Mirrors Edge And New Monitor

Two things happened this week. Firstly I got a new monitor and secondly I played through Mirrors Edge on it.

Firstly this is my old setup:



This is a 16" 4:3 CRT monitor I got more than ten years ago and has served me very well over the years. The reason why I haven't replaced it in so long was because I didn't have any desire to. But the fact that Bluray films didn't look any better or worse on it than DVD or for that matter on my 24" Samsung LCD TV made me want a screen where I could see that extra resolution. Plus the idea of widescreen FPS gameplay was an appealing one. So I bought this:



It is a blue Acer G24, the G24 standing for 24" gaming monitor. 16:10 ratio and very importantly a 2ms gray to gray response time so there is no ghosting on the screen. It has a native resolution of 1920x1800, that's higher than 1080p, well it would be 1800p. This means Bluray films look amazing at their full resolution, but unfortunately DVDs because they don't have as much resolution to them, don't. Games of course look fantastic on and that brings me to Mirrors Edge.

Maybe it was because of my new screen, but I loved this game from start to end. I have read a few opinions and I disagree with almost all of them. And mainly in the area of what kind of game Mirrors Edge is. To me it is clearly an FPS Platformer with shooting elements. Shooting elements that should have been left out, but I can imagine someone seeing seance at EA during development and saying that if there are guns in the game the player should be able to shoot them. Personally I would have left them out all together and replaced them with tasers. Pacing on the game is great, but I would have liked to have played few more basic courier missions to start with to get the player into the flow of the action before the main story kicks off, but then that is me saying that after playing the finished game. It is very difficult as a designer to make such decisions at the start of a project.

The story of Mirrors Edge should have been fleshed out more, although with my interest in writers I was surprised to find that it was written by Rhianna Pratchet, the daughter of Terry Pratchet. I am not familiar with her work, but the story in Mirrors Edge leaves a lot to be desired. The game in general feels very short so my thoughts on this are that if the game was longer, the story would have been better.

Having said all that, Mirrors Edge is by far my most favourite game from last year simply because it offered me a new and original play experience, and maybe my new monitor had something to do with that too.

HDMI Is A Trojan Horse

I have read a few comments by audio, video, TV, HD film reviewers/engineers that content piped through a HDMI connection doesn't look or sound any better than a standard composite cable. They have all then said that it is probably still too early in the standard's implementation to properly tell, but I just found out about a feature that comes along with HDMI.

The extra feature is called HDCP which stand for High-Bandwidth Digital Content Protection. This means that the signal travelling along the cable from your HD player to your TV is encrypted. Thus preventing a signal recorder from being placed between the player and the TV to capture the signal. This is most certainly another serious attempt by the industry to stop high quality pirated rips of films appearing on the internet. My initial reaction was that this is a little bit subversive, so I did some more reading to findout more about HDMI.

The idea of HDMI is that video and audio is digitally transmitted along one cable to prevent electrical interference. I had some Creative speakers that where digital and could switch between a Digital and Analogue signal on the fly. When no sound was being played, I could turn up the volume and there was always much less static on the digital setting. Using the speakers at a standard volume setting however I never could noticed the difference just like everybody who has commented about HDMI so far. So that begs the question, was HDCP the catalyst for HDMI or was it is just an extra feature someone thought of when the HDMI standard was being written, we will probably never know, but I am fairly certain that the uptake of HDMI would be a lot slower if more consumers where aware of HDCP because this stinks of corporate capitalism.

Curry's Issues

So I happened to go Currys today and I noticed that they had a slight issue with their XBox 360 display. So I took this picture:



They have a lot of nice HD TVs in there, but most of them are running video from DVDs. I was talking to one of the guys and he was saying that the only HD signals that where being displayed where on the 360 and four LG sets that had somekind of Compact HD Streaming box connected to them. Not sure if it was HD-DVD, but it was by Toshiba. My point is that if I went in there to buy a HD TV I wouldn't be able to choose one because the picture on all of them is shockingly bad. They are all displaying upscaled standard definition signals. So choosing a TV based on picture quality is near impossible.

Blu-ray Vs HD-DVD - A Draw!

Apparently there are a few Hybrid Blue and HD players in the works. This means that the winner of the war won't be determined by which format most of the film-buying public buys, but by which format the studios themselves prefer. And because of contracts and stuff, that means we could be seeing films on both formats right up until digital distribution kills films distributed on physical mediums.