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Movie Matters #14 - supplement

5:40 PM / Podcast / 5 Comments

Somewhat later than anticipated, we've put together a supplemental bonus to the most recent Movie Matters episode containing the three "Top 10 of 2011" MP3 lists we didn't have time to showcase in the episode itself. We hope you enjoy listening to these additional takes on the year that was 2011 and can forgive the delay in getting them out there.

• https://rapidshare.com/files/2003881223/moviematters-episode14mini-26-02-12.mp3
• iTunes

The music sampled in this episode is from DRIVE.

Created by Lee Howard & Michael Mackenzie
Edited by Michael Mackenzie

http://moviematterspodcast.blogspot.com

A tale of two cannibals

10:32 PM / Blu-ray / 25 Comments

Note: a BIG thank you to two readers of this site, Brian and Matt, for bringing my attention to this, Brian back in October and Matt more recently when I must admit I'd more or less forgotten about Brian's original email. Without their eagle eyes, I'd be none the wiser about this bizarre situation.

HANNIBAL is one of my favourite Ridley Scott films, and I make no apologies for saying this, or that I consider it an entirely worthy (if dramatically different) sequel to THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS. That it has never been particularly well represented on BD despite multiple releases by different labels is lamentable to say the least, particularly when we've seen how good the results can be when Scott lavishes his attention on the creation of a new HD master (see the final cut of BLADE RUNNER and the corrected re-release of GLADIATOR). I don't know where HANNIBAL lies in Scott's own estimation of his filmography, but I have a hard time believing someone with so exacting a visual eye would be satisfied with any of the available BD releases.

For the record, I've seen:

1. The German UFA disc, released on 30th October 2008
2. The UK Universal disc, released on 9th September 2009
3. The US 20th Century Fox/MGM disc, released on 15th September 2009 as part of THE HANNIBAL LECTER COLLECTION

While the three releases differ in terms of available bonus content, sound options and image quality, all three of them are lacklustre. The US Fox/MGM release fares the worst, its aged MPEG-2 encode the least of its worries when you take into consideration the fact that the whole image is blurred vertically, resulting in a disagreeable softness. On the other hand, the Universal and UFA releases, which both look as close to identical as two separate encodes of the same master can look, both suffer from being vertically stretched, with a portion of the top of the image being cut off the screen. The UK DVD, incidentally, suffered from the exact same problem, having been taken from the same master. (That, of course, means that we're talking about a master originally prepared in 2001, which goes some way towards explaining its lacklustre quality.)

All well and good. So, basically we have a choice between a properly framed but blurred US release and a misframed but better-looking (though still substandard) European release, right? Well, for a while that may have been the case, but then I was contacted independently by two different people, Brian and Matt, who both told me they'd compared their UK copies against my captures and weren't seeing the misframing I'd illustrated. Matt and another viewer, Sky_Captain, even provided shots taken from pointing their cameras at their displays as proof.

Well, now my curiosity was well and truly piqued. I simply had to see this with my own eyes. Knowing it was going to be a complete lottery which version I ended up with (the old misframed version or this apparently new corrected version), I paid the £5.49 Amazon was asking and waited with bated breath.

The results? Well, they're interesting to say the least:

Left: UFA/old Universal; middle: Fox/MGM; right: new Universal

(NB: I'm using the UFA release for captures rather than the old Universal disc because that's the one I own. I only had a review copy of the old Universal disc and had to return it when I was finished with it. However, as the captures in this link show, I've already demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that both had the same wonky framing.)

For sheer what-the-fuckery, I think Universal deserves some sort of grand prize. Ladies and gentlemen, what we have here is a silent fix.

It's really quite fascinating. The new UK disc now has framing that almost perfectly mirrors that of the US disc, apart from the opening titles, which are framed differently again (and more accurately than even the US release, if you look at the positioning of "TCE 00:00:58:06" and "PLAY LOCK" in Example 1). Someone clearly caught the framing SNAFU and decided to correct it. The question is, why now (after all, it's been there since 2001 when the original UK DVD was released), and why do so without telling anyone? It's THE DESCENT debacle all over again, the only difference being that in this case Universal has fixed an old problem rather than created a new one.

There's a bit more too it than that, though. Click through the various captures above, and you'll see that the new UK disc has an increased harshness not seen in either the old UK/German transfer or the Fox/MGM release. Close-ups look sharper than they did before (check the one of Julianne Moore for some serious freckle action), but I'm not convinced what we're seeing is genuine detail. Look at the chain around Bolton's neck in Example 5 - its individual beads are only clearly defined on the old UK/German transfer - in the other two, they're a lot less distinct. Colour levels have changed too, with the new UK disc looking slightly warmer.

So what's going on? Is this a new transfer, or did Universal simply dig that old 2001 transfer out again, tweak the framing and colours and attempt to sharpen it up a bit? It looks so damn mediocre I really hope it's the latter, because I'd be very worried if a transfer looking anything like this being created recently. On balance, it's an improvement - for one thing, you no longer have to suffer through Giancarlo Giannini's cranium being chopped in half in that iconic shot - but, as with the previous releases, the whole presentation is so compromised by virtue of its lack of detail that you do have to wonder why they felt it worth the money to press a new glass master and then not tell anyone about it. Come on, Universal and/or MGM - I know we HANNIBAL advocates are in the minority, but it's a Ridley Scott film, for crying out loud. It should look amazing, not like yesterday's reheated leftovers.

Oh, and just in case anyone thinks I'm full of it, here's a snapshot of the new disc's /BDMV/STREAM folder. Files dated February and March 2011 on a disc supposedly released in 2009? I think not.

#1136: Hannibal

11:00 PM / Blu-ray / No Comments

(BD, Universal, Region ABC, UK)

Silent fix exposé incoming

10:15 PM / Blu-ray / 10 Comments

A BD title from a major label that suffers from a noticeable framing problem has had a silent fix. Anyone like to guess which one?

DIABLO III beta impressions

4:26 PM / Games / No Comments

Note: I originally posted this article in the diablo.incgamers.com forums. As such, it's written in such a way as to be geared towards those who already have a reasonable understanding of the game's mechanics and recent developments in the ongoing beta.

Last night, a friend gave me the use of his account for a few hours to let me try out the DIABLO III beta. I just thought I'd share a few impressions while they're still reasonably fresh in my mind.

A bit about me

Played Blizzard games since THE LOST VIKINGS and became what I'd consider a fan after the original WARCRAFT. Loved every subsequent Blizzard game with the exception of WOW, which I've tried to get into a few times but just find to be boring as hell and a sad bastardisation of a once brilliant RTS series. Played DIABLO and DIABLO II extensively, racking up more hours with D2 but probably having a slight preference for D1, which I thought was a more impressive achievement in terms of its atmosphere and singularity of focus. D2 always struck me as a bit more sloppy, lacking that bleak gothic atmosphere and at times suffering slightly from "ice cream on the hotdogs" syndrome - i.e. so all-encompassing in its scope that you had elements that didn't fit rubbing shoulders.

The interface

I'm adding my voice for the calls for a class selection screen more like D2, with all classes visible on the same screen. Funnily enough, they had a screen like this implemented for the various previews at Blizzcon etc.

I agree that the skills panel needs work. I actually don't have too much of a problem with the current implementation of skills and runes (more on that later), but the huge panel that takes up most of the screen needs to go. It's clunky, and it doesn't fit with the interface as a whole (the quest, lore and inventory panels are positioned on either the right or left and take up less than half the screen). I do think we need to be able to see, on a single screen, all our skills, including the ones we haven't unlocked yet.

PLEASE Blizzard, add an option to toggle the minimap on and off, as well as the chat window at the bottom left corner.

I'd also like to see the return of the dedicated character screen. This is admittedly more for nostalgic than functional reasons, but for some reason it just doesn't feel right having your stats share the same screen as the inventory. And while we're at it, I'd like to have a way of seeing my hit point and mana/fury/whatever numbers at a glance without having to mouse over the health or resource orbs.

One other thing: please, Blizzard, standardise the fonts. I've counted at least four: the standard "Diablo" font with the crosses through the Os, Arial, a serif font, and that vaguely Arabic-looking one that also showed up in D2. It just looks sloppy having so many different typefaces in play.

Other than that, I'm happy with the interface. It's polished, functional, and instantly reminiscent of the previous games while also making improvements.

The classes

I played for about five hours and in that time took three characters from scratch through to killing Leoric: the Barbarian, the Wizard and the Demon Hunter. I didn't have time to try out the Monk or Witch Doctor. If I get a chance to play again, I'll definitely be checking them out.

I played the Barb first and took him on more or less a full clear, going pretty methodically through each area and listening to every bit of dialogue in full. He's certainly a visceral class and I found it fun to wade into large groups of enemies and get stuck in, although he did start to feel a bit repetitive after a while. Things perked up when I unlocked Leap Attack, which allowed me to be a bit more mobile and mix up my strategy a bit. Overall the Barb feels tough, no-nonsense and fairly straightforward - a lot like his D2 counterpart but with more damage dealing options available from an earlier stage.

Next I rolled a Wizard and blasted through the whole thing in about an hour. This was partly because I was anxious to see as much of the game as possible and partly because this seems to be the sort of gameplay the Wizard encourages. Whereas with the Barb I found myself feeling compelled to fairly methodically clear out each area, with the Wizard I often found myself simply running past stray zombies or skeletons and not worrying too much about them (they all move so slowly there was no chance of them catching up with me). With AoE skills like Arcane Orb, the Wizard dispatches enemies considerably more quickly than the Barb. Add to that the insane regeneration speed of her arcane power, and you almost never find yourself stopping blasting enemies for more than a couple of seconds. If the Barb was a fairly straightforward class to play (more on difficulty later), the Wizard was an absolute breeze. She feels different from the D2 Sorceress, and I think that's down to two things: the lack of fire skills (at least at this stage in the game) and the abundance of arcane power. In the D1 and D2 days, my Sorcs were constantly hungry for mana. Here, there almost seems to be too much of it. I very rarely ran my arcane power orb down, and if I did, I could simply switch back to Magic Missile, which, when socketed with its first rune, became ridiculously powerful for a skill with no arcane power costs attached to it.

My last class was the Demon Hunter. I slowed down a bit for him, still skipping over the dialogue I'd already heard but generally taking my time to do a full clear. Occasionally, if I came to the end of a dungeon and knew there was a corridor back near the beginning that I hadn't explored, I'd just leave it and move on to the next level, but by and large I was pretty thorough. This playthrough took me under two hours. I immediately noticed that he dealt less damage per second than the previous two classes. I understand he's been beefed up with this patch, but he still found myself doing a lot more clicking to achieve the same results than I did with the Barb or Wizard. The DH, dare I say it, plays more like I would expect a class in a Diablo game to play. That's not to say that the game was any more of a challenge with him (the beta is, on the whole, ridiculously easy), but I no longer felt like I was simply steamrolling through everything. I occasionally had to actually back up and thin a horde of monsters out from a distance, which made this class feel more tactical than the other two.

Back when D3 was originally unveiled, with that original gameplay trailer showcasing the Barb and Witch Doctor, I immediately knew the first character I'd roll would be a Barb due to the sheer visceral nature of his combat. I kept my promise to myself and wasn't disappointed, but having taken a Barb through to completion of the beta, I'm no longer so sure I'll be playing him first in the retail version. It's not that I didn't have fun, but the other two classes I played simply seemed to have a far more interesting arsenal at their disposal.

If I have a favourite at the moment, it's probably the DH, because he actually forced me to take a step back from the carnage and think about what I was doing. That's not to say I ever felt I was in any significant danger of being overwhelmed, but as a ranged fighter you can't simply run up to a summoner and one-shot or two-shot them, meaning that you actually have to position yourself in such a way as to pick them off from afar, otherwise you face an endless stream of minions soaking up all your arrows.

Graphics

Unlike some people, I've always been reasonably happy with the art direction. True, some of the armour and helmets look a tad ridiculous (I hate, hate, HATE the pointy wizard hat), put overall I like the painterly approach they've gone for in terms of the backgrounds. The initial outdoor zones, with their blue tint and twisted, gnarled trees are among the most graphically atmospheric work Blizzard has ever done. I love the way the individual blades of grass move in reaction to you walking through them, or how tapestries hanging on the walls of the cathedral billow if you swing your weapon near them. This is definitely one of those games where static screen captures can't convey what it looks and feels like in motion. Even the various HD gameplay movies on the likes of YouTube don't do the game justice due to how compressed the visuals are.

With all that said, the game definitely lacks that old "hairs standing up on the back of your neck" feeling of the original DIABLO... but then again, D2 lacked that as well and I didn't hear too many complaints about it. D3 definitely has oodles more atmosphere than D2, and there are several areas where you'll actually want to break off from combat for a bit to stare at the scenery. I'm thinking of the glowing blue crater in the cathedral where the Fallen Star fell, and the chasm in Leoric's chamber where the carpet on the floor dangles off the precipice.

My system is fairly high end - Intel Core i7 930 clocked at 3.36 GHz, 6 GB RAM, 80 GB SSD (with D3 installed on it), overclocked AMD Radeon 7950 video card, Hazro HZ27WB 27" monitor. I mention this because I played at 2560x1440 with all settings maxed (including anti-aliasing) and had no complaints about performance, but am aware that my system is quite a bit more powerful than the norm. It definitely performs better than STARCRAFT II, which still drops below 60 fps for me on certain story mode maps (e.g. the "zombie hordes" one) even with a near state of the art GPU.

I also have no complaints about lag. I live in Scotland and the servers are obviously all US-based at the moment. I was averaging a ping between the high 100s and low 200s throughout but was never aware of any latency. Whatever model they're using for combat (and I know there's been a lot of back and forth about this), it certainly works, and this is coming from someone who only ever played D2 offline because I found a ping of 80 to be unplayable. I'd rather the online-only restriction wasn't there (for a multitude of reasons, not least an occasionally flaky internet connection), and find it quite bizarre that Blizzard has gone down this online-only route but then sets the default game setting to private, meaning you're essentially being encouraged to play a single player game that requires a broadband internet connection, but that's an argument for another time.

Skill system/customisation

Let's get something out of the way first: I really dislike the removal of manual stat and skill point allocation. I'm not one of those people who thinks this game should be DIABLO 2.5, but when the changes to automatic stat points and the removal of skill points were announced, I'd be lying if I said I didn't have concerns. Having now actually sat down and playing around with the game for a few hours, these concerns haven't been allayed. On a first playthrough, when you're getting access to a new active/passive skill or rune at every level, there's plenty to look forward to as you level up because you're constantly getting new toys to play with. On a second playthrough, though, I get the feeling that a lot of the excitement will be gone. Sure, you can decide whether you want to use skill X or socket it with rune Y that becomes available at level Z, but apart from that I do worry that the leveling up process will feel a bit hollow and uneventful. And because they've removed stat requirements on items, I found myself more or less ignoring my STR/DEX/VIT/WIS numbers, even though they were staring me in the face every time I opened the inventory. To an extent it felt like they were just arbitrary numbers that could have been replaced with anything.

That said, I for one am actually glad that runes are now unlocked rather than being items. Previously, it looked as if the only form of character customisation in the game was going to be itemisation; now at least it feels like there is more of a semblance of skill choice, even if the actual change is 99% interface-related. I basically like the idea of the skill system in its present state, and I PARTICULARLY like that they seem to have solved the clvl 30-60 dead zone problem by constantly unlocking new runes right up to clvl 60.

The skill interface needs work, though. Visually it's as polished as anything else in the game, but functionally it's incredibly clunky. This is especially true in elective mode, where you have a great deal more freedom of choice but that freedom feels as if it's been hacked in. At the very least they need to get rid of the skill slot names when you're playing in elective mode and sort the skills in a way that makes sense. Having Arcane Orb not show up in the Arcane list is frankly just confusing - ironic, considering Blizzard's push for simplification that grandma can understand.

(NOTE: I actually played the Barb with elective mode turned off purely to see what it felt like. Restrictive is the answer, particularly early on in the game when you have limited skill slots available and are restricted to a single primary skill.)

Health globes

The globes work. I'm fine with them, and they give a very satisfying "clunk-glug" sound effect when you pick them up. At the moment, I'd say they drop way more than are actually necessary, but I expect this will change as the difficulty ramps up further into the game. In my six hours or so of playing, I only used a single health potion - when my Barb dropped into the red after I let myself get surrounded by a mobs of skeletons that suddenly emerged from the ground in one of the outdoor locations. In fact, when I rolled my Wizard, I actually made a point of leaving the potions I started with in my stash and not picking up any that dropped, purely to see if it was possible to play through the beta without them. It was.

Account-wide artisans

Not crazy about this. Personally I like the feeling of rolling a brand new character and having to start from scratch. If your blacksmith is already leveled up, you can craft high-end equipment right from the get go, which leaves me feeling that the game is steering you towards twinking your characters, which personally speaking goes against my whole Diablo playing philosophy. Ditto for shared gold. It would be nice if an option was provided to roll a character not tied to your account-wide artisans, but I'm not holding my breath.

TL;DR

Interface needs to be tweaked a bit and I'm still concerned about the limited character customisation, but overall great game, extremely fun and showing a lot of promise. Now hurry the hell up and release it!

#1135: J. Edgar

11:00 PM / Blu-ray / No Comments

(BD, Warner, Region ABC, USA)

I'm back

10:57 AM / Technology / 1 Comment

Sorry for my recent disappearance - computer woes. I'd practically just installed my new video card when one of my hard disks started to fail.

I have four drives in my system:

1. an 80 GB SSD which I use as a boot device;
2. another 80 GB SSD which I use as an install drive for games and the contents of my "My Documents" folder;
3. a 1 TB hard drive (a Hitachi DeskStar) which I use for storing pictures, music, a few miscellaneous applications, copies of this web site going back to August 2001, and a stack of movie files (mainly trailers and stuff downloaded from YouTube); and
4. a 2 TB hard drive (Western Digital Caviar Black) containing my documents, drivers, installers and about 600 GB of recorded TV shows and movies.

Guess which one decided to fail?

It would have to be the largest one, wouldn't it? I first became aware of the problem when I came back to find that the entire system had locked up while attempting to unpack the installation files for THE WITCHER 2 (which I'd just finished redownloading from Good Old Games). Initially I was ready to blame the new video card (any new technology will tend to have teething problems and, with AMD yet to release WHQL certified drivers for the card, I'm currently using beta drivers), but when the same thing happened again while attempting to write to the hard drive, the culprit was obvious. After a reboot, a short DST in SeaTools failed, and I got that sinking feeling I always get when I realise a hard drive is on the way out.

It could have been worse. I did lose some data, but it was only the document I was writing to the drive at that given time. (Unfortunately it was the latest redrafting of the PhD chapter I'm currently working on, and my last backup was nearly a week old.) The rest I was able to siphon off on to various hard drives, including my laptop. (Copying 350 GB of data over 100 Mbit Ethernet is not fun.) The hard drive, which was only two years old, has been sent back to Western Digital to be RMA'd (thank fuck for five-year warranties). However, unwilling to sit around twiddling my thumbs for up to 28 days before seeing a replacement, I decided to burn a hole in my wallet and pick up a new drive (I'll either sell the replacement WD send me or keep it around for occasions such as this). Unfortunately, hard disk prices are still through the roof due to shortages brought about by the flooding in Thailand last year, so I wasn't exactly spoiled for choice, and the few drives that WERE available were pretty expensive. Still, I eventually managed to get an OEM Hitachi DeskStar 7K3000 for just over £150 including delivery. So yeah, not exactly overjoyed to be forking out yet MORE money I can't really afford on computer parts, but at least I'm up and running again. Hopefully this one'll last a bit longer than two years.

#1134: Lady and the Tramp

12:54 PM / Blu-ray / 1 Comment

(BD/DVD combo, Buena Vista, Region ABC/1, USA)

New computer toy

1:30 PM / Technology / 3 Comments

For several years, I've made a habit of performing a major upgrade on my computer once every 2-3 years, gutting it and replacing the majority of the internal components - motherboard, CPU, RAM and video card. The last time I did this was in 2010, when I switched from my ageing Core 2 Duo setup to a then state of the art Core i7 (LGA1366). Two years on... and I have no earthly reason to do so again at present. Improvements to computer performance have plateaued to such an extent that if I were to replace my current setup with one of the new LGA2011 Core i7s, it's extremely unlikely that I would actually notice any change to the speed. The bottom line is that the majority of games don't even tap the full potential of the CPUs Intel was releasing two years ago, let alone the ones coming out today. So, there will be no major computer upgrade for me this year, for which my bank balance is incredibly grateful.

One area in which sizeable improvements HAVE been made, however, is with regard to graphics. Especially since buying my new monitor, with its native 2560x1440 resolution, it's become increasingly clear that my old Radeon HD 5850 lacks the muscle to play the latest games with all the bells and whistles enabled. Even the deceptively low-tech STARCRAFT II, the game I still play the most, tends to choke at the highest settings thanks to the large number of units on the screen.

When it comes to graphics cards, I'm normally about six months behind the curve, waiting for prices to come down and the various third party manufacturers to come up with their own variations as regards performance and cooling solutions as compared to the stock models from ATI (...sorry, AMD) and Nvidia. This time round, though, an extremely attractive proposition came along more or less at the time of the release of the second-tier card in ATI's new 7XXX series, in the form of the Sapphire HD 7950 Overclock edition. This card, while not as powerful as its beefier (and more expensive) 7970 cousin, handily beats the previous single-GPU card performance champion, the Nvidia GeForce GTX 580, in most tests, and has an excellent cooler which appears to be both the quietest AND the most effective of the various third party coolers made available at launch. Having received and installed it last night, I've discovered that it's actually quieter and cooler under load (by about 20 degrees Celsius) than my old 5850 from two generations ago - quite a feat given that, in the computer world, more performance normally = more heat.

So yeah, great card - second fastest single-GPU card currently on the market - and a welcome upgrade as I look forward to my two most anticipated games of 2012, DIABLO III and GUILD WARS 2. (RAYMAN ORIGINS is finally coming to the PC in March too, though I don't anticipate it requiring a beast of a video card.) Obviously this card is absolute overkill if you only use for computer for word processing, browsing the web and watching the odd movie, but if like me you have a high resolution display, play games and consider anything less than 60 fps to be a compromise, you could do a lot worse than pick up one of these.

#1133: Carlos the Jackal

3:03 PM / Blu-ray / 4 Comments

(BD, Optimum, Region B, UK)

I picked this up based on the strengths of other "70s European terrorism/gangsterism" films I've enjoyed such as THE BAADER MEINHOF COMPLEX, ANGELS OF EVIL, MUNICH and MESRINE... and because Play.com is selling it for just over £5 (thanks, Anthony). This seems like a better deal than the Criterion Collection release - not just because of the price, but because it also includes the 185-minute movie version, absent from the Criterion... Oh, and judging by the screen captures posted at Blu-ray.com and Blu-rayDefinition.com, the Criterion is slightly filtered, while the Optimum isn't.