give your Commander Shepard a snazzy haircut and you can choose which set of genitals are concealed under that spacesuit, and you can choose how to respond to certain situations, but you're ultimately playing a prefabricated character that you get to tweak rather than define.

The original DRAGON AGE took an entirely different approach. Although your character came from one of a selection of pre-determined "origins", they were essentially a blank slate that you could define as you saw fit. Male, female, human, dwarf, elf, noble, commoner, warrior, mage... the number of combinations was impressive, and there were plenty of opportunities for you to shape the character, his/her relationships and the world at large. All this, however, came at the cost of immersion. Because the world of DRAGON AGE is so large and densely populated, there is a considerable amount of repetition among its inhabitants. You'll see the same generic haircuts, outfits and animation cycles being repeated constantly, and if you're not careful it's possible to design a player character who is virtually indistinguishable from one of your sidekicks (my first PC, a female elven mage, unintentionally turned out to be a dead ringer for the human rogue Leliana). NPC dialogue is fully voiced but, because of the quantity of different responses at your disposal, your own character's voice is never heard during cut-scenes or conversations. Hell, no-one even refers to your character by name due to the fact that you create that for yourself. The characters of MASS EFFECT actually do a passable job of resembling real people. The characters in DRAGON AGE talk, move and look like mannequins.

DRAGON AGE: Is it just me or do these people seem kinda DEAD?

MASS EFFECT 2: which of the above seems more cinematic?

That in itself is not necessarily a huge problem. The two series had different goals. MASS EFFECT's was to tell an immersive cinematic story, and it did so at the expense of player freedom. DRAGON AGE's was to provide the player with a sprawling world in which they could affect real change, explore every nook and cranny and engage in conversation with hundreds of different characters. It, however, did so at the expense of both immersion and visual realism. Both have their strengths and weaknesses and I like both a great deal, but ultimately I'm one of those people who, despite a preference for the combat mechanics of DRAGON AGE, actually found myself drawn into the world of MASS EFFECT more and ended up caring far more about its characters than the lifeless puppets of DRAGON AGE and their limited array of shared animation cycles.

A lot of other people, however, are up in arms. They liked the fact that you could play a human, a dwarf or an elf in the original DRAGON AGE. They liked the fact that you could give them a name of their choosing. They liked the fact that they could select from a variety of origins and continue to define the character through their ensuing deeds. I liked it too, and I think Bioware were justifiably proud of the level of player choice they allowed - the "origins" system was, after all, one of the major selling points in their promotion of the game. To renege on all of this for the sequel, railroading players into a character with a fixed name, origin and race, might seem like a regression. As much as I liked the freedom DRAGON AGE provided, however, I can't help thinking it would have worked better if they'd kept the combat mechanics but taken a more MASS EFFECT-like approach to characterisation. It seems that I may well be getting my wish.

In case you're not convinced, allow me to remind you of the PC RPG scene's glory days in the late 90s/early 00s. Back then, Bioware and publishing/development partner Black Isle Studios created a variety of games based around the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons rules system and Bioware's Infinity engine: BALDUR'S GATE I and II, ICEWIND DALE I and II, and PLANESCAPE: TORMENT. Although using almost identical mechanics (and, in the case of BALDUR'S GATE and ICEWIND DALE, artwork), they covered a wide range of different play styles, from the no-nonsense dungeon crawling of ICEWIND DALE to the primarily dialogue-driven PLANESCAPE: TORMENT, with BALDUR'S GATE effectively occupying the middle ground. ICEWIND DALE allowed you to create a party of six "blank slate" characters from scratch. In BALDUR'S GATE, you created a "blank slate" player character, but everyone else you met was pre-fabricated and fully-fleshed out, à la DRAGON AGE. In ICEWIND DALE, everyone, including the PC, we pre-fabricated. Which of the above is widely considered to have provided the most satisfying, immersive narrative? (Clue: it wasn't ICEWIND DALE.)

PS: excellent summary of the currently known facts about DRAGON AGE II: http://greywardens.com/dragon-age-2-facts/

Book review: The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest

2:46 PM / Reviews / 1 Comment

Two things are clear about the final published instalment in Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy, THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNETS' NEST. First: that while the first part, THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO, functioned adequately as a standalone novel, HORNETS' NEST and its predecessor, THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE, must be taken as an interwoven pair. Second: that, had he not died so prematurely, Larsson would undoubtedly have continued the series.

With Larsson deceased and the legal rights to the series (seemingly including a partial draft of the fourth novel, currently in the hands of his long-term partner, who was shut out of the publishing deal by Larsson's brother and father when they inherited his estate) a contentious mess, it seems pointless to speculate about there being any future instalments any time soon, meaning that a series that was never intended to be a trilogy must now be taken as such. This is a frustrating situation, because it means that a novel that in many ways feels like a mere stepping stone on a much larger journey now has to serve as the concluding instalment, which it admittedly does to some extent in terms of the Lisbeth Salander storyline. At the same time, though, a number of loose ends remain, perhaps most notably a lengthy subplot involving Blomkvist's colleague and on-off lover Erika Berger taking a job with a rival publication and being subjected to a campaign of terror perpetrated by a sadistic stalker. This storyline, which runs for a good two-thirds of the book before being resolved, has no real bearing on the main thread (the Salander/Zalachenko business) and I wouldn't be surprised if the makers of the film adaptation excised it completely (I haven't seen the film yet, so I'm only guessing). In the context of a much longer series of books, however, I'm sure it was intended to serve as the setup for some broader arc that will now never be revealed.

The plot picks up from where THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE ended, so if you don't want to know how that book turned out, stop reading NOW.

* SPOILERS FOR THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE *

Lisbeth Salander and her estranged father, Soviet defector Alexander Zalachenko, are rushed to hospital in the aftermath of the carnage that ensued at Gosseberga, Zalachenko grievously wounded by Salander and Salander with a bullet fired by Zalachenko embedded in her skull. The charges against Salander are numerous and, assuming she survives the injury that by rights should have killed her immediately, she is at the very least looking at a lengthy stretch behind bars for attempted murder. That Salander went to Gosseberga to kill her father is in little doubt as far as the reader is concerned. However, the events of the previous two novels have repeatedly demonstrated that Salander, from a very young age, has been a victim of judicial injustice, part of a concerted cover-up by a rogue off-shoot of the security service who deemed protecting their asset, Zalachenko, more important than Salander's well-being (it's a long story). The dice are loaded, and they don't favour Salander. If she's to get out of this, she and her ragtag allies are going to have to be every bit as unscrupulous as the men who want to lock her away for good.

This is the perfect setup for a tense and gripping story. Unfortunately, Larsson makes the same mistake he made in THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE, which is that he never gives us any real reason to fear for Salander. In the previous novel, her seemingly superhuman ability to avoid detection ensured that we never really believed the police would catch her. Here, Salander is so calm and collected and has so many aces up her sleeve that the same applies. The "one woman against the state" theme is also undercut by the sheer number of people she has fighting her corner. For someone who has repeatedly been set up as an outsider who has been betrayed at every turn, it's rather amazing how many people will risk their careers, reputations and in some cases lives for her. Once this becomes clear, we essentially spend 500-odd pages waiting for the inevitable to happen, with Larsson nailing his political colours to the mast and leaving the reader in no doubt as to the point he is trying to make:

"...When it comes down to it, this story is not primarily about spies and secret government agencies; it's about violence against women, and the men who enable it."

That's not a quotation from an introduction or review of the book, by the way. It's an actually line of dialogue spoken by one character to another. Subtlety is to Larsson what fairness and balance are to Fox News. And yet...

...and yet I couldn't put the book down. THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNETS' NEST is a frustrating read, more satisfying for its individual components than when taken as a whole. As with the previous novels, it's easy to pick holes in the storytelling, to make fun of the wooden dialogue and soapbox-style posturing, to point to all the sections that could have been deleted without anyone missing them in order to get the thing down to a more manageable length. But when you're staying up till four in the morning, turning each page with unabashed impatience and salivating for the next plot turn (even though you can guess well in advance what it will be), who the hell cares? The Millennium trilogy is quite rightly described as a literary phenomenon, and there can be nothing more phenomenal about it than the fact that so many millions of people around the world have embraced these three rambling, quirky and at times downright clumsy Swedish doorstops.

And yes, I was ultimately satisfied. The Salander storyline reaches its conclusion and a line can finally be drawn under nearly three decades of uncertainty and injustice. Ancillary though it is, the Berger subplot is also interesting in its own right and feels as if it came from a very real place (because of Larsson's tireless investigation of extreme right-wing groups, he himself had good reason to fear for his life, and it's not hard to see parallels between Berger's situation and his own). There's a certain dissonance to the novel as a whole, and if you go into it expecting it to neatly wrap up every thread introduced in the two previous novels, you are likely to be sorely disappointed. However, if you approach it with an awareness of its faults and an appreciation for what Larsson was trying to do, however clumsily, I suspect that, like me, you'll be deeply sorry to bid farewell to Lisbeth Salander, the world's first Asperger-suffering, photographic memory-imbued, bisexual goth computer hacker and crusader for justice.

I know who you are

6:28 PM / Games / Web / 5 Comments

In the time since I last posted about STARCRAFT II: WINGS OF LIBERTY, my most anticipated game of the year, the beta has been taken offline and brought back for a final brief round of testing, an actual release date has been announced (July 27th), and developer Blizzard Entertainment has announced and swiftly retracted plans to force all users to display their real first and last name when posting on their forums. The whole thing seems rather moot now that Blizzard has climbed down in the face of an outpouring of public wrath, but I'd like to say a few words about it anyway since it touches on a pertinent subject that I don't believe I've ever brought up on this site: privacy.

As you've probably noticed, my real name is visible on this site, as is a picture of my face. Anyone who has met me in real life would have no trouble connecting the site to me if they came across it, and those who know me at all could probably do so even without the headshot, given that the site makes clear what my hobbies are. I personally don't have a problem with this: I could easily post anonymously, giving away nothing personal about myself, but I've chosen not to hide behind a veil of secrecy. To be honest, I'm not entirely sure why, as I don't really have anything in particular to gain from letting the whole world know that I'm a heterosexual white male in my twenties from Glasgow with fairly left-leaning libertarian political views and an addiction to Pepsi Max. Then again, I don't really think I have anything to fear either. While I have clearly defined views that not everyone is going to agree with, I don't consider any of them to be particularly outrageous or likely to cause widespread offence. Dig into the past and you'll probably find that I was at one point a whole lot more blunt and antagonistic, but these days I prefer to take a stance of not saying anything to anyone that I wouldn't happily repeat to their face. (I have been guilty of lapses in the past. For instance, in my BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER reviews, I got pretty accusatory about who I personally held responsible for the episodes and creative decisions I didn't like. I doubt I would make the same mistake today.) Larger entitles, such as DVD and BD publishers, are a whole other matter: if I'm not happy about something, I'll make no bones about it, but I always do my best to stop short of blaming and/or attacking individuals.

Other people, however, are a lot more cagey about their identities - and rightly so. If, for example, you're a gay rights blogger living in Iran, chances are you don't want to broadcast your name, location and face for all to see. Other people, for whom the threat of their identity being discovered is far less life-threatening, can also have valid reasons for not revealing who they really are. Perhaps you don't want the teenagers on Xbox Live to know you're a screaming homosexual, or maybe you don't want the company you work for to know that you've bad-mouthing it online (see the Bastardstones scandal). Or perhaps you simply want to keep your online and offline personas separate, for no other reason than that's the way you like it. That's entirely right and proper. I personally have no problem telling people I run a web site that reviews the image quality of BD releases, but I understand that not only are there valid reasons for remaining anonymous online: you shouldn't NEED a reason.

Which brings us on to Blizzard's Battle.net forums and their plans to lift the veil of secrecy, revealing the real names of everyone posting there. Barring a couple of posts I've made in the STARCRAFT II beta technical support section, I haven't personally been active on the Battle.net forums for years. They were a hive of spam, insults and general stupidity when I last used them circa 2002, and while the situation has improved somewhat in recent years, they still have problems. The logic of the so-called "Real ID", according to Blizzard, was to facilitate better conduct. It might very well have worked. In the past, I've posted on a couple of forums that have required real names rather than nicknames, and have found them to be very civilised. However, that didn't stop one instance of a nasty little shit finding his way to this site and being very uncivilised to me via the comments function. (He never admitted it was him, but his distinctively dreadful grammar and punctuation gave him away.) He dicked around for a couple of days before I eventually blocked his IP address after he made some thinly veiled threat to the tune of knowing where I lived and that he wasn't a million miles away from me. I haven't heard from him since. However, I know from my hosting provider's log that, for a number of weeks, he continued to visit my site with a frequency that bordered on obsessiveness.

I suspect the individual in question was simply a dickhead and an attention-seeker with nothing better to do, but it serves as a good example of the sort of thing you're setting yourself up for when you create an online presence. You can understand, therefore, why so many people were up in arms over Blizzard's Real ID plans. I won't regurgitate all the arguments here, but one of the most persuasive demonstrations of how bad an idea this could be comes in the form of this screenshot of a forum discussion relating to the announcement. Fair enough if you create a forum that requires users to display their real name AND make this clear from the outset. That way, people who don't feel comfortable revealing their true identity can simply look elsewhere for their forum fix. However, to apply it retroactively to a board on which people were previously able to hide behind nicknames, and to essentially tell players "you won't get online technical support for our games unless you consent to your identity being broadcast to the whole world", is a step too far.

To Blizzard's credit, they climbed down pretty quickly when they realised just how negatively Real ID had been received. The company's president, Mike Morhaime, wrote a direct letter to the players. They didn't have to do this. In spite of the unprecedented backlash, they would have continued to rake in massive quantities of cash per month from WORLD OF WARCRAFT subscriptions. The fact that they actually paid attention to public feedback and reacted accordingly in my opinion puts them several steps above the likes of EA and UbiSoft, who have ridden roughshod over their customers with excessive and unpopular DRM schemes. The sinking of Real ID is people power at its finest and proof that not all rich corporations are completely deaf to their customers' concerns. (Of course, the fact that one forum member demonstrated the folly of the system by Googling the real name of one of Blizzard's forum representatives and, within a few minutes, providing links to his Facebook and Twitter accounts, home address, a satellite photo of said address, phone number and the names of some of his family members, may have been a contributing factor too. Because I'm not a fan of that sort of invasion of privacy, I won't be linking to any of it here.)

Still, though, the above may give you pause for thought next time you choose a user name when signing up to the official goat porn message board.

BD impressions: 36

5:26 PM / BD Impressions / 1 Comment

Olivier Marchal's cop thriller 36 is downbeat, grim and melancholic in a rather browbeating way. The characters rarely crack a smile, the sky is always bleak and overcast, and barring the odd woman or child there are no good people, only degrees of badness. All of which, I assume, was Marchal's intention, but the modern-day French noir doesn't quite have the pizazz of the real thing. The plot is satisfyingly convoluted and there are a lot of interesting themes at play, particularly the ongoing strife between bureaucracy and actually policing the streets of Paris, and the extent to which petty rivalries can spiral out of control in a charged situation, but because it's all told with the same unwavering straight face, and because the mood is so downright monotonous, it eventually becomes wearying. Men scowl and avoid eye contact while speaking to each other in low, gruff voices, and it ultimately devolves into a long and plodding trawl through the staples of the macho cop thriller with no light at the end of the tunnel. Worth a look, but fairly unremarkable.

Image quality: This release from Palisades Tartan is a bit of a mixed bag, culled from a less than stellar masters which, in addition to some pronounced ringing, is affected by a bizarre fault by which the left hand side of the image is consistently blurrier and less defined than the rest of the screen. It seems almost reminiscent of when the various plates of a book have not been properly aligned and some of the colours bleed out of the black outlines (you can often find such a fault with comic books, particularly those that have been printed cheaply.) Example 14 provides a particularly striking example of this anomaly. Other than that, it's a watchable enough disc. Detail is for the most part acceptable, and the grain doesn't appear to have been interfered with. 5/10

36
studio: Palisades Tartan; country: UK; region code: B; codec: AVC;
file size: 19 GB; average bit rate (including audio): 24.56 Mbit/sec

New new headphones

7:36 PM / Technology / 9 Comments

I bought a new pair of 5.1 gaming headphones to replace my faulty Roccat Kave. The Medusa NX from Speedlink is priced similarly to the Roccat Kave (approximately £50) and offers the same basic functionality and connectivity, the bonus being that, so far, these have lasted for more than the twenty-four hours I got out of Roccat's offering.

On the whole, I would say that the audio quality with the Medusa NX isn't quite up there with the Roccat Kave (the left and right channels sound noticeably less clear than the centre channel), but at the same time the channel separation is improved. With the Roccat Kave, the surrounds weren't all that distinct from the left and right front channels; now, they actually do a passable imitation of coming from behind me. Of course it would be ridiculous to expect a pair of headphones to deliver the same level of positional sound as a dedicated 5.1 speaker setup, but the effect is really not bad at all for £50. They also have a nifty feature whereby they compensate for the lack of a dedicated subwoofer by converting the LFE data into a subtle (or not so subtle, depending on how high you set the slider) vibration effect. D-Box eat your heart out!

BD impressions: For Your Eyes Only

3:56 PM / BD Impressions / 15 Comments

As the James Bond series limps into the 1980s, it's beginning to look as crusty and worn-out as its incumbent star, Roger Moore. The clichés are now so firmly established that all those involved seem simply to be going through the motions, and it's hard to care about the plot, which has nothing to offer that we haven't seen a dozen times before or more. Even the Maurice Binder opening titles are beginning to look like he just doesn't give a damn any more. Which is a shame, because FOR YOUR EYES ONLY is on the whole a step up from the last Bond film I watched, LIVE AND LET DIE (Moore's first outing as 007). The plot may have nothing to offer, but during the various set-pieces, the film does come to life for some impressively staged stunts, the most striking of which is an extended ski chase. My interest in the movie peaked and dipped throughout its two-hours-plus running time, and whenever I was engaged, you can bet your bottom dollar it was because of an action set-piece rather than anything to do with the narrative.

On the other hand, the pre-credits sequence, involving an obvious Blofeld stand-in, some really bad puns and the sort of jokey slapstick comedy that always comes to mind whenever I think of the Moore Bonds, is pretty dreadful, ranking as one of the worst openings in the series' history and very nearly derailing the film before it gets off the ground. It contains one of the series' few callbacks to a previous Bond film and, in the process, somehow manages to piss all over the memory of ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE's melancholy ending. Worse still, it seems to have been included solely as a means of giving Kevin McClory the middle finger. Bad move, Bond producers, bad move.

Thankfully, nothing which follows is anything like as bad, and while I don't fully agree with the assertion that FOR YOUR EYES ONLY is a Timothy Dalton Bond film before its time, it does contain a couple of very satisfying moments in which Moore's "nice English gent" mask slips and the ruthless bastard portrayed on occasion by Connery, Dalton and Craig (and, needless to say, the literary Bond of the original novels) emerges. In fact, there's a scene involving a truck, a cliff and a well-placed kick that I'm inclined to feel is considerably nastier than anything Connery's Bond ever did. On the whole, though, it's hard to shake the feeling that he's simply going through the motions, and for whatever reason I still have great trouble ever feeling that he's in any danger - even when being used as shark-bait or being set upon by a team of homicidal ice hockey players. I suspect the problem is that he just seems so detached from the events unfolding around him that it's hard to see him as anything other than an observer.

A few more random thoughts: despite the dull-looking opening titles, I quite liked the Sheena Easton song. I also rather enjoyed Bill Conti's score, but I'm not convinced it fit particularly well with some of the action scenes. There's an earlier sequence, involving Bond and his sidekick du jour, Melina, escaping an armed gang in Melina's mini, that feels a bit too jaunty and jokey. Speaking of Melina, she may not go down in history as one of the greatest Bond girls but she's a good deal more feisty and resourceful than the dimwits in LIVE AND LET DIE... not to mention that the actor playing her, Carole Bouquet, is incredibly easy on the eyes. By the way, it's not true that she never smiles. (The film's other Bond girl, Lynn-Holly Johnson, on the other hand, is just infuriating, and thankfully the filmmakers have the good sense to limit her screen time.) And the closing gag, while completely tone-destroying, did, I must admit, make me laugh.

Well, for the time being, I'm done with Roger Moore, despite only having watched two of his seven films (barring THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN and MOONRAKER, the rest aren't available on BD yet, and I don't feel like paying for either of those two). Next up: Timothy Dalton in LICENCE TO KILL. Hmm... or shall I rent THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS on DVD first?

Image quality: Slightly underwhelming-looking, this one. Unlike many of the other Lowry Bond restorations, this one certainly looks its age, which is both a blessing and a curse. A blessing, because the obvious digital manipulation that plagued the earlier restorations is greatly reduced here; a curse, because it lacks the crispness and "agelessness" of these titles. This may, of course, simply be down to the original photography, which looks rather drab and tired. I guess what I would say about this one is that it looks CONSISTENT, meaning that flaws like the softness that pervades, are present throughout, rather than popping up without warning like the frozen grain patterns and "cut-out" effect of the likes of DR. NO et al. 7/10

For Your Eyes Only
studio: 20th Century Fox/MGM; country: UK; region code: ABC; codec: AVC;
file size: 30.9 GB; average bit rate (including audio): 34.66 Mbit/sec

If you're keeping track:

• Dr. No - 7/10
• From Russia with Love - 8/10
• Goldfinger - 8/10
• Thunderball - 6/10
• On Her Majesty's Secret Service - 7/10
• Live and Let Die - 4/10
• For Your Eyes Only - 6/10
• Casino Royale - 8/10
• Quantum of Solace - 5/10

Oh, get to f...

9:53 PM / Technology / No Comments

Well, I got less than twenty-four hours' usage out of my new headphones before they started malfunctioning. I'm starting to think I'm cursed.

I spent most of yesterday playing DRAGON AGE: AWAKENING (it's a lot of fun, provided you don't mind more of the same) and trying out various movies with the Roccat Kave headphones. I was, on the whole, pretty impressed by the quality and the spatialisation, even if it wasn't a patch on a dedicated 5.1 setup. (My main reason for buying a pair of 5.1 speakers is that my brother does a lot of work in the same room as me and often needs me to turn down my volume so he can concentrate. Otherwise, I'd just use my speakers all the time.)

This morning, however, when I popped them on, I was treated to noticeable crackling and popping. At first I thought my sound card was the culprit, and I tried everything I could think of to eliminate the problem, including disabling it and re-enabling the on-board card. Eventually, I started pulling out the various jacks, one at a time, to see whether only a certain channel was affected. It was only when I pulled out all three jacks at once that I realised the problem persisted even when there was no connection between the headphones and the sound card. The Roccat Kaves use a USB connection for power, and it was only when I unplugged that (i.e. cutting off power completely) that the crackling subsided. A quick Google search revealed that I am not alone in experiencing this problem with these headphones. Because of that, I'll be returning them for a refund rather than a replacement.

Happy birthday to me.

BD impressions: The Box

5:17 PM / BD Impressions / 5 Comments

There was a point when everyone in this country seemed to love Richard Kelly's debut film, DONNIE DARKO, but the craze seemed to die out pretty quickly and I honestly can't remember the last time I heard anyone mention it. His follow-up, SOUTHLAND TALES (which I haven't seen), was more or less universally panned, to the extent that there was really nowhere for him to go but up. THE BOX, based on a Richard Matheson short story which was previously adapted as a TWILIGHT ZONE episode, is an intriguing and atmospheric piece, even if the questions it raises in the first half are more interesting than the answers it provides in the second. Beyond the nifty central premise - man offers husband and wife $1 million is they press a button which, so he tells them, will result in the death of someone they don't know - it's probably best if you go in without know anything about how the plot unravels, so I'll leave it at that and simply say that this was a rather pleasant surprise and one of the better films I've seen recently.

Image quality: Apparently, Richard Kelly once dismissed the possibility of shooting a 70s period piece digitally. He seems to have reneged on this claim, if THE BOX is anything to go by (or perhaps budgetary factors came into play?), but having seen the end result, I can't help suspecting that his initial instincts were probably the correct ones. THE BOX looks good, but there's something rather anachronistic about the overly video-like appearance, which all the diffusion filters in the world can't hide. Detail is impressive once you take into account the deliberate sheen of softness, and compression is largely fine across the board. Blacks are slightly raised, which can be clearly seen during the white-on-black text crawl at the very beginning, but beyond that I have no complaints about the technical presentation. 9/10

The Box
studio: Icon; country: UK; region code: B; codec: AVC;
file size: 29.5 GB; average bit rate (including audio): 36.61 Mbit/sec

Just arrived...

5:42 PM / Blu-ray / 3 Comments

My birthday haul:

TRUE BLOOD: THE COMPLETE SECOND SEASON (BD, HBO, Region ABC, UK)

THE BOX (BD, Icon, Region B, UK)

FIGHT CLUB (BD, 20th Century Fox, Region ABC, UK)

It's my birthday...

9:40 AM / General / 12 Comments

...and here is my swag:

- Roccat Kave 5.1 surround sound gaming headset
- DRAGON AGE: AWAKENING expansion set
- TRUE BLOOD: THE COMPLETE SECOND SEASON on BD
- FIGHT CLUB on BD
- THE BOX on BD

...and a packet of Jelly Bellies.

What the fuck is this?

7:23 PM / Blu-ray / 13 Comments

Seriously, Fox, is this meant to be a joke?

Great comment by Robert A. Harris on this mess:

Whatever post facility created this master should be tarred, feathered and rode out of town on a log.

In the past I suggested that they should best be working in the manufacture of plastic combs, where nothing artistic might be harmed. No longer. And people actually get paid to create this garbage.

Spamalot

5:07 PM / Web / 6 Comments

I've been receiving rather a lot of spam comments recently. Spam has been an issue for this site almost from the get-go, but I've tended to take care of it simply by deleting messages as and when they appear, and more recently implementing a "comment freeze" on all entries over a month old. In the last week or so, however, the volume of spam has increased quite noticeably. So far, I've been doing a reasonable job of keeping it under control by checking my inbox regularly and deleting any dodgy entries more or less immediately. If the volume becomes any heavier, though, this is unlikely to remain feasible.

Because of this, I have had no choice but to enable moderation for ALL comments that are posted. I'm sorry to have to do this, because I've always liked the "real-time" nature of simply letting comments be posted instantly (unless flagged as suspect by Movable Type's anti-spam filters), but that's the way it is. I'll do my best to be as prompt as possible when it comes to approving any comments, and hope that this doesn't discourage you from posting as frequently as before.

One benefit of this new approach, it must be said, is that, because it no longer serves any purpose, I've disabled the "comment freeze", so you will now be able to comment on entries that are older than one month. Every cloud, as they say...

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