BROKEN EMBRACES (BD, Sony Pictures, Region A, USA)

Second time's a charm...

THE DESCENT PART 2 (BD, Pathé, Region B, France)

TOY STORY 2 (BD, Buena Vista, Region ABC, USA)

Why is all the good stuff coming out at the same time?

THE PRINCESS AND THE FROG takes most of its cues from the so-called second golden age of Disney animation (basically, THE LITTLE MERMAID through THE LION KING), which isn't entirely surprising, given that most of its key creative personnel worked on that era. There's a definite sense of predictability to it, and there's a distinct lack of risk-taking throughout, but the production values and overall animation quality represent something that hasn't been seen in years. Scroll through the film's technical credits, and it reads like a veritable "who's who" of Disney artists from the second golden age, from THE LITTLE MERMAID (and, erm, TREASURE PLANET)'s John Musker and Ron Clements sharing writing and directing dues to Eric Goldberg (ALADDIN's Genie) leading the animation of jazz-playing alligator Louis. Even the biggest flaws - the bland, po-faced heroine and the predictable plot - can be found in virtually any previous Disney feature, and the meandering, episodic narrative? Well, that's pure JUNGLE BOOK. So what if Dr. Facilier is just a black Jafar and Tiana spends the bulk of the film poo-pooing the typical Disney princess fairytale only to succumb to it hook, line and sinker? It's colourful, technically amazing, riotously funny in places (particularly as far as the more lewd jokes go), and resurrects an art form that was basically dead as far as mainstream cinema is concerned. Now that it's back, it better not be going anywhere for a long time.

Image quality: This is the first BD release of a 2D Disney animated feature that didn't originate from film, and consequently is the first one not to have been put through the "make film look like digital video" mangling machine. The image is as crisp and pristine as you could reasonably expect, and the level of detail certainly allows you to truly appreciate the quality of the animation and the often deliberately impressionistic backgrounds. Compression definitely suffers in places (see Example 10), but overall this is a very strong disc, if not up to the standards of the recent PONYO. 9.5/10

The Princess and the Frog
studio: Buena Vista; country: USA; region code: A; codec: AVC;
file size: 24.2 GB GB; average bit rate (including audio): 35.58 Mbit/sec

THE PRINCESS AND THE FROG (BD, Buena Vista, Region A, USA)

THE BAADER MEINHOF COMPLEX (BD, MPI, Region A, USA)

"Catchphrase!"

Incidentally, apparently the US theatrical release was cut to get a PG-13 rating. Given that this is surely the most deliriously violent film Besson has ever produced, I'm struggling to get my head round (a) how, even with the most judicious cutting, this could be achieved, and (b) how anyone could possibly think this was a good idea.

Image quality: Solid release from 20th Century Fox, reminding me a lot of the overall look (in terms of detail, grain and overall texture) of QUANTUM OF SOLACE, also from Fox. There's a bit of ringing around the left and right edges of the frame, which might be indicative of light filtering or a less than ideal downconversion from a higher resolution (does anyone know if this received a 4K digital intermediate?), and detail is perhaps a hair lower than I expected, but really I'm just nitpicking. It's my job to do that, though, and while TAKEN is a fine-looking disc indeed, it falls shy of FOX's best (for instance, JENNIFER'S BODY or I, ROBOT). Still, a very nice disc all round. 9.5/10

Taken
studio: 20th Century Fox; country: UK; region code: B; codec: AVC;
file size: 27.8 GB; average bit rate (including audio): 42.71 Mbit/sec

TOY STORY (BD, Buena Vista, Region ABC, USA)

Clicky!

Source: Blu-ray.com

CAPITALISM: A LOVE STORY (BD, Anchor Bay, Region A, USA)

Anyway, faced with the knowledge that, no matter what sort of copy protection or forced activation system they put on the game disc, the crackers will find a way of bypassing it, letting players get straight to the good stuff (often before the game is actually available on store shelves - SPORE, I'm looking at you), UbiSoft hit on an ingenious scheme: to force the player to authenticate and remain online at all times, connected to UbiSoft's servers and streaming a significant portion of the game data NOT stored on the physical disc. Sounds like a good idea, right?

Well, yes, until you break it down and figure out what it actually means. You have to remain connected to the internet the whole time. If your connection dies, for whatever reason, the game quits. Depending on which game it is, it might save your progress, but that's not a given. ASSASSIN'S CREED 2, for example, uses a checkpoint system, so if your connection dies, the game will only restore you back to the last checkpoint. As per Rock, Paper, Shotgun:

No matter what you're doing, no matter what the reason, the game will refuse to let you continue playing if it decides you're not online. You're dumped right back to a menu, losing any progress made since the last checkpoint. If you don't have a constant, uninterrupted internet connection, you can't play. Let's list some of the reasons you might drop your net connection, shall we? Router crash, ISP problems, cat playing with the cable, microwave muddling your wi-fi connection, train going into a tunnel when you're on 3G, Windows having a networking befuddlement, someone else in the house torrenting the bandwidth dry...

And let's get something straight here: we're talking about SINGLE PLAYER GAMES that require you to remain connected. That's a load of horse-hooey. A player's ability to run a single player game should not be dependent either on his/her web connection or the stability of UbiSoft's servers. It's ludicrous. It benefits no-one but the publisher. As Phill Cameron put it in his article at Gamasutra:

It's not there for our protection, it's there to stop people who aren't us (the paying customers), from getting their hands on the game.

[...]

Recently, PC Gamer managed to have a talk with Ubisoft about the technology. They claim that 'The real idea is that if you offer a game that is better when you buy it, then people will actually buy it. We wouldn't have built it if we thought that it was really going to piss off our customers.'

While it might be tempting to call them naive or blindly optimistic, the base theory there is sound; if you offer a better service than the pirates, you'll have more people buying the game. The problem is that here, with Assassin's Creed 2, we're not getting a better game when we buy.

The last point, which I emboldened, is in my opinion the most pertinent. From a shareholder's point of view, this new DRM system sounds wonderful in theory. After all, the bottom line is what counts, and what bigger bottom line is there than preventing the loss of sales due to piracy? (Let's, for a moment, run with the fallacy that every pirated copy directly equates to a lost sale.) Unfortunately, for the end user, it's meaningless. There's nothing to be gained by the gamer from this sort of content protection. The gamer is being asked to accept more stringent limitations being placed on their usage of the product in return for... nothing. Zilch. Nada.

The stupidity of this new system was laid bare for all to see when the aforementioned ASSASSIN'S CREED 2 was released on March 5th, and the servers were promptly brought to their knees due to the sheer demand placed on them, preventing legitimate customers from playing the game they'd just bought. That's right: people were unable to play a single player game because the servers couldn't cope with the number of connections. I hate to say "I told you so", but the sadist in me derives a considerable amount of schadenfreude from this whole affair. Rock, Paper, Shotgun again:

The DRM was clearly ludicrous from its first announcement, and Ubisoft could not have been sent a more clear message by a worldwide reaction of outrage. They persisted with it anyway (quashing some people's suspicions that this was a deliberately OTT announcement so they could appear to back down on it later), and despite repeated warnings that it was untenable continued to boast the "feature" as a bonus for gamers. This weekend people have not been gamers, because their game wouldn't run.

And don't forget that the game has currently only been released in Europe. Just imagine what's going to happen when it comes out in North America on the 9th...

This new DRM scheme is supposedly going to be employed for every subsequent UbiSoft PC game, including THE SETTLERS VII: PATHS TO A KINGDOM, which I was previously looking forward to playing but now won't be bothering with. Well, it'll be used until UbiSoft's managers cotton on to the fact that this is a major faux-pas and backtrack. That may take some time, given that all the evidence suggests that UbiSoft's managers are SPECTACULARLY stupid, but I'm confident that it will happen eventually. Electronic Arts, for example, eventually backed down on the ridiculous "three/five installs and you're out" scheme that they imposed on SPORE and RED ALERT 3, among others. It's a shame wary customers are going to have to miss out on the likes of ASSASSIN'S CREED 2 and THE SETTLERS 7, but them's the breaks, and I feel reasonably confident that the inevitable ASSASSIN'S CREED 3 and THE SETTLERS 8 will not be crippled to this extent. (That, or UbiSoft will devise something even worse, which I suppose is always a possibility...)

If nothing else, the ASSASSIN'S CREED 2 fiasco is a cause for celebration because it serves as a clear demonstration of just how dangerous this sort of DRM potentially is. If you bought the game, fully aware of the included restrictions, and found yourself unable to play it, then I sympathise, but maybe it will teach you not to be so trusting in future.

Image quality: TRIANGLE was shot in high definition (Panavision Genesis HD) by Robert Humphreys (who also shot the sublime-looking SOMERSAULT), and it looks very good indeed on this BD from Icon. The level of detail on display is frequently jaw-dropping, and the compression is handled well for the most part, barring a bit of mosquito noise in the ocean and a single major encoding screw-up at 00:39:26. At times, the blacks look rather too grey, but this is by no means a constant issue, so I'm inclined to blame the photography or the colour timing rather than the transfer itself. A very fine-looking disc. 9/10

By the way, the UK release definitely seems to be the one to go for. From these screen captures, it's pretty clear that some scenes in the US version from First Look Studios have been filtered (though oddly enough, others appear unaffected).

Triangle
studio: Icon; country: UK; region code: B; codec: AVC;
file size: 19.8 GB; average bit rate (including audio): 28.74 Mbit/sec

LUFTSLOTTET SOM PRENGTES (BD, Nordisk Film, Region ABC, Norway)

Known in its native Sweden as LUFTSLOTTET SOM SPRÄNGDES and in English-speaking territories as THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNET'S NEST. I won't be watching it until I've read the novel (which I haven't started yet), but I took a look at the BD this evening and I'm sorry to report that it doesn't look pretty. See Lyris Lite for more information.

TRIANGLE (BD, Icon, Region B, UK)

Now, the discs I picked up at HMV today in a sale:

36 (BD, Palisades Tartan, Region B, UK)

LADY VENGEANCE (BD, Palisades Tartan, Region B, UK)

A TALE OF TWO SISTERS (BD, Palisades Tartan, Region B, UK)

THIRST (BD, Palisades Tartan, Region B, UK)

SIN CITY (BD, Buena Vista, Region ABC, UK)